The centerpiece of the paper is an analysis of the interaction between music and visuals in Stanley Kubrick's film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Particular attention is paid to how the background music — in particular, works by G. Ligeti, R. Strauss, I. Strauss, and A. Khachaturian — does not simply accompany the images, but enters into a structural and semantic counterpoint with them. Here, music is not an illustration, but a full-fledged medium of meaning, forming the special temporal and philosophical fabric of the film.

Kubrick thus creates an audiovisual polyphony — a polyphony of meanings that arises not only in the harmony of music and images, but also in their deliberate dissonance. It is in these shifts and contradictions that new meanings are born, which cannot be reduced to any of the components separately.

The paper offers a brief typology of the functions of music (accompanying, commenting, interpreting) and examines how Kubrick, using quotes from the classics, builds his own audiovisual language. This language brings Space Odyssey closer to postmodern art and makes it possible to interpret it through the lens of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson.

Drawing on Deleuze's concepts of image-time, rhythm, and open form, as well as Bergson's understanding of duration and perception, the paper will examine how music influences the rhythmic, montage, and even ontological structure of the film. This approach allows us to see Space Odyssey as a work in which cinema ceases to be simply “moving pictures” and becomes a space for philosophical thinking — not in concepts, but in sound and image.

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