MichaelB wrote:The Doogster wrote:I stand by my assertion that Kubrick was influenced by Pale Flower. There is no way a filmmaker could have independently radically altered his style and adopted an appreciation for Penderecki compositions by chance.
Why not? Krzysztof Penderecki was one of the biggest names in the musical avant-garde of the 1960s, and plenty of filmmakers have made use of his work - William Friedkin in
The Exorcist being a particularly good example. In fact, I'm not sure what relevance this has towards
2001, since that film doesn't use Penderecki compositions - have you got him mixed up with György Ligeti, or
2001 mixed up with
The Shining?
Yes, this argument for influence does seem to be extremely tenuous. All it would have taken for Kubrick to get 'turned on' to Ligeti or Penderecki is for one of his friends to say, "Hey, you've got to hear this
amazing music!" That's what people did in the sixties - hang out and listen to records. Getting interested in a piece of music purely because it was used in another movie seems to me the least likely explanation for Kubrick's use of it.
The fabled story behind the use of Ligeti in
2001 - that it was a temp track that stuck - also suggests very strongly that it was favoured music of Kubrick's (or the editor's) that was lying around at the time, not that he was crafting a loving tribute to a film that nobody had seen.
EDIT: Actually, I was just trying to imagine how The Doogster's favoured scenario would have had to play out, and it's ridiculous enough to somehow be enshrined.
Somebody in the UK goes to the extraordinary expense of importing a 35mm print of
Pale Flower and arranges a private screening for Stanley Kubrick (or a private screening that Kubrick is invited to). A bunch of folk watch
Pale Flower (unsubbed, naturally, unless somebody can find evidence of an English-language festival screening before 1967). Rather than saying, "I don't understand Japanese" and stomping out, Stanley stays to the end of the film, absolutely enchanted. He asks what that music is. His host says, "What? I have no idea." So Stanley charges an assistant to track down "that music from the weird Japanese film."
Said assistant, flailing in the dark, picks up a bunch of records that seem to be in the same ballpark, says, "will this do?" Kubrick hears Ligeti amongst this random mess and runs with it. Some years later, the assistant stumbles across the actual Penderecki piece they were looking for in the first place, and gets it to Kubrick in time for
The Shining. Or he does find the Penderecki piece back in the 60s, and Stanley says, "get me more stuff like this, but, I don't know,
spacier." Ligeti intrat. A decade later, he remembers Penderecki.
Even the Beatles were pimping European avant-garde music (e.g. Stockhausen) in the 60s. It was extremely fashionable, and it would be extraordinary if the first anybody working on
2001 had heard of Ligeti or Penderecki was in an obscure Japanese film.