The Late Great Stanley Kubrick

July 26, 2006

“I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content...I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does...You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film.”

-- Stanley Kubrick on
“2001, A Space Odyssey”
If you grew up in the ‘60‘s and ‘70s, you couldn’t escape the long shadow cast by film director Stanley Kubrick over popular culture.
Shadow? Brilliant illumination would be the better metaphor, because for those of us who sat spellbound through “Dr. Strangelove” in 1964 or “2001, A Space Odyssey” in 1968, Kubrick was virtually inventing the modern cinema before our eyes with its ethos of stark honesty and realism that was almost painful in its grit to behold onscreen. As the subject of a retrospective at this year’s Traverse City Film Festival, Kubrick offers a vast terrain of film worth exploring.
Kubrick brought us visions of worlds we’d never glimpsed; often, worlds we had never even thought of. He shucked the corniness right out of science fiction with “A Space Odyssey.” He foresaw the hopeless “no future” outlook of Britain’s punk rockers in “A Clockwork Orange.” And the horror film -- which had been dominated by adolescent fantasies such as “The Blob” and “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” -- grew up in his unrelenting camera in the neoreal frightfest of “The Shining.”
Kubrick was an icon-breaker, but in the process, he became an icon. He was a key shaker in the cultural earthquake created by ’60s visionaries such as authors Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and Thomas Pynchon; musicians Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Neil Young; photographer Diane Arbus; sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick and “new journalist” Tom Wolfe in defining what the post-“square” world beyond the ’50s would be like. And more than those contemporaries, he gave us a preview of the new millennium -- literally, in the case of “2001” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

SPACE ODYSSEY
Following the release of “2001, A
Space Odyssey,” Kubrick’s films came to be seen as major ‘events’ that were discussed in detail before their release and long after. And no one gave us more to work with: In “2001,” for instance, a mysterious monolith, planted by unknown aliens, provides evolution’s “missing link” that transforms apes into human beings. Under the influence of the monolith, an ape picks up a bone in battle, inspired to use man’s first tool. Victorious, he throws it in the air and we see the workings of time and evolution transform it into a spaceship in orbit around the Earth. Man makes the leap to the moon to find another monolith which points towards Saturn. But this time, man’s enemy is the machine he has created in the form of the murderous computer HAL. At the end of a surviving astronaut’s voyage, he encounters another monolith as well as the next jump in evolution.
Visually, “2001” is unpleasantly, relentlessly ‘modern’ in its sterility. There’s nothing warm or touchy-feely in the astronauts’ world that expresses their humanity. Only with the birth of the Starchild at the end of the film do we glimpse a new possibility for the human touch.
The meaning of “2001” and its bizarre ending was discussed for years. God, aliens, evolution, the role of machines and the meaning of our existence were all themes. As with many great artists, Kubrick didn’t tie up the details or explain his film’s meaning -- he purposely left things hanging at the end of the film to give viewers something to mull over.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
For a generation raised on the peaceful vibes of the hippies and the idealistic militance of the anti-war movement, “A Clockwork Orange” in 1971 was akin to an electric shock. Kubrick’s film was set in Britain in the near future where roving gangs bent on “ultraviolence” occupied a suburban hell of deteriorating high-rise apartments with no hope for the future. Led by Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a jumpsuit-clad gang rampages through the suburbs each night, beating, robbing and raping. Talk about anti-heroes -- Alex was over the top.
Yet few films have been more prescient in depicting a society on the dole and running down. Based on the speculative fiction of Anthony Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange” foreshadowed the lost-hope attitudes of the punk rock movement of Margaret Thatcher’s England, and more particularly, last year’s riots in the suburbs of France. In much of Europe today, a generation of young immigrants live without jobs or hope in dilapidated apartment towers where the police fear to tread. The hoodlums of “A Clockwork Orange” are flashier in their apparel and driven more by evil impulses than the dream of a good job, but both circumstances demonstrate what happens when people are denied opportunities to succeed.

