Article
French
ID: <
oai:doaj.org/article:890eb1dca79a4cf799c2c59ec6d62773>
·
DOI: <
10.4000/resf.561>
Abstract
Stanley Kubrick can be described as a metageneric director, since his major works tend to overthrow and reconstruct inherited conventions of the relevant film type (the horror in Shining, the historical film in Barry Lyndon and so on). Kubrick’s most intense and complex metageneric analysis is science-fiction with 2001. A historical and theoretical observation of science-fiction cinema reveals that it is structured by a central and almost paralysing contradiction: between the cognitive and critical structure of science-fiction as a literary mode, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the general association of science-fiction cinema with the dominance of special effects, which tend to produce anti-critical intellectual banality. Only 2001 (or almost) manage to bypass this contradiction by dialectically displaying all this intellectual triviality and thus solve the problem, so to speak, by raising it to a higher level. 2001 is thus the first and last major masterpiece of science fiction cinema.