Jump Cut: Montage as Metaphysics in Kubrick’s 2001

Our first impulse is to view Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as an odyssey in the Homeric manner. Odyssey here refers to a persistent narrative mode that continues to dominate our reception of literature and film, one that privileges continuity and coherence as formal, diegetic principles. But when viewed through the lens of Eisenstein’s theory of montage, 2001, it becomes clear, is expressly designed to challenge those principles. Rather than championing development, evolution, progress or return (all variations on the Odyssean trope), Kubrick’s film, I argue, is a manifesto for rupture and discontinuity, for metaphysics as montage.