aRonald Bergen on the life and films of Stanley Kubrick, the enigmatic and reclusive director who died recently aged 70
Over his 40-year career, the director Stanley Kubrick made only 13 feature films, yet the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his extremely slow method of working, the years of planning, the secrecy, the attendant speculation and publicity, his obsessive personality and the nature of his films built up an aura around every work that ensured serious critical attention, as well as interest from the public.
In each of his deeply pessimistic movies, Kubrick strove to overcome technical and textual difficulties and was always prepared to venture into new territory.
For Kubrick’s Lolita, made in 1962, the age of Nabakov’s nymphet was raised into her teens to make it more acceptable to cinema audiences, thereby changing Humbert Humbert’s “perverse passion” into an acceptable one. This and the reduction of the American landscape in the novel – it was shot in England – still did not detract from the acerbic comedy, played to perfection by James Mason and Peter Sellers. While his unflinching 1987 Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket suffered similarly from being shot in England – because of the director’s refusal to fly – it was permeated with the deepest cynicism, at its best in the brutal boot camp sequences.
If Lolita approached a 20th century masterpiece, Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb in 1964 got as close as possible to a 20th century nightmare. It elected to view the end of the world as the ultimate absurdity and frighteningly embodies Kubrick’s 1957 anti- militarism, first revealed in the bitterly ironic and moving first world war drama, Paths of Glory, which starred Kirk Douglas. The film, which also featured Kubrick’s third wife and widow, the German actress and painter Christiane Susanne Harlan, as a caf singer entertaining French troops, was banned in France until recently because of its unflattering depiction of the French army.
Doctor Strangelove’s message – that there is no future – was contradicted by Kubrick’s next two movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). It was these two films that turned Kubrick into a cult director.
For a film that wryly condemned a hyper- technical future, 2001 was a hi-tech product in itself, not far behind the futuristic world it depicted. Although technically light years ahead of many previous space odysseys, it lagged behind intellectually. The simple message – that man will merely become a machine of a machine – was decked out with man’s relationship with his primitive beginnings, and his final psychological regression through time.
For many cinemagoers, the long, lavish and loving recreation of 18th century sensibility in Barry Lyndon (1975), based on Thackeray’s novel, seemed far superior. Designer Ken Adam, cameraman John Alcott and art director Roy Walker all won Oscars for their work. Kubrick started each sequence with a long shot, as if looking at a painting, and then gradually moved in to depict the harsh life within the frame.
>From this elegant evocation of the Age of Reason, he moved to the late 20th century madness of The Shining (1980), adapted from the Stephen King novel, and again resorted to unsubtle shock treatment.
Kubrick was born in the Bronx, the son of American Jews of Central European origin. His father, a well-known doctor, introduced him to photography at the age of 13, when he gave him his first camera for his birthday. The gift took the young Stanley’s mind off his other passions – jazz, and his dream of becoming a professional drummer. He left school at 17 with poor grades, but later became an omnivorous reader and autodidact. He was one of Look magazine’s best photographers and the subject of his first documentary in 1950, Day of the Fight, was the middleweight boxer Walter Cartier, on whom he had done a photo feature. Four years later he shot the noirish mini-feature Killer’s Kiss in the streets of New York for $40 000 – given to him by a Bronx chemist.
Because of the promise of Killer’s Kiss, United Artists decided to gamble on the 26- year-old Kubrick and invest $200 000 in The Killing in 1956. A first-class heist movie emerged and earned more than its money back. In 1960 Kirk Douglas asked Kubrick to replace Anthony Mann, with whom he had had serious disagreements, on Spartacus. This epic is an exception in Kubrick’s oeuvre in that he had no control over the casting, nor did he contribute to the screenplay.
All the rest of his films bore his unique mark as, presumably, will the most eagerly awaited movie of the last decade, Eyes Wide Shut, based on Artur Schnitzler’s short novel about sexual jealousy with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise.
Dictatorial Kubrick jealously guarded his autonomy and never really became absorbed into the system on which he was financially dependent.
For years he had tried to make a film about Napoleon, with whom he seemed to identify. He once made an analogy between Napoleon’s meticulous military campaigns and his own method of filming.