Revisiting Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'

This is one of the films in cinema history that has been written about the most. Kubrick's masterpiece was analyzed by film critics, cultural scientists and philosophers. Fifty years after its premiere, the German Film Museum in Frankfurt is dedicating an exhibition to the film. "Kubrick's 2001. 50 Years A Space Odyssey" showcases many original exhibits from the Stanley Kubrick Archive.

What makes us human? This is just one of the many questions director Stanley Kubrick dealt with in his 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey." When a computer takes over the control of a spaceship, astronauts appear helpless, despite their protective helmets and spacesuits.

Composed of three major segments, the epic science-fiction drama opens with the prologue "The Dawn of Man," set in an African desert millions of years ago. A tribe of hominids discover a mysterious black monolith. They then start using bones as weapons, accompanied by Richard Strauss' "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

The sequence is followed by a cut that has become legendary among film experts and fans alike. The bone used by the ape to kill another one is thrown into the air; it switches to a similarly shaped satellite orbiting in space — four million years later.

The main segment of the film, entitled "Jupiter Mission," depicts the mission of the spacecraft Discovery One. Two pilots and three scientists in suspended animation are on their way to Jupiter. The ship's computer, HAL, controls the spacecraft.

The astronauts do not know much about the goals of their journey. HAL is the only one who's been informed of the mission's true objectives. They are headed to Jupiter, where the enigmatic monolith is based. It is believed to a be tool created by aliens.

The main segment of "2001: A Space Odyssey" showcased visuals unlike anything moviegoers had seen in 1968, and they would rarely be surpassed in later works. The outer space scenes were directed to appear extremely realistic; Kubrick worked with NASA and other companies to achieve this.

The two pilots, portrayed by Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea, fatally confront the supercomputer HAL, which turns out to be the actual captain on board. The astronauts' every movement and conversation is followed by the computer. The power of artificial intelligence was a central and pioneering theme in "2001."

"I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content," Kubrick once said in a Playboy magazine interview. His aesthetic concept attracted viewers and critics alike.

In the third segment of the film, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," Kubrick ignited a psychedelic firework of images that some people in 1968 interpreted as an acid trip. The final scene is set in a mysterious white room, where death and birth meet — a symbol for the eternal cycle of life.

The filmmaker born in New York directed many of his most famous films in the UK. When his pioneering epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" came out in 1968, Kubrick was 40 years old. This masterpiece and many more ground-breaking works make him one of the most influential directors in cinematic history.