I was in the front row at a packed Nova cinema in Carlton with my younger teenage son for its ‘retrospective’ screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s 1968 film is in favour with arthouse buffs, despite original critics variously labelling the 149-minute epic as unintelligible, lacking plot, and being too long. Well, the film does encompass a timeline of four million years. How short do you want it to be?
The front row was otherwise empty. Don’t people like being close? Or is a cinema screen an overpowering phenomenon for a generation attuned to watching a tiny device twelve inches from its face? The front row has always been my choice since the legendary Doug Ling, RMIT film lecturer, enlightened me to its virtues: complete absorption in the film, no interruption to peripheral vision, near deafness, and plenty of legroom. I might add that during the more transcendental films the sweet redolence of something approximating incense also emanated from somewhere near the front of the Radio theatre. Oh yes, Doug loved his movies.
I had seen the Kubrick masterpiece before. I was in my final year of high school. My older sister, a student at Melbourne University, had been given a ticket to the Carlton Moviehouse opposite the main campus and couldn’t use. So she gave it to me, and one cold mid-1970s winter’s evening, I caught the 59 tram down from boringly suburban Essendon into Parkville, alive with the reverberations of its cultural institutions even on a freezing winter night, got off at Royal Parade and walked through the university, along the echoing cobblestoned Tin Alley and past the hulking shadows of its halls of learning, monochrome in the moonlight, to Faraday Street, and sat in an ancient fold-down seat of cracked leather and creaking timber, and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.
Most of it. Towards the end a sudden crackling noise and a yellowing screen edged with red chads fading to white looked like part of the film; but then the projectionist came out of his cubby and told the audience, me and a few other cold beings scattered around the ancient theatre like lost aliens, that the projector had failed. We were given new tickets but for some reason I was unable to make the replacement screening.
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Fifty years pass, and I am sitting not fifty metres from the long-gone Carlton Moviehouse as the final chapter, the one I missed all those years ago - ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’ - takes Dave into another dimension, transcending time and space through a psychedelic 1960s sequence that pre-dates modern computer-generated cliché, and in doing so shows the paradox of physical human life as a cotton strand of indeterminate length, a lottery; housing a mind of infinite power whose sheer infinity is terrified by its unknown physical length, a fuse that never stops burning. How long is the fuse? The one thing the mind can never know.
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