The poster for A Space Odyssey shown at left,[a] provides quite a few hints about various themes in the movie: The space craft exiting the yellowish slot in the middle of the space station, is leaving some sort of trail behind, giving the whole thing (station, craft, and trail) the appearance of a key being inserted into a keyhole. Since the space station rotates, and since it looks physically similar to a giant film reel, the hint here is that one key to the movie is rotation, i.e., when the "key" is turned, the space station/film reel rotates. The rotation 'theme' in the movie includes the rotation of an image of Heywood Floyd's daughter clockwise by 90 degrees (see below).
Above: Recall that when we rotated the image of Heywood Floyd's daughter clockwise by 90 degrees, the resultant image (the right-hand image above) turned out to be a hint leading to the conclusion, that Floyd's body is occupied by an alien life force.
The space station being in the poster is a hint, that part of the Jupiter mission film is being recorded in the station itself. The fact that part of the station is red in the poster is indicative of the presence of HAL's camera 'eyes'.
Note that all four alchemical colors (black, white, yellow, and red) are present in the poster. Also note the presence of blue, the color which Jung says represents the feminine, and which is being used in the movie to indicate that the aliens are feminine in nature. Finally, the prominence of yellow in the poster (in the lettering of the movie title) is meant to highlight the importance of the alchemical citrinitas stage and the chemical wedding.
a. Poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey: The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Turner Entertainment), the publisher of the film or the graphic artist. The poster art is believed to be used in accordance with the U.S. Copyright Fair Use Act (Title 17, U.S. Code).
