Masterpiece Dialogues Quotes

Throughout, Kubrick and Clarke remained locked in dialogue. One strategy they’d agreed on in advance was that their story’s metaphysical and even mystical elements had to be earned through absolute scientific-technical realism. 2001’s space shuttles, orbiting stations, lunar bases, and Jupiter missions were thoroughly grounded in actual research and rigorously informed extrapolation, much of it provided by leading American companies then also busy providing technologies and expertise to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

It was Vyasa’s genius to take the whole great Mahabharata epic and see it as metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart. Arjuna and Krishna are then no longer merely characters in a literary masterpiece. Arjuna becomes Everyman, asking the Lord himself, Sri Krishna, the perennial questions about life and death – not as a philosopher, but as the quintessential man of action. Thus read, the Gita is not an external dialogue but an internal one: between the ordinary human personality, full of questions about the meaning of life, and our deepest Self, which is divine.

In the sphere of rights the irresistible trend is towards a situation where, if something can be taken for granted, all rights are otiose, whereas if a right must be demanded, it means that the battle is already lost; thus the very call for rights to water, air and space indicates that all these things are already on the way out. Similarly the evocation of a right to reply signals the absence of any dialogue, and so on. The rights of the individual lose their meaning as soon as the individual is no longer an alienated being, deprived of his own being, a stranger to himself, as has long been the case in societies of exploitation and scarcity. In his postmodern avatar, however, the individual is a self-referential and selfoperating unit. Under such circumstances the human-rights system becomes totally inadequate and illusory: the flexible, mobile individual of variable geometric form is no longer a subject with rights but has become, rather, a tactician and promoter of his own existence whose point of reference is not some agency of law but merely the efficiency of his own functioning or performance. Yet it is precisely now that the rights of man are acquiring a worldwide resonance. They constitute the only ideology that is currently available - which is as much as to say that human rights are the zero point of ideology, the sale outstanding balance of history. Human rights and ecology are the two teats of the consensus. The current world charter is that of the New Political Ecology. Ought we to view this apotheosis of human rights as the irresistible rise of stupidity, as a masterpiece which, though imperilled, is liable to light up the coming fin de siecle in the full glare of the consensus?

this key moment halfway through the shoot, Clarke’s nine-point plan became a blueprint the director largely followed, though he cut them down a bit further, in part by incorporating some into the astronauts’ pod dialogue, which hadn’t been shot yet. In much the same way that Lockwood’s and Dullea’s dialogue improvisations had methodically been reduced to their essence, Clarke’s suggestions stripped down and clarified the story.

[…] the history of art is not a long line of masterpieces stretching back hundreds of years but an evolving dialogue - with other works of art, with society, with the history of ideas, with other people - in which everyone should feel able to participate.