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A Brief History of Time



Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs. An adroitly crafted tale of personal adversity, professional triumph, and cosmological inquiry, Morris’s documentary examines the way the collapse of Hawking’s body has been accompanied by the untrammeled broadening of his imagination. Telling the man’s incredible story through the voices of his colleagues and loved ones, while making dynamically accessible some of the theories in Hawking’s best-selling book of the same name, A Brief History of Time is at once as small as a single life and as big as the ever-expanding universe.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED EDITION

- New, restored 4K digital film transfer, supervised by director of photography John Bailey and approved by director Errol Morris, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview with Morris
- New interview with Bailey
- One Blu-ray and one DVD, with all content available in both formats
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic David Sterritt, a chapter from Stephen Hawking’s 2013 memoir My Brief History, and a short excerpt from Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time

I can't remember a forthcoming title and subsequent announcement getting quite the total silent treatment that this one has so far. A couple of brief comments from Matt are all I could find about the film on the forum. Is it because relatively few have seen it (or seen it this century)? It never came out on DVD in R1, but the whole thing has been on YouTube for almost a year. I should probably watch it there while it's still up. If I ever saw it, I've forgotten it, though the chicken at the beginning seemed familiar.

Depending on how long the two interviews are, this appears to be pretty light on features for an upper-tier title.

Morris strikes me as rather unshutupable, so that could indeed be a lengthy interview.

As for the film, all of Morris's films are compulsively watchable, and he has an excellent nose for good material, so naturally it's recommended. It's less quirky and individual than his preceding works (hey, it's an adaptation of a best seller, for heaven's sake!), but much quirkier and more individual than anybody else's take on the subject would have been.

It was moved to the Morris thread.

Yep, it wasn't about A Brief History of Time.

I wonder where this discussion will end up.

It will cease to exist when the universe collapses, if not before.

I'm gonna censor it.

I'm then going to call on congress to censure it

This was the first Morris film I ever saw and I loved it -- but I was very very young (about ten years old) and had no idea who Errol Morris was at the time. My mother showed it to me because she has a strong interest in Hawking and in physics and I remember finding its dealings with his own story fascinating, but not much else about it. So I'm excited to see it again but my memory may have inflated it.

A Brief History of Time is at once as small as a single life and as big as the ever-expanding universe.

This blurb windup could have been lifted from the final monologue of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.

Carey’s final monologue –

“I was continuing to shrink, to become... what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens.

The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!”

That's an astute observation and an excellent reference. And it highlights the way in which A Brief History of Time for Morris is as much a science fiction film -- with Hawking as a HAL-like robovoiced time and space traveler; or like you say, the incredibly shrunken man whose mind nevertheless expands to the edges of the cosmos -- as it is a biopic or a work of popular science. It's always interesting for me to see the way that Morris' engagement with the visual tropes and conventions of various genres informs his documentaries. There's film noir styling all over The Thin Blue Line and a number of his shorter true crime works and plenty of horror film imagery in Mr. Death and Standard Operating Procedure (especially those ghostly interrogators). But I'd say A Brief History of Time is one of his works, perhaps along with The Thin Blue Line, where the influence of genre is almost an organizing principle.

This release will be getting a DVD-only edition, as well as RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11, MASTER OF THE HOUSE, and IL SORPASSO.

Carey’s final monologue –

“I was continuing to shrink, to become... what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? ...
All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!”

That reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics
I'd especially rec All At One Point, which begins on Page 20, but all the stories are excellent.
Pardon the Digression.

I wonder if they used the Interrotron for the Morris interview!

I just realized they probably timed the release date for this one to coincide with Fox's airing of Cosmos. Smartly done, Criterion.

This was a truly brilliant film, as expected, though for totally unexpected ways. The exact depths for which the film ties Hawking's life, science, and philosophy together is insane almost to a Borgesian level as Hawking dealing with ASL becomes a microcosm for how time works and the exact function of that body too changes as Hawking's understanding of time does. This leaves, for me, the film as shockingly tragic with Hawking's hope on an implosion induced time reversal seeming like a possible way to go back to his youth and use more than just the hour a day he mentions at the beginning. The chicken and egg metaphor at the top seems to take a place more than a cute way to dumb down purpose as it might at first seem. Rather it seems to be a summary, for the film, more about the unknowability of how much of Hawking's science is moved by his philosophy or the vice versa. Naturally hopefully everyone checks out this film, but especially now board members since it seems so essential for both lists going on right now. *nudge*nudge*

I completely forgot this existed. Snowed in today so I wound up viewing it (a short feature at 80 minutes). Quite good, I was surprised by the mixed reaction in vintage reviews. Jonathan Rosenbaum liked it, calling his favorite Morris film up to that time, but others were less enamored. Physics is ideally studied in print - just too many details and abstract concepts that need to be explained with actual words and numbers - but this film does a good job of explaining the ideas within the constraints of this format.

Morris gave a nice interview about this film, summarizing the challenges of doing it (a work-for-hire job) and bringing it back into print in the U.S.

I watched this over the weekend, and thought it was wonderful. The first Morris film I've seen. I was captivated from the opening credits by the Glass music. The studio sets gave the interviews a rather surreal feel, and the pacing was perfect. The film did a concisely brilliant job of providing insight into Hawking's ideas, and Morris in his interview showed why he was an ideal filmmaker to tackle this story.

The disc itself is magnificent. I was blown away by the visuals. The absence of CGI was something of a relief.