2012: A SPACE OLYSSEY

After coming so close to completing '2012: A Space Olyssey', it was abandoned in September 2012. For many reasons it was put on the wobbly shelf of unfinished projects. But recently I have been digging it back up, sifting through my notes and watching the poorly shot segments of film, and have decided that it is worth bringing back to life. For this to happen it will now take a different form to that originally intended -  a periodic presentation of notes, clips, photos, quotes and links right here on this website, with the intention of eventually forming them into a book. Perhaps this is a futile attempt at mimicking the approach of Walter Benjamin and, like his work, my project will never come together in one place. Yet it seems a shame to let everything I've done disappear entirely without anyone ever seeing it, including myself. So here it goes - 2012: A Space Olyssey - The Reboot. Read on.

Introduction to the project:

Tomorrow, I depart for my fortress of solitude. A winter hiding place in a small French village on the Spanish border. Somewhere to think, to read, to write, and, of course, to film. Yes it is time for ‘The Olyssey Mark 2’ or, as I am beginning to think of it, ‘2012: A Space Olyssey’.

This will be a continuation of many of the themes present in the first film, but will be much bleaker and more grand. I go in the footsteps of Jack Nicholson, who hid away in his wintry hotel to focus on his work. But as we all know, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy… and attempt to kill all his family. He loses his mind but also loses his way quite spectacularly in the hedge maze at the end of the film. And who can forget that fantastic shot where he stares down into a model of that same maze, and the camera seamlessly zooms into his family in the real one? Kubrick meets Vertigo meets Last Year at Marienbad.

So I will be heading deep into the snow covered mountains, in search of seclusion and scary hotels. Perhaps I will find Superman’s hideaway, his own fortress of solitude. But I will also spend time on the coast, exploring the tourist destinations along the Mediterranean that are left abandoned in winter, turned into empty shells. In one such village is buried that great explorer of labyrinths, Walter Benjamin. The Franco-Spanish border is a place of death, where people have attempted to flee into or out of Spain at various points in history. Not everyone can get across.

Death is the ultimate sacrifice one can make for his or her work. Perhaps no other such death is quite as famous as that of Robert Falcon Scott and his fallen comrades from the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. They were amongst the first to discover that unexplored paths are fast disappearing. Yet they showed in their deaths that great beauty and a story that will last for centuries can arise out of failure.

Space is possibly the last physical place we have left to explore. Although I would argue that it is writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists of all kinds that are today’s great explorers, there are those who persist in attempting to breach the last physical realm of space. Dr. David Bowman, although fictional, was one such lunatic who, in ‘2001’, breached the infinite realms of unexplored space before turning into a space baby that would return to Earth. A superman.

These are amongst some of the thoughts I shall be mulling over in my fortress of solitude, exploring how they tie into the Labyrinth of Fragments. But I wonder, how long before I start singing: ‘Daisy… Daisy… Give me your answer do… I’m… half… crazy… all for the love of you…’?

I

"All this has happened before. And all this will happen again."

Battlestar Gallactica

He wrote me from the zone.

Several months had passed since his last letter, and I had presumed him dead, lost, or insane. His journey, or ‘The Olyssey’ as he had called it, had certainly taken its toll.

He showed me the house of God in ruins, and the steel-wrought Angel of the North, looming over the A1, amongst other things. He wrote me, these images could be put at the start of a prophetic film about an end to the world of memory. They hint at a revelation that is far from enticing – a revelation in which nothing is revealed and instead, everything is forgotten.

He was gathering a catalogue of things worth remembering. Films, images, books, thoughts, places, people, connections, ideas; everything that he could not bear to see damaged by the coming floods. A philosophy of immortality as duplication, he claimed.

But then, you don’t always get what you want from the Zone.

II

He wrote me from the Spanish border.

Intro to 'The Shining' (1980)
Stanley Kubrick 

'Dies Irae' - Gregorian chant.

Day of wrath and doom impending,
David’s word with Sibyl’s blending,
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!

Oh, what fear man's bosom rendeth,
When from heaven the Judge descendeth,
On whose sentence all dependeth.

...

III

The Shining

Superman's Fortress of Solitude

Robert Falcon Scott

The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining' (1980)

Where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes on a job as caretaker of the hotel whilst it is closed over winter. He hopes that it will be the perfect conditions in which to write his book.

He wrote in fragments, telling me of how he had gone deep into the mountains in search of solitude. There he would be able to immerse himself in labyrinthine reflection, and finish his work.

He was following in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson, of Robert Falcon Scott, and of Superman. He believed that he had encountered a Fortress of Solitude, akin to that of the comic book hero, in which all memories were stored and could be reflected upon, away from the distraction of others.

