This sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made came out in 1968, which seem strangely familiar to anyone who knows Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which was released 24 years earlier.
Was Kubrick influenced by the earlier film? Almost certainly not.
In a footnote to his article Deconstructing the Imagined Village: A Canterbury Tale, Paul Banks writes:
Ian Christie has recently pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 6023 (7 September 2018), 6, that even if Kubrick had seen A Canterbury Tale before making his own film, it would have been the ‘severely truncated and re-ordered US version’, the only print available between the late 1940s and 1978, which omitted the sequence in question.
That seems pretty conclusive.
It's a lesson that just as technological innovations can take place simultaneously in countries that have no contact, so great directors can have similar brilliant ideas without influencing one another.
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