Directed By Magazine: Online Edition: Luis Bunuel by Enrique Diaz

In attempting to define Kubrick, who had no seeming peer in the world of film, one must consider him in the broader context of 20th century American artists. Much like his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Miles Davis, Kubrick was born just prior to the Great Depression and died prematurely after helping to define his chosen pursuits through the decades in which he was most active. Like Warhol (1928-1987) in modern art and Davis (1926-1991) in jazz music, Kubrick entered filmmaking on fiercely independent terms, and despite his temporary forays into the world of the major movie studios, remained a wholly separate entity until his death. All three craftsmen entered adulthood in the fertile American period following World War II and were able to navigate their respective positions within the arts in the ensuing 1950s before achieving legendary status in the 1960s. Each man, in a decidedly unique context, reliably created works that simultaneously established and catapulted his reputation, inspiring the careers of countless followers, many of whom went on to break new ground of their own. After settling in New York, Warhol revolutionized the downtown scene in the 1950s and 1960s with his Pop Art and Factory experiments; the effects of his innovations were undeniable in the works of subsequent artists of all extractions. From his arrival in New York in the mid-1940s, Davis’ unprecedented approach to both his trumpet playing and the many bands that he assembled over the years helped merge the worlds of jazz and pop, launching the individual musical careers of his many collaborators. Kubrick—also a New Yorker in his early working years—is the lone member of this group who did not take on any specific protégés akin to the prominent names shepherded by both Warhol and Davis. Though he repeatedly worked with filmmaking colleagues, his disinterest in fostering new talent, in the manner of, say, a Steven Spielberg, is another instance of Kubrick’s complete iconoclasm. Nevertheless, much like the best of Kubrick’s movies themselves, the director’s career, after a demonstrative beginning, reached aesthetic heights that few contemporary artists can claim.

Kubrick’s early creative period illustrates both his passions for realizing powerful visual imagery and his often stubborn unwillingness to allow his vision to be restrained by external circumstances. Born into a middle class family in the Bronx, Kubrick’s early passions for photography were accommodated by his physician father despite his poor grades in school. After experimenting with a friend, Kubrick sold photographs to Look magazine at 17, but the manner in which he constructed the images was more telling than his persistence in becoming a staff photographer — he was directing these photographs, often positioning his subjects and organizing the settings to achieve surprisingly compelling compositions for an artist so young.

By 1953, Kubrick had parlayed a series of short documentaries (the first of which, Day of the Fight, was based on one of his early photos of a boxer) into the production of a full-scale dramatic feature film, Fear and Desire. Though prints of his debut effort exist, it has been unavailable to the general public for some time. With its Heart of Darkness theme of soldiers traveling down river in an unnamed war, the 35mm project was reportedly completed with Kubrick filling every key crew position. One of the few technical mistakes of any Kubrick movie was his decision to post-synch all of Fear and Desire’s production sound, deeming it a cheaper method of creating the soundtrack (he was ultimately off by tens of thousands of dollars). Though he later dismissed the film as amateurish, Kubrick would return to the theme of the dehumanizing effects of war in five of his succeeding films. One hopes that, with Kubrick’s death, this film can

now be displayed in a retrospective.

Kubrick’s growing obsession with control and detail became evident in each of his other films of the 1950s. He again served as a one-man crew on Killer’s Kiss, a boxing-themed story set in New York’s seedy underworld. Notable for its striking climactic chase sequence across Manhattan rooftops culminating in a mannequin warehouse, the film facilitated a relationship between Kubrick and producer James B. Harris. The two managed to sell the independently-produced project to United Artists, developing an alliance with the studio that led to The Killing, Kubrick’s first major motion picture [see LONG LENS], and Paths of Glory, among the most powerful anti-war statements ever put on film. For the latter, shot entirely in Germany, Kubrick painstakingly re-created the battlefields of World War I to set a backdrop for his examination of the callousness—and incompetence—of the French army’s leading officers. Both the battle scenes— which Kubrick directed akin to a field general, organizing 600 soldiers and multiple “explosion zones”—and the performances, especially that of Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, indicate a filmmaker with more on his agenda than simply entertaining his audience. His next effort, Spartacus, was dissatisfying to the director in that it stood as the one film in which Kubrick did not have complete control. Brought in by Kirk Douglas after Anthony Mann left the film one week into production, Kubrick clashed with Universal’s old guard of studio department heads throughout production. The results, despite the star-laden cast and $12 million budget, display a visually dynamic if inhibited vision, that, perhaps not coincidentally, brought an end to Kubrick’s working inside the U.S.

