Arthur C. Clarke has died.

One of the most influential artistic experiences I have ever had in my life was in the spring of 1968. I was in college at UNI at the time. A few college friends and I drove down to Des Moines to see a movie. Yes, there were plenty of movie theaters in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area so why go to Des Moines? Well the movie we wanted to see was "2001: A Space Odyssey" and it was being shown at the River Hills Theater in Des Moines which, at the time, was the only wide screen movie theater in Iowa and it also had the best (surround) sound system of any movie theater in the state.

I honestly don't remember how I had heard about the movie but probably there had been an article in the newspaper. I do remember hearing enough that I was very curious and felt that it would not be just another movie. I was also looking forward to seeing a movie in the new wide screen (180 degrees) format with the, at the time, new "surround sound."

I convinced some other guys to go down there with me. On the two hour trip to Des Moines I read a very long magazine interview with the director of the movie, Stanley Kubrick. Of course he talked a lot about the making of the movie and I remember the interviewer asking him about the meaning of some of the scenes in the movie. Kubrick's answer was interesting. He basically said to not try to figure it out, but rather just "experience" the movie. In later years Kubrick would say that he himself didn't really know what some of those scenes, and the movie itself, were trying to say. Think about that. Kubrick was the director of the movie and more than any other human being responsible for what people saw and heard on the movie screen. Since then I have read or heard other artists say similar things about their own work. Bob Dylan is a good example. He has often said that his songs "come through him." That implies that they started somewhere else ( location unknowable to the artist), went through him and then emerged into the public consciousness. That makes it a lot easier to understand when an artist claims to not know the meaning of their own work. They aren't trying to be mysterious - they really don't know.

Where does Arthur C. Clarke come into this? He was a science fiction writer among many other things. In 1948 he wrote, "The Sentinel" which in some way was the forerunner to "2001: A Space Odyssey." I won't go into the details but Kubrick and Clarke worked together to bring the movie to the screen. Arthur C. Clarke died on Mar.19, 2008 at the age of 90. He is most remembered for his role in creating the movie but he did many other things. In 1945 he wrote a scientific article that proposed the theory of satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the earth and how valuable that could be. Of course he was way ahead of his time in his thinking. Where would we be today without those communication satellites that almost the entire world relies on these days? This also reminds me of one of Clarke's three famous laws. Law #3 said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think about that many times when I consider some of the new technology that comes into public usage. How else could you explain using a cell phone to make a call from the middle of a corn field in Iowa to someone in the middle of an oil field in Saudi Arabia? That has to be magic! Here is a link to a Wikipedia article on Clarke if you are curious.

Now back to the trip. We got to the theater and there wasn't a real big crowd. We sat right in the middle of the theater and I was agog at the size of the screen. You had to physically move your head to see from the far left of the screen to the far right. I could see the speakers on the side and behind the audience. To use an expression not known at that time, I was pumped! The lights went down, the sound came up and the movie started. I remember gripping the armrests on each side of me as I saw the first images come on the screen. I felt like I was going to fly off my seat!

I was enthralled the entire time at what I was seeing. The special effects were way ahead of their time ( I didn't see anything comparable until Star Wars in 1978). There were long passages of time in the movie in which there was no dialog, and that was unusual. One scene early in the movie was an encounter between two groups of early humans. The image on the screen was where we saw one of the groups and we knew the other group was behind the camera. We heard that group, behind the camera, from the speakers in the theater behind the audience. That was amazing to me.

The use of classical music was a brilliant touch. With the surround sound and the wide screen it was like the movie had opened its arms and invited the audience into its embrace.

I won't go into detail about the movie. Some people hated it. Some critics hated it. I loved it. Some critics loved it. You might want to do a search for Roger Ebert's review of the movie. The last half hour, in particular the last few minutes, are unforgettable to me. It is pure cinema and I still have no idea what it means (Kubrick always said he didn't know and Clarke never, to my knowledge, gave any explanation) but I "experienced" it and the last scene just gave me such a hopeful feeling about the human race.

I have seen the movie a few times since then on television and on DVD but it isn't even close to the experience I had in 1968 at the River Hills Theater. Watching that movie on a normal TV is like watching a football game on a postage stamp.

I remember walking out of the movie that night thinking I might have experienced something very special in my life. Now, 40 years later I know I did. I have seen many great movies since then, but no other movie has affected me in the way "2001: A Space Odyssey" did. I also remember thinking that one of my goals in life was to see that movie again in the year 2001 at the same theater. I realized I would be very old at that point but I wanted to compare the movie to the reality of 2001. I was so disappointed that Stanley Kubrick died in 1999. Then the River Hills theater was torn down to make way for Wells Fargo Arena. When I went to Wells Fargo Arena in 2006 and 2007 to watch the Spirit Lake girls play basketball in the state tournament, there was a slight tinge of sadness that they were shooting baskets where I had once been sitting and watching and hearing and experiencing my all time favorite movie.

One other thing that relates to parents and teachers. If or when you encounter a young person that is different, and I mean really different, like Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick must have been as children, don't dismiss them right away. They can be a nightmare at times because they don't seem to follow the normal rules of life. It's almost like they are aliens from another planet. They might talk about things that seem impossible to a normal way of thinking. Our world badly needs these type of thinkers and dreamers. Some of those dreams may never come to pass, but some of them may end up affecting deeply the people in the world that experience them.

Arthur C. Clarke R.I.P.