ON THIS DAY 4 2 2023

This Day in History: April 2

Featured Event

2001: A Space Odyssey

film by Kubrick [1968]






2001: A Space Odyssey, American science-fiction film, released in 1968, that set the benchmark for all subsequent movies in the genre and consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made, especially known for its groundbreaking special effects and unconventional narrative. The complex and thought-provoking film was directed by Stanley Kubrick and cowritten by Kubrick and futurist and novelist Arthur C. Clarke.



2001: A Space Odyssey



2001: A Space Odyssey
One of the most original works in cinema history, 2001 defies simple explanation. The opening section, “The Dawn of Man,” shows apes in the prehuman era discovering a strange stone monolith that appears from nowhere and then using the first tools. The scene subsequently switches to the future, the year 2001. A similar monolith has been found under the Moon’s surface and transmits a signal to Jupiter. The spacecraft Discovery, manned by astronauts Frank Poole (played by Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), is sent to Jupiter to investigate. The middle segment of the film takes place on board Discovery and is perhaps the most memorable—and most straightforward. The ship’s computer, HAL 9000, which possesses human intellect and vocal ability, malfunctions and begins to work against the astronauts in a life-or-death battle of wits, leading to questions about humankind’s relationship to machines. In the film’s final section, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” Bowman travels through a gateway in space opened by the monolith orbiting Jupiter and is reborn as the “Star Child.” This section of the film is the most debated and open to interpretation, because conventional film narrative is suspended, and the story is told solely through images and sound.


Voice-activated computers, flat-screen monitors, and HAL’s ability to play chess are among the far-sighted novelties in the film that later became commonplace. Kubrick included extended periods without spoken conversation in the film, particularly in the opening and ending sections. His use of classical music instead of an original score—tapping Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltz for his famous space station docking and lunar landing scenes and Richard Strauss’s dramatic Thus Spoke Zarathustra for the opening scene of the film—which depicts an alignment of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon and is often called the greatest movie opening ever—only added to the uniqueness of the film.

Production notes and credits

• Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
  
• Director and producer: Stanley Kubrick
  
• Writers: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
  
• Music: Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti
  
• Running time: 141 minutes
  

Cast

• Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman)
  
• Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole)
  
• William Sylvester (Dr. Heywood Floyd)
  
• Daniel Richter (Moon Watcher)
  
• Douglas Rain (voice of HAL 9000)
  

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Director
  
• Screenplay
  
• Special effects*
  
• Art direction–set decoration
  

Lee Pfeiffer

Emmylou Harris

American singer and songwriter






Emmylou Harris, (born April 2, 1947, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.), American singer and songwriter who ranged effortlessly among folk, pop, rock, and country-and-western styles, added old-time sensibilities to popular music and sophistication to country music, and established herself as “the queen of country rock.”
After being discovered while singing folk songs in a club, Harris added her satin-smooth country-inflected soprano to former Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons’s two solo albums (1973–74), landmarks in country rock. After Parsons’s death, Harris carried his vision forward, first in Pieces of the Sky (1975), which included her tribute to Parsons (“From Boulder to Birmingham”). Following this major-label debut album, she issued a remarkable string of critically acclaimed and commercially successful recordings produced by her husband, Brian Ahern, which included Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town (1978), Roses in the Snow (1980), Cimarron (1981), Last Date (1982), and The Ballad of Sally Rose (1985).


Harris’s collaborations with other prominent artists or covers of their songs were legion and included Simon and Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt, Hank Williams, the Band, Jule Styne, and Bruce Springsteen. Her 1995 release, Wrecking Ball, on which she performed songs written by Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix, among others, was especially notable and earned the Grammy Award for best contemporary folk album. Red Dirt Girl (2000), on which she was accompanied by such singers as Kate McGarrigle and Dave Matthews, won the same award. Harris joined a host of folk and country artists on the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack for the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and she later released the solo efforts Stumble into Grace (2003), All I Intended to Be (2008), and Hard Bargain (2011). She and Rodney Crowell recorded a pair of duet albums: Old Yellow Moon (2013), which took the Grammy for best Americana album, and The Traveling Kind (2015).



In 2008 the Country Music Association inducted Harris into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2018 she received a Grammy lifetime achievement award.