Unquestionably, the greatest period in Stanley Kubrick’s creative life arrived with his middle four films, at least two of which are generally considered among the finest works every created in celluloid. While their financial situation forced Kubrick and Harris to produce Lolita in England, due to his experience on the project, Kubrick never made another film outside of the U.K. Working with the book’s author, Kubrick adapted Vladimir Nabokov’s tale of forbidden love before there was such a thing as rating a film. Though fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon’s Lolita was never depicted in a sexual act with James Mason’s Humbert Humbert, Kubrick’s implications were clear, and the film was closely scrutinized by the Production Code, an ethical board which restricted films of the time—Kubrick reluctantly agreed to their requests but would never again censor himself on film. Regardless, the narrative effectively introduced a Kubrick protagonist’s battle with personal compulsion, an element that recurred in all of his remaining films. Lolita, though roundly criticized by fans of the book, also established the actor-director partnership of Peter Sellers and Kubrick, so strong a bond that Kubrick

cast Sellers in four roles for his next film.

A voracious reader throughout his life, Kubrick’s fascination with the Cold War’s nuclear arms race coalesced in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Kubrick and Terry Southern’s adaptation of the precocious novel Red Alert by Peter Bryant. In Sellers, Kubrick found his alter-ego, a manifestation of his innate desires as a filmmaker. Like Mason, Douglas, and Sterling Hayden (The Killing) before him, Sellers articulated Kubrick’s propensity to offer a focal point for his examination of controlled desperation. In the face of irreversible nuclear war, Sellers’ President Muffley, Captain Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove himself all present a facade of contained anxiety as the open hysteria, represented by Hayden’s General Ripper, George C. Scott’s General Turgidson, and Slim Pickens’ Major Kong, explodes around them. Combined with the film’s nihilistic doomsday ending, Kubrick’s success with Dr. Strangelove became even more prescient when, in 1964—the year it was released—U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater announced that, in a cold war boiling point, the U.S. would “nuke them into the stone age.”

If Kubrick’s close attention to detail in his films crystallized on Dr. Strangelove—he supervised every phase of set construction at Shepperton Studios, conceived all special photographic effects, shot dozens of takes of each set-up, and spent eight months editing the $2 million movie—it skyrocketed with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Never before had a science-fiction film’s narrative and production been taken as seriously. In an era of low-budget, shoddily-assembled fare which passed for sci-fi entertainment, Kubrick deliberately and methodically presented a portrait of the future. Working with the story’s author, Arthur C. Clarke, through four years of planning and production, Kubrick fashioned a cinematic event that featured his vision of early man, alien intelligence, and scientifically-accurate space travel. After consulting with a team of qualified scientists, he meticulously oversaw the construction of a mammoth centrifuge and other sets at Borehamwood film studios to house the various sections of the spaceship Discovery. Most significantly, Kubrick assembled a team of top visual effects technicians to execute the myriad post-production compositing of shots—all of which he had designed himself—including the famed stargate sequence, which took audiences “beyond the infinite.” That Kubrick’s masterpiece arrived in theaters one year before NASA’s moon landing reaffirmed the uncannily prophetic and insightful nature of his instincts.

In the early 1970s, after flirting with an epic screen biography of Napoleon (for a time, to star Jack Nicholson), Kubrick delved into the final chapter of his middle period, realizing his finest adaptation of literary material. Anthony Burgess had written A Clockwork Orange as personal therapy after his wife was randomly attacked by young thugs, leaving her in a fragile physical and emotional state. Kubrick’s film would not flinch from examining what he saw as the inevitable decay of modern society. Alex, amid his amoral and desensitized gang of “droogies,” was the story’s ebullient anti-hero. With overt Nazi symbolism, Kubrick characterizes the state, which is trying to maintain order amidst the encroaching chaos, as the film’s antagonist. Kubrick’s approach to making the film would radically depart from his previous methods. In lieu of using special visual effects or building vast sets, he shot the action in-camera, often over or under-cranking to transform the sex and violence into bizarre dances. He also sent scouts throughout the U.K. in the search for architecture that evoked the near future (though the book is set in 1972, Kubrick’s film aimed for 10-15 years past that). Even today, the result is a shockingly uninhibited journey into Alex’s experience, at times equal parts grotesquely disturbing, humorous, and titillating. At the time, audiences were unprepared for Kubrick’s stark presentation of one possible near-future. When several bands of English youths responded to A Clockwork Orange by invoking the dress and manner of Alex’s droogs, Kubrick himself banned the film from exhibition in his adopted homeland, a moratorium that still exists today.