Superman's fortress of solitude as it appears in the film, 'Superman' (1978)

A location where Superman has access to all knowledge in the crystals created by his father.

Here, he studies philosophy, science and space in a remote arctic location, away from the rest of the world.

He insisted that he did not mind this perverse quietude. How could one feel alone in the company of such geniuses as Calvino, Eco, Borges, Baudrillard, and Zizek? – all great explorers of fragmented labyrinths.

He wrote me that Scott’s final expedition revealed the fast-diminishing opportunities for exploration of physical spaces in the twentieth century, and that the only direction left to go in the twenty-first was Space itself. A realm in which we may once more find uncharted volcanic wastelands or unknown realms of snow-covered mountains.

But he believed that there was another form of exploration still to exhaust, one potentially without end – that in the realm of reflection, memory, history, the imaginary, and the unreal. He said that it was into this realm that he had disappeared that winter, seeking to claim ownership over such abstractions through the medium of film, and that separating himself from the physical world and the people within it had been a necessary sacrifice.

But he wrote me that he was now ready to return to this land of the living. He wrote me from the land of the dying and the dead.

IV

The Land of the Dead

Walter Benjamin

In a strange coincidence of history, he wrote, this borderland where I spent much of my youth is also home to the remains of one of time’s great explorers of fragmented labyrinths.

Walter Benjamin chose to take his own life, here in the modest town of Port Bou, rather than to allow the Spanish authorities to send him back across the border and into the hands of the Gestapo.

He was one of many thousands that fled across this frontier in the 30s and 40s, attempting to escape either Hitler from one direction or Franco from the other. And he was also one of many that didn’t make it, leaving their ghosts to roam the Catalan cemeteries.

This totalitarian shadow from the past can also be found looming over the abandoned bunkers that litter the coastline. Built by the Nazis to defend against any attempted Mediterranean attack from the allies, they now lie broken in ruins, a sombre reminder of the spectre of death.

I walk through these discarded labyrinthine passages half expecting a minotaur in SS uniform to jump out at me, and I mull over the immense cultural crime that was the eradication of many of the world’s greatest creative thinkers, either executed or forced into suicide.

I fight off vertigo when I look down the tunnel-like monument built in memory of Benjamin at Port Bou. Is it an entrance into the labyrinth, or to that famous land of the dead from Greek legend, the underworld? Did Odysseus walk down these steps on his long journey back to Ithaca?

At the bottom, our path is blocked by a slanted plane of glass upon which is written the words of Benjamin: “It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.”

I turn to look back up the tunnel and am forced to shade my eyes from the blinding light now shining down upon me. In this spiritual moment of epiphany, I walk up toward the light, and am drawn back into the world of the living.

On the other side of the border is the desolate French town of Cerbère, tucked away in a secluded valley at what feels like the edge of the world. Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that it shares its name with Cerberus, bestial guardian of the underworld?

The internet refutes this possibility; but reliably informs me that the town is also the setting for a level in Battlefield 2142, a post-apocalyptic computer game in which EU forces fight against a Pan-Asian Coalition. But of course that level bares little resemblance to this most peculiar town.

I laugh when I discover that the next settlement up the coast, the old port of Banyuls, has been designated a Cité Odyssea.

V

"The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history...

..The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognisability, is the past to be held fast."

Walter Benjamin

Theses on the Philosophy of History

"Since I wrote the foregoing, I have thought about my project again and again and tried to find a way out of my difficulty. I have not found a solution. I am still confronted by chaos. But I have vowed not to give in, and at that moment of making this vow a happy memory passed through my mind like a ray of sunshine. It was similar, it seemed to me, quite similar to how I felt when we began our expedition; then we also undertook something apparently impossible, then we also apparently travelled in the dark, not knowing our direction and without prospects. Yet we had within us something stronger than reality or probability, and that was faith in the meaning and necessity of our action. I shuddered at the recollection of this sentiment, and at the moment of this blissful shudder, everything became clear, everything seemed possible again."

Hermann Hesse

The Journey to the East

VI

The Eternal Return

 

He wrote me, how long before a conflict between east and west becomes reality? In 1912, Kim Il-sung, the founder of North of Korea, was born. A hundred years on, around Christmas time, Kim Jong-il dies and the country crowns its new leader, Kim Jong-un.

The apocalyptic film 2012 has been banned in North Korea as it sheds a negative light on the year that is supposed to be a centenary celebration, as well as the year that will witness the beginning of the nation’s rise to super power status.

Rivals to the status quo are popping up everywhere, and the Pax Americana stairs collapse in the face. The uncertainty of what will ensue renders pension disputes meaningless. Will we tumble into a long dark age, as happened following the collapse of Rome?

History always seems to repeat itself. We witness an eternal recurrence of the same events but with different characters, different effects, or slightly altered scripts. Adaptations, if you will. Or remakes.

