- Space Odyssey - 2001 | The Dawn of Man

 

2001: Space Odyssey is a well-known science fiction film which was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” and well as his other short stories. The screenplay was co-written by Kubrick and Clarke. The film starts with an amazing opening scene, “The Dawn of Man” and depicts the stages of human evolution from primates to man on a voyage to Jupiter accompanied by a computer, HAL. The themes of the film can be listed as existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

Watching the scene, “The Dawn of Man” enables viewers to identify the stages how primates evolved into humans who have eventually become capable of travelling to other planets in pursuit of finding answers to their curiosity and how they have become cognitively able. Cambridge Dictionary defines cognition as ‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses’ and explains that cognition refers to a range of mental processes relating to the acquisition, storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information. Likewise, Encyclopaedia Britannica describes cognition as the states and processes involved in knowing, which in their completeness include perception and judgment and states that cognition includes all conscious and unconscious processes by which knowledge is accumulated, such as perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, and reasoning. Viewers of the film can find out about how primates their knowledge by experiencing, how they transferred their accumulated knowledge into practice by inventing tools and technology, how they evolved and created in search of finding answers to their curiosity and catering for their survival needs and how they retrieved and enhanced the knowledge they have gathered to discover even what is beyond their reach.

In the opening scene of the film, we see that a group of primates and tapirs live in close proximity in a barren piece of land with a small water source and that they, like tapirs, are basically herbivores trying to live on the plants they can find around. We also see some skeletons of dead animals laying around the barren land. Living in the open, like the other animals, the apes are vulnerable to the attacks of wild animals who are in search of food.  The apes from other tribes try to get closer to the water source but they are scared away by the tribe. The sounds the apes make and the background music reflect the primitivistic life of the apes.

Suddenly, the music changes. The eerie music of the scene, the sudden appearance of the monolith and its difference manufactured outlook evokes the idea of alien intervention. The sounds and the notes in the background music show a totally different composition to imply the arrival of something more complicated and advanced. The apes get curious and try to find out what it is by touching it and they start to learn by experiencing. They touch to find out about what it feels like or what it is. Also, the way the camera shows the sun and the moon in line with each other over the moon indicates their what the apes have found on Earth will give them new perspectives and one day enable them to reach out to the space in the pursuit of finding answers to their curious questions to understand what is around them.

The arrival of the monolith ignites the flame of curiosity and the apes start to observe to understand. Although they have been living on a piece of land with some skeletons lying around, we see one ape observing the skeletons of a tapir, trying to make sense of it. The ape takes a bone in its hand and starts to hover it and then realizes that when he hits the bigger bone hard on a bone, he can break the bones. A new era in the history of evolution of the mankind begins as the primate invents the first tool, the first technological piece of equipment he will soon use the defend himself against the apes from other tribes and kill. While the ape is hitting the bones on the ground with the bone in his hand, the image of the tapir appears in his mind and this is another important moment as it shows the fact that the ape started to make associations and make connections with he has accumulated and what he is experiencing.

The ape then throws the bone up into the air and the image of the bone changes into the image of an orbiting space shuttle, and this is accompanied by the vision of an orbiting space station, which gives us the hint that the cognitive evolution of mankind, his curiosity and his experiences as well as his deeds to survive will enable him to go beyond his imagination and borders of his habitat.