Unthinkably, audiences have only witnessed three Stanley Kubrick movie

s since A Clockwork Orange was released in 1972, each film unable to sustain the quality of his previous features. Barry Lyndon was Kubrick’s stylishly expansive if slow-moving take on William Thackeray’s period drama, released in 1975. Ryan O’Neal was less than captivating in the starring role, and though Kubrick elicited stunning visuals from his location photography in the English-Irish countryside, often using source light from candles to illuminate his scenes, the film was an inevitable letdown from the previous decade’s work. Lending itself to haunting mood and settings, The Shining benefited from Kubrick’s newfound affinity for Steadicam, which let him move his camera fluidly throughout the halls of his massive full-size Overlook Hotel sets. Kubrick’s 1980 horror tale, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, was further invigorated by Jack Nicholson’s iconic performance as hotel caretaker Jack Torrance. Nicholson’s take on the slowly unraveling Torrance provided Kubrick with the most memorable male characterization in any of his films. Still, the film’s revelations failed to match the creepy suspense and intensity that Kubrick had built up. Seven years later, Kubrick finally unveiled Full Metal Jacket, an expanded version of Gustav Hasford’s “The Short Timers.” Its riveting Parris Island training scenes remain as stirring as any material Kubrick has committed to film; unfortunately, the film’s subsequent Vietnam sequences suffer in comparison. Not only did the final two-thirds of Full Metal Jacket fail to match the intensity of the opening sections, its city setting—shot at an abandoned gasworks in England—and limited scope fell short of other Vietnam films of the era, Platoon among them, which offered a more fulfilling perspective of the combat veteran’s Vietnam War experience. One wonders why, considering the intriguing unspecified setting of his first film, Fear and Desire, Kubrick consciously chose to set his film in Vietnam. Had Full Metal Jacket been a take on a less particular war, it might have been freed of justified comparisons to Platoon, Apocalypse Now and others. Still, Kubrick managed to evoke indelible performances from Vincent D’Onofrio as a victimized Marine recruit and Lee Ermey as his drill instructor. The film also re-established Kubrick’s inventive exploration of the disillusioning essence of war, his last effort to do so.

In 1988, at age 60, it seemed that Kubrick had at least several films left in him. Yet, until the production of the current Eyes Wide Shut, he merely flirted with several projects, not immersing himself in any for a confounding ten years. His mystique superseded his output despite ongoing rumors of pre-production work on AI, an artificial intelligence story which supposedly attracted Kubrick’s attention to its vast production possibilities when he viewed the computer graphics effects from Jurassic Park. Throughout his career, Kubrick rarely gave interviews and made even fewer public appearances, becoming increasingly more reclusive in recent years; as such, it is impossible to construe his motivation for engrossing himself in any of his films. What remains is a timeless legacy of works, all of which have provided the unforgettable images key to Kubrick’s immortality as an artist. What true cinema enthusiast, for instance, can forget the demented knowing stare in the eyes of Kubrick’s most vividly-realized characters—Clare Quilty with his back turned to Humbert at the hotel bar in Lolita; Alex’s unfettered glare during the long slow pull-back that opens A Clockwork Orange; Jack Torrance’s burning grimace while pursuing son Danny through the maze in The Shining; Private Pyle’s horrifying affirmation of his psychotic break which ends Full Metal Jacket’s jolting first act; and, of course, the muted red glow of HAL-9000’s visual sensor as it reads the lips of the doomed Poole and Bowman conspiring against him in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We can only hope that Tom Cruise has that same look in his eyes somewhere in Eyes Wide Shut, the final film from the premier cinema maker of our time.