  

A hundred years after Scott’s trip to Antarctica, a 15-year-old boy climbs the continent’s highest peak, becoming the youngest person to have ever climbed the biggest mountains of every continent.

 

 

And of course, people couldn’t help but draw comparisons between the crash of the Costa Concordia and the sinking of the Titanic that had occurred a hundred years earlier. And in 2012, we’re also now witnessing the 3D release of the film, Titanic, thanks to Paramount Pictures, who also celebrate their centenary.

Happy returns. A sentiment wished repeatedly to Alexander on his birthday in Tarkovsky’s film made in exile, The Sacrifice. A film shot on the desolate and secluded island of Gotland, a film pregnant with the fear of the infinite unknown presented by an imminent threat of nuclear war.

'The Sacrifice'

Andrei Tarkovsky 

 

It opens with two characters appropriately discussing Nietzsche, a philosopher preoccupied with the eternal recurrence of the same. Nietzsche described eternal recurrence as a great burden of the heaviest weight, a burden that the übermensch, the superman, would embrace wholeheartedly.

 

Tarkovsky had indeed intended at one point to call The Sacrifice ‘The Eternal Return’. It ends where it started, but with one difference: no Alexander. He broke away from the cycle.

'The Sacrifice'

Andrei Tarkovsky 

I felt it necessary to visit the island where all this took place. I thought that if I were to film it, and include it in my map of fragments, I might come one step closer to completing this project of mine.

 

Through a bizarre series of encounters and coincidences that started in Finland, I met Hector. He was kind enough to drive me around to all the places of the island I wished to see and film and, without him, much of the island would have remained out of reach.

At a location that had been used extensively in the filming of The Sacrifice, I marveled at the calls of the lapwings and how similar they were to the eerie sound of the woman's singing in Tarkvosky's film. Simply another coincidence perhaps.

VII

Stardust

He wrote me of a man named Charlie. His first memories of him are of the jovial old man with the long grey beard, a look that prompted some of the youngsters on the beach to call him Panoramix after the druid from Asterix.

Although he was slim, he had a huge, round belly from drinking excessive amounts of wine, and the only clothes he was ever seen wearing were his swimming trunks in which he came down to the beach in. Charlie’s traditional method of getting into the sea was to walk a few steps into the water and then belly-flop the rest of the way in.

He wrote me that Charlie liked to talk, and that he spoke in mysterious ways. He loved the beach, and would regularly choose a stone he would like and take it back up to his house with him. He would say that these stones were made of poussière d’étoiles – stardust – like everything else on this planet, like us, all created in a cosmic explosion.

He wrote me that Charlie grew sadder as the years went on. He would grieve over what Collioure had become, and long for what it once was – a humble fishing port with traditional fishing boats lining the bay. Now it is lined with shops selling tack for the tourists and but a few people continue to fish.

Yet you can still see traces of the past here in the faces of those that lived it and in the way they operate in complete disregard of the tourists around them, as if they were ghosts that can be ignored.

But as much as one might dislike the crowds that Collioure now attracts, and the disappearance of its history and traditions, they are facts that one must come to terms with. Can we learn to see them as part of the town’s charm?

Charlie threw himself off these cliffs because he could not.

VIII

The Duty of the Director

Piecing fragments together into a whole. He saw this as the central duty of the director. Although clearly echoing the thoughts of Eisenstein, he was actually referring to a short story by Italo Calvino on World Memory.

He was always referencing someone or other, or visiting some site of fictional importance. You may have already noticed that many of his ideas pay homage to that film he loved more than any other, Sans Soleil. It seems that most of his words aren’t his, instead they’re nostalgic rehashings of a time and place beyond his reach.

“The duty of the director”, the story goes, “is to make sure that nothing is left out, because what is left out is as if it had never been.” The director is “working in expectation of an imminent disappearance of life on Earth. We are working so that all may not have been in vain.”

He identified with this Borgesian project to salvage all memories of worth, and from his letters I can tell that he feels it with a greater and greater urgency. I sense that he saw it as the key to immortality in a time of uncertainty, a time where we have before us Nietzsche’s gate, revealing eternity in both directions.

He wrote me of Umberto Eco’s description of a philosophy of immortality as duplication. If we replicate our lives, copy the things we love into steadfast images, images that can be stored in one vast archive, library, or museum, then they will be granted an eternal life of remembrance.

Despite all this, he distrusted the greatest archive imaginable, that web of connections that has rendered the notion of physical storage of information obsolete – the internet. Even if the world were to be destroyed, all of our memories would still be up there, bouncing around between satellites. But this gave him no solace. He distrusted that which he could not hold, that which he had no control over. He wrote me that the internet has no director, nobody to filter out the rubbish that deserves no remembrance.