Peter Krämer: An Epic Drama of Adventure and Exploration: The Marketing, Reception and Success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

An Epic Drama of Adventure and Exploration’: The Marketing, Reception and Success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Peter Krämer

Widely regarded as one of the very best films of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is also one of the most influential. It inspired George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to make Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977) which in turn led to the (near)dominance of Science Fiction/fantasy at the global box office ever since. What is more, the impact of 2001 helped to launch James Cameron and Christopher Nolan on their later careers as the pre-eminent blockbuster filmmakers of our times.

Last but not least, 2001 is probably the most written-about film ever. Most of this writing tries to make sense of the film’s puzzling story and imagery, to reconstruct its long drawn-out and immensely complex production history, or to place it in the context of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s career, the Science Fiction genre and American society and culture in the 1960s.

My own work on 2001 across the last fifteen years or so has aimed to add another dimension. Taking the often overlooked, huge commercial success of the film during its original US release as my starting point, I have examined how the film was initially marketed to the American public, how it fit into the major hit patterns at the US box office across the 1950s and 1960s, and how so many American viewers were able to engage productively and enjoyably with what, at first sight, might appear more like an avantgarde movie than a Hollywood blockbuster. In this lecture, I present some of the results of this research, and in doing so raise general questions about the discipline of Film Studies.

People who are not familiar with 2001 may want to watch it before attending the lecture.

Biographical note:

Peter Krämer is a Senior Research Fellow in Cinema & TV in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). He also is a Senior Fellow in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is the author or editor of twelve academic books, including four books about Stanley Kubrick, among them the BFI Film Classics volumes on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. He has published over ninety essays in academic journals and edited collections, several of them about 2001.

Here are links to some of his talks and articles about 2001:

- “’Dear Mr. Kubrick’: Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s”, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (November 2009), chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.participations.org/06-02-06-kramer.pdf

- “An Introduction to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)”, ThinkingFilmCollective Blogspot, 5 November 2013, http://thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/an-introduction-to-2001-space-odyssey.html

- “2001: A Space Odyssey: The Ultimate Spectacle”, Pure Movies, 19 January 2014, http://www.puremovies.co.uk/columns/2001-a-space-odyssey-the-ultimate-spectacle/

- “From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Avatar: Reflections on Cultural Impact and Academic Research”, Screening the Past, no. 42 (October 2017), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2017/09/from-2001-space-odyssey-to-avatar-reflections-on-cultural-impact-and-academic-research/

- “The Future of Humanity, Then and Now: 2001: A Space Odyssey at 50“, first annual Stanley Kubrick lecture, University of the Arts London, January 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIebcZ8rGSk

- “2001: A Space Odyssey and Its Audiences”, public lecture, Deutsches Filmmuseum (German Film Museum), Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, April 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2InGGLsH2g