The journey is one of the most recurring and productive archetypes, from myth, where it originated, to literature and cinema. Thus, we have the oldest reference, the journey of Gilgamesh in the foundational Sumerian poem, that of Ulysses in the Odyssey, passing through many others, until we arrive at García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
We know that the journey takes place in a specific time and space (but not always). And here we touch on an interesting question: the inseparable relationship between space and time. Hence, modern physics (Minkowski, Einstein) has proposed the concept of space-time. Time travel is therefore a transfer in space, which can happen in an indeterminate way and through undefined spaces.
Let's move on to cinema after this introduction.
Apart from literature, cinema has been the art form that has most addressed the theme of travel from different perspectives. Among the films I like (and remember), I will make a few references below. Sometimes it has been in relation to the unconscious and memory, of which Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) is an extraordinary example; other times it has been more fantastical and wonderful, such as Cloud Atlas (2012) by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski brothers; and also the journey through dreams, as seen in Christopher Nolan's extraordinary film Inception (2010); another vein is the retroactive journey, of which the magnificent director David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) is an unparalleled example.
Cinema has been able to take advantage of the space-time relationship, and in a very purposeful way, in most cases. From my perspective and taste, the masterpiece of this connection will continue to be 2001: A Space Odyssey by British-American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Here are my brief thoughts.
So much has been written about this film that anything I could say here would be insignificant.
As reported on websites, the plot centers on a team of astronauts who try to follow radio signals emitted by a strange monolith found on the Moon, which appears to be the work of an extraterrestrial civilization (Wikipedia).
Although it apparently follows a temporal “sequence,” from the appearance of the ape-man, with the discovery of the weapon and space—that shocking beginning—continuing with others—with indefinite or almost indefinite time jumps—we are in the presence, in my view, the most daring film in terms of presenting reality to our vision, where time seems to enter a dimension that is unknown to it (I am referring to the extended sequence of colors, close to a hallucinogenic trip), and finally encounters its uncertainty (or its desire?): the mystery of life (cosmic eternity?).
All of this, of course, has been crafted by Kubrick with great narrative precision and, at the same time, with unusual imagination and undoubted achievements, considering the years in which it was made, when technology was still quite basic.
Every time we return to 2001: A Space Odyssey —and I have done so many times— we can appreciate the mastery, not only of the direction, but also of its appropriate adaptation to the original novel; also in the use of music (not to mention Richard Strauss's “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” at the beginning), as well as so many other characteristics of that work.
We can focus, for example, on Kubrick's use of wide-angle lenses to offer us a comprehensive image, in the alternation of slow moments (“ma non troppo”) and others that are extremely leisurely in terms of rhythm, in the recurrence —as we have already mentioned— of a kind of “op art” (when it comes to showing the ship entering that kind of “black hole”), and many other cinematic devices.
From the passage to prehistory to the last moment (indefinite in time), we witness an allegory of human behavior in the face of power and consciousness in the face of life. Hence, the final sequence is that of the astronaut in a “place” where he has “arrived” after that space-time adventure, where he is now a mortal old man surrendered to infinity.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
