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Scene from »2001: A Space Odyssey« (1968): Four effects specialists were involved in Stanley Kubrick's film, Douglas Trumbull was the most influential
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A telephone call to Stanley Kubrick in 1964 began the long, difficult career of special effects designer and director Douglas Hunt Trumbull, marked by fantastic inventions and tragic setbacks.
He had heard that Kubrick was preparing to shoot a science fiction film, and one of his colleagues had been hired - could he also take part?
He was allowed to.
And helped significantly to create a film that set standards, not only for the science fiction genre, but for the art of film in general.
Trumbull was in his early 20s at the time and was employed as a painter and graphic artist by a small Hollywood animation company after the big animation studios rejected his applications.
The task that Kubrick initially assigned to him was correspondingly small.
Trumbull was assigned to create the graphics that appeared on the spacecraft's computer screens in 2001.
In the film they look like computer graphics, but of course there was nothing like that in reality in the mid-1960s.
So Trumbull photographed and animated charts and graphs from technical books and magazines.
Kubrick gave his protégé increasing freedom and eventually commissioned him to film the film's climax, the so-called Star Gate sequence, in which astronaut Bowman appears to be flying through space and time in a space capsule.
For the spectacular, psychedelic sequence, a riot of color that literally sucks the viewer into the canvas (or screen), Trumbull used the so-called slitscan effect, which produced distorted and deformed images and decisively further developed Trumbull.
Above all, however, he succeeded in opening up new visual worlds and in taking cinema beyond the limits of reason.
The sequence, combined with György Ligeti's ghostly choral music, is film in its purest form: it cannot be translated into language and functions differently from other art forms such as literature, photography and music, although it borrows from all of them.
In 1977 he told SPIEGEL about his work: »Bringing a UFO to the screen is like photographing God«.
Four designers took care of the special effects for »2001«, but the fact that they only ever mention Trumbull is also due to this understanding of his art.
And that Trumbull's career continued to sparkle after this film, albeit in part because of the bizarre setbacks the Hollywood system inflicted on him.
With his work on the film "Andromeda - Deadly Dust from Space" he first consolidated his reputation as a particularly talented technician.
But Trumbull, who had not only had positive experiences with Kubrick ("as a boss, he was hell, an absolute perfectionist"), wanted to make his own films.
He made his directorial debut with »Silent in Space«, but despite positive reviews, the sci-fi thriller with an ecological message went under at the box office.
The producing Universal Studio, which provided Trumbull with a mini-budget of one million dollars (»2001« cost ten times as much), completely dispensed with advertising and hoped for word-of-mouth propaganda, which failed to materialize.
After that, Trumbull tried for years to get the budgets for new film projects together, always without success.
Sometimes filming was about to begin when funding collapsed.
He turned down the offer to work on Star Wars, but was instrumental in Steven Spielberg's classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind and eventually saved the 1979 production of Star Trek: The Movie.
Actually committed Trick specialist had verhoben in the project and presented to only a few seconds of the necessary special effects just before theatrical release.
Douglas Trumbull jumped in with his team and worked for six months day and night.
The film was ready in time, Trumbull ended up with stomach ulcers and fatigue in the hospital.
Blade Runner is another classic that Trumbull contributed his own style to, notably the cityscapes of dystopian Los Angeles.
His next directing work eventually led to disaster and his exit from Hollywood.
He originally wanted to film »Brainstorm« using a specially developed recording process with 70mm material, with the result being a significantly brighter and clearer image.
But by the early 1980s, the trend toward multiplexing had caught on in the United States.
The cinema halls and with them the screens shrank significantly, and the cinema chains refused to buy new projectors just for this one film.
So Trumbull had to shoot his film on regular 35mm stock.
When his leading actress Natalie Wood died under mysterious circumstances, the almost finished film was put on hold for two years.
Eventually, the producing MGM studio reluctantly released Brainstorm, with no advertising and few prints, where it unsurprisingly flopped.
Trumbull retired from the active film business and tinkered with inventions and new recording techniques on his estate in Massachusetts.
Once again he returned to a film set for director Terrence Malick and worked on the special effects of The Tree of Life, using techniques he had used in 2001.
Trumbull continued to dream of enhancing the cinematic experience through brighter images, higher frame rates and larger, curved screens.
He said, "For my sake, there should be a few fewer cheap multiplexes if the remaining cinemas were spectacular movie theaters." Trumbull remained a visionary whose ideas could perhaps still benefit cinema in its struggle to survive against streaming services.
Douglas Trumbull, whose father worked on the special effects for the classic The Wizard of Oz, battled cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke in his last years.
He died on February 7 at the age of 79.