- Cepheus was the mythological king of Ethiopia. He was deemed worthy of a place in the sky because he was fourth in descent from the nymph Io, one of the loves of Zeus – and having Zeus as a relative was always an advantage when it came to being commemorated among the constellations. The kingdom of Cepheus was not the Ethiopia we know today, but stretched from the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean southwards to the Red Sea, an area that contains parts of the modern Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Ptolemy described him as wearing the tiara-like head-dress of a Persian king, as he is shown on John Flamsteed’s star atlas…
- ‘Dear Mr. Kubrick’: Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s (participations.org)
Stanley Kubrick’s highly unconventional Science Fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was one of the biggest hits of the late 1960s in the US. This success has traditionally been explained with reference to the film’s particular appeal to youth. This paper examines a wide range of letters sent to Kubrick by cinemagoers in the late 1960s, and identifies four types of audience responses to 2001: rejection, dialogue, celebration and appropriation. The paper concludes that the largely positive letters, together with additional research on the film’s box office performance, strongly suggest that 2001 was a success with very diverse audience segments, and that an optimistic belief in the possibility of fundamental personal and social transformation may have been at the root of this success.