The New York Philharmonic’s live performance last Friday night of the music to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”—played in sync to the movie projected on a screen suspended over the orchestra—proved to be surprisingly revelatory. Any shift of context has a way of refocussing attention. I’m reminded of the delightful shock of first seeing a movie on VHS, which turned out to be very different from watching a movie broadcast on television, because it offered the possibility of manipulation: freeze-frame, slow motion, fast-forward, and rewind. So it was on Friday: Kubrick’s movie, which I hadn’t seen since college and always recalled with slight derision for its dated paranoid bombast, came to immediate life, as if it were a painting stripped of darkened varnish and rendered contemporary again. It was the music that effected this change, starting with the excerpt from Ligeti’s “Atmosphères.” Employed as an overture, it immediately sets a very high bar for the artistic originality required for the movie not to wither and shrink from the screen in full public view.

The evocation of Homo faber in the opening monkey business sparked some laughter in the audience, and from me, too—until it turned deadly. There is where Kubrick becomes Kubrickian, with the idea that the mark of humanity is not in mere technology but in the weapon, and in the will to use it. Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”—underlined by the conductor Alan Gilbert’s exuberant, climactic leap on the podium—now came to the fore as a Nietzschean nod toward a cosmology of violence and power.

And then, the “Blue Danube,” plush and enveloping, yet cream-puff-dainty in the Philharmonic’s confident hands. As the spacecraft makes its way through the void to its lilting strains, what I had remembered as an easy irony suddenly seemed infused with philosophical weight. As a kid, in the sixties, I was awed, amazed, inspired by the seeming gracefulness of the colossal blastoffs from Cape Kennedy, but also understood it as a marvel of science, a realm that aroused my dreams and ambitions and in which I planned to make my career. But in a few images and in a few moments, Kubrick converged the then famous “Two Cultures” (of the sciences and the arts) into one. The wheel-like space station—and, later, the scepter-like Jupiter-bound craft—float through space like a dancer leaping in extreme slow motion, the incidental beauty of utilitarian flight proving, for him, indistinguishable from more calculated aesthetic delights.

The same goes for the gargantuan, yet massively intricate, spaceship. The industrial nozzles and tubes, handles and portals, pods and lights and vents—all designed by engineers for precise practical results—offer, in Kubrick’s high-design universe, the thrills and awe-inspiring power of art. Yet, of course, it’s an art without an artist—the work of a horde of anonymous inventors creating interplanetary cathedrals devoted to the worldly fulfillment of a scientific ideal no less inspiring and enduring than the metaphysical one of medieval glory.

That anonymity, though, is a peculiar part of Kubrick’s own artistic strategy, in which the apparently inhuman veers toward the impersonal. Whatever exceptional talents his spacemen (and women) may have, they’re not on view in their ordinary dealings with other people—least of all, in their connection to the earthlings they’ve left behind. Upon reaching the space station, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) calls home and speaks to his young daughter via video phone (the futuristic configurations of familiar products are as far as the film goes in whimsy), and, though there’s a shadow of family disquiet in his wife’s untimely nap, Floyd’s chat with his daughter is so banal and conventional as to seem, yes, impersonal. That’s also true of the video chat that Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) has with his parents, a couple of utterly bland and boosterish oldsters who have as little of substance to say to him as he does to them. Whether the scenes were underthought by Kubrick or intentionally conceived by him as underimagined, their insignificance is deeply revealing.

Does “2001” suggest that there’s an incommensurable gap between those who experience outer space and those who remain on the ground—or simply between those with the intelligence and moxie to fulfill great missions and the run of humanity’s mill? What surprised me now, at many decades’ remove from my prior viewing of the movie, was how the astronauts’ lives lacked specificity. They offer no trace of ribald trench humor, no chitchat about back home, no reminiscence, no desire beyond the immediate purview of the mission; the closest thing to life is the praise of the prepackaged sandwiches. Is Kubrick suggesting that there’s as much of a gap between the post-simians of the Dawn of Man and the 1968-style man in the street as there is between his contemporaries and the intrepid outer-space voyager? Does the inner life of the astronaut get more or less blanked out by the unprecedented grandeur of cosmic travel?

When the Philharmonic performed sections of Ligeti’s “Requiem”—with the chorus posted overhead, in box seats, women to the left of the stage, men to the right—a thrill of silent awe ran through the audience, and certainly through me. Kubrick picked a piece of music (and, as James M. Keller explains in the program notes, did so without Ligeti’s permission or knowledge) that, even as it evokes strange new worlds of transcendent harmony, plumbs the depths of the inner experience of sound itself. It’s music of a modernist sensibility of extreme subjectivity, a sort of celestial expressionism. While watching the movie, I wondered about the musical aspect of Kubrick’s images. He made images that are up to the overstuffed chromatic bombast of Richard Strauss and the poignant grace of Johann Strauss, but none reached extremes cognate with Ligeti’s.

But then came the Jupiter landing by Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea), or, more precisely, his entry into Jupiter’s mighty gravitational field. The wild visual screech of the abstract onrush of forms and colors, divided by a seeming mirror into a torrential Rorschach test, is a mind warp that suggests experience bypassing the visual and tapping straight into the limbic. It inaugurates a miraculous sequence that brings to life artistically a simple but enormous scientific idea: the fusion of space, time, and matter. Kubrick expresses a vast confidence in the cinema, and in the power of his own art, to evoke this idea. Yet the scene, in its abstraction, also evokes despair regarding representation, as if it were intrinsically inadequate to the scope his ideas: not even Kubrick’s own highly crafted and thoroughly imagined compositions would be more than pictures of actors on sets, following the paces of scripts.

On this view, not Bergman, not Dreyer, not Antonioni, not Hitchcock, not Bresson—none of the modernists, with their realistic and theatre-based images, could come close to the depths of experience of scientific and visual abstractions. Kubrick’s own images were straining toward their own dissolution, and the reprise, at the end of “2001,” of naturalistic images (albeit of seemingly impossible phenomena) is the very plus ça change that’s built into the story itself. The movie comes full circle in its theoretical notions and in its philosophy of the image.

Yet, in his dialectic of representation and abstraction, Kubrick missed out on another crucial kind of cinematic modernism—the loose, frame-breaking, reflexive kind. It was inimical to his fanatical quest for technical command, as if he feared, above all, the loss of control—which is why the one movie in which he seems to lose control, “Eyes Wide Shut,” is his deepest, his most personal, his best.

P.S. Alex Ross, who recently wrote in the magazine about the art and commerce in Kubrick’s use of Ligeti’s music, added some important notes on the subject in a post on his blog, The Rest Is Noise.

Photograph by Chris Lee.