Visionaries Film Club - 2001: A Space Odyssey

Some films get smaller on a laptop. This one gets punished.

Visionaries Film Club opens with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, screening September 2nd at The Kult LA in Downtown Los Angeles.

Kubrick shot it in Super Panavision 70 and built sets that actually rotated so the camera could follow an actor upside down. He was making something that only worked at scale. Nearly sixty years later, most people have only ever seen it in a window on their couch, half-watching, wondering what the fuss is about.

The fuss requires a dark room, a big screen, and a couple hundred people who agreed to sit still for it.

A note on timing: we picked this film weeks before Nolan's Odyssey started dominating the box office. Pure coincidence, though a fitting one. Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke named theirs after Homer on purpose, and Nolan has spent his entire career pointing back at this film as the reason he does what he does. He personally presented the 70mm print at Cannes.

If you saw The Odyssey this summer and want to know where that scale came from, this is the answer.

Doors at 7:00 PM. Showtime at 7:30 PM.

Concessions available at the venue. No outside food or beverage permitted. Sealed water is welcome.

Visionaries Film Club is a monthly series for cult classics, misunderstood masterpieces, and the films that earned their reputations the hard way.

The Kult LA, Downtown Los Angeles.