![]() Leo and I certainly knew James’s work, but we’d never talked to him. I don’t know whether he knew about the screening program or not, but he saw it and reached out to us. So, he had obviously been eager to see the exhibition. Zinman: Back in 2016, Leo and I put together a program called Computer Films of the 1960s for the Museum of the Moving Image as part of an exhibition called “The Moon and Beyond: Graphic Films and the Inception of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” It opened March 25th, and we received an email from James Gray on March 28th. You’ll be glad you did.įilmmaker: How did the two of you get involved with the Ad Astra project? Prepare to open a browser window and Google some filmmakers’ names while you read our conversation. How were others taking on these questions?Īs you’ll see, this involved a deep dive into some highly specialized territory. Rather, Gray wanted to subject his own ideas about space, identity and isolation to the broader cultural conversation going on in contemporary experimental media. ![]() But he didn’t want to merely repeat Kubrick’s gesture. To hear Goldsmith and Zinman explain it, Gray was in part inspired by Kubrick’s turn to the avant-garde to solve certain conceptual problems. ![]() This might be a way to understand Gray’s interest in contemporary experimental film, particularly computer animation and other forms of nonobjective cinema. And those ideas were finding expression in various realms of the culture industry, from the most well-heeled industrial directors to artisanal image-cobblers working in near penury. These were visual ideas that pertained to the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, involving a broad-scale quest to explore the limits of the material world and the capacity of the arts to engage with questions of consciousness and ontology. While Kubrick and company did take some direct influence from specific films in the making of 2001, it’s probably better to adopt a cultural studies approach to understand how that big studio film ended up, to some extent, speaking the same cinematic language as some mystical hippies from San Francisco. (Avant-garde film scholar Scott MacDonald has claimed that these psychedelic productions also led quite directly to “Laser Floyd” and other popular planetarium shows.) In Michael Benson’s book Space Odyssey, he details how Trumbull, while working on a slit-scan sequence for the Stargate Corridor, decided to incorporate an animation sequence made by his collaborator Colin Cantwell by layering the two projections together in a “live mix.” This was a moment when “expanded cinema” was a burgeoning field, with various filmmakers trying out experiments with double projection, split-screen, projecting onto moving objects, water, or fog, and various environmental formats, practices that evolved into what we now know as video installation work. In particular, Kubrick and his visual effects specialist, Douglas Trumbull, took both technical and thematic inspiration from a number of avant-garde abstractionists-brothers John and James Whitney, Jordan Belson and Scott Bartlett, in particular-in designing 2001’s penultimate movement, the psychedelic “Stargate Corridor.” David Fincher quite graciously acknowledged that the Kyle Cooper–designed credits sequence of Se7en was a deliberate homage to Stan Brakhage, while a certain 1999 Oscar winner infamously ganked an image of a floating plastic bag from Nathaniel Dorsky’s film Variations, completed a year earlier.īut perhaps the most well-known instance of experimental film serving as a launchpad (of sorts) for a big-budget studio production was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Legend has it that executives at the ad agency BBDO routinely screened prints of Bruce Conner films in the boardroom to poach his complex montage techniques. So, he turned to two experts in the field.įor all its relative marginality, the world of experimental film and video has often served as a kind of research and development arm of the film industry. Said to be a moody, existential science fiction film (Zinman and Goldsmith have read the script but are sworn to secrecy, and the film hasn’t screened at press time), Ad Astra posed certain challenges for Gray that, in the director’s mind, could possibly be addressed by exploring the world of avant-garde media. (Hell, we’re usually not even asked to authenticate representations of academia itself.) So, it came as a pleasant surprise indeed for Brooklyn-based scholar and curator Leo Goldsmith and Georgia Tech film and media professor Gregory Zinman when they were asked by director James Gray to serve as advisors on his latest film, Ad Astra, scheduled for a September release by 20th Century Fox. It’s a rare thing for scholars to be asked to serve as advisors on studio films of any size, no matter the topic. Ad Astra, Fall 2019, Gregory Zinman, James Gray, Leo Goldsmith
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