POST DELUGE
Kubrick’s succeeding films gave viewers less fodder for thought but advanced the art of film in other ways.
“Barry Lyndon” (1975) followed the progress of an Irish rake (Ryan O’Neal) in 18th century England. Barry is a gambler trying to climb the social ladder into high society. But his picaresque “Tom Jones” style adventures with the lovely Marisa Berenson lead him to a dwindling end. The film’s contribution to cinema was through its pioneering use of a Zeiss 50mm 0.7 lens designed by NASA which allowed for low-light photography to capture the candlelit scenes of the 1700s.
“The Shining” gave us a modern gothic thriller and the flowering of Jack Nicholson’s career as the crazed caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, high in the mountains of Colorado. Most critics put “The Shining” at or near the top of their lists as the best horror film ever created, and the sickening twist of its ending presages that of today’s au courant director M. Knight Shyamalan.
“Full Metal Jacket” (1987) about the siege of Hue during the Tet Offensive got lost amid a host of superior Vietnam films such as “The Deer Hunter,” “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now.” It wasn’t until 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut” that Kubrick got back to his genesis as a filmmaker creating art that sparked intense discussion. In “Eyes Wide Shut,” Tom Cruise is a sexually curious physician who fears that his wife, Nicole Kidman, is desirous of other men. And indeed she is. His paranoia leads him into a fantasy encounter with a murderous secret society and an orgiastic evening. The film plays well as a chill thriller, but more importantly, it speaks to the underlying fears of sexual betrayal in any relationship; ultimately, it’s a freudian adventure of the mind.
Kubrick wrapped up his career posthumously with “AI: Artificial Intelligence,” co-directed by Steven Spielberg. A futuristic retelling of the Pinocchio story, “AI” gives us Kubrick’s chill -- some might say sterile -- view of humanity’s darker side with Spielberg’s kid-centric gloss. If you enjoy analyzing film, “AI” offers a tutti-frutti of flavors and colors to digest.

Who was
Stanley Kubrick?
F ilmmaker Stanley Kubrick was born in New York City on July 26, 1928 and had an early career as a still photographer which later aided the excellence of his film technique.
Part of the early bohemian scene of Greenwich Village, young Kubrick augmented his income playing chess for quarters in Washington Square and freelanced for “Look” magazine in the 1940s, one of the major
photo magazines of its day.
In 1951, a friend convinced him to try his hand at film. His first feature, “Day of the Fight,” made him a profit of $100. Based on his success, he quit his job at “Look” and began filming documentaries and trade films.
“With “Fear and Desire” in 1953, Kubrick began concentrating on feature-length narrative films. “Fear and Desire” was about soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who discover that their faces are identical to that of the enemy. It was an early indication of
Kubrick’s humanity and his willingness to push the envelope.
His first break came with “The Killing,” written by Jim Thompson, a master of hard-boiled detective fiction. It was the story of a race track heist that goes spiraling out of control, filmed in non-linear time, which was virtually unknown in the cinema of the day.
From then on the hits started rolling: “Paths of Glory” about three soldiers charged with cowardice (1957); and “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas, detailing a slave revolt in the Roman Empire (1960).
Kubrick moved to England in 1962, living their for the rest of his life. There, he filmed one of his most controversial works, “Lolita,” about a 12-year-old strumpet who seduces a middle-aged man. Kubrick rewrote Vladimer Nabokov’s screenplay, upping the girl’s age to 16 and dumping its more perverse aspects.
Wiith “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” in 1964, Kubrick reportedly intended to create a straight thriller but found the U.S.-Russian policy of mutual assured destruction so insane that he created a satire instead. Despite heroic efforts to stop a crazed Curtis LeMay-style Air Force general who launches a first strike on the Soviet Union, the world goes up in smoke as the result of a “MAD” doomsday machine.
Succeeding films took Kubrick into his glory years (see the rundown in the accompanying article). He died in 1999 after a
10-year effort to complete “Eyes Wide Shut”
and midway through his collaboration on “AI.”

-- adapted from an article
on wikipedia.com