Kubrick: Biographical Notes
by Michel Ciment
Stanley Kubrick was born on 26 July in the Bronx, New York. His parents
were American Jews of Central European origin. He has one sister, Barbara,
six years his junior. His father, a well-known doctor, introduced him to
chess at the age of twelve and to photography the following year when he
gave him his first camera -- a Graflex -- for his birthday. The gift took
Kubrick's mind off another of his youthful enthusiasms, jazz, and his
dream of becoming a professional drummer. At school -- William Howard Taft
High School in the Bronx -- the only good grades he received were in
physics (science was his favorite subject) and he left at seventeen with a
poorish average of sixty-seven. He was therefore refused entry to college,
especially as in 1945 the return of thousands of young GIs from the war
made standards of enrolment in higher education even more strict.
While still at high school, Kubrick had taken numerous photographs -- he
was actually made the official school photographer -- and a few of these
were exhibited. One morning in April 1945, on his way to school, he
chanced to snap the haggard features of a newspaper vendor beside
headlines announcing the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt; he then sold the
photograph for twenty-five dollars to Look magazine, which offered him ten
more than the New York Daily News. Shortly after, he proposed two other
features to Look and both were accepted. One of these involved his English
teacher, Aaron Traister, who had aroused his interest by playing all the
roles in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays himself (a fascination with
multiple role-playing which will later be found in his films.)
Though he enrolled in evening city classes at New York's City College in
the hope of eventually being eligible for university, his involvement in
photography was given a boost when Helen O'Brian, the head of Look's
photographic department, found him a place on the magazine's team. He
worked there for four years, travelling all over the country and even to
Portugal, his camera concealed inside a shopping bag so that he would not
be taken for a tourist or a journalist.
During these years of apprenticeship -- when his independence, his
stamina, and his bright ideas were already such that he came to be
regarded as one of the magazine's best photographers -- Kubrick applied
himself to the avid study of a wide range of books that would contribute
to his intellectual development in every possible field of knowledge.
Because of this thirst for facts and ideas, he enrolled as a
non-matriculating student at New York's Columbia University, where he sat
in on classes given by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren.
Though they were destined to give way to the cinema, the young Kubrick's
three favorite activities (two of which, chess and photography, are often
viewed as frivolous pastimes) left a lasting mark on him. From chess,
which he would continue to practice between takes (with George C. Scott,
for example, during the filming of Dr. Strangelove), cam the mathematical
precision of his plots, his enthusiasm for abstract speculation, and his
view of life as a game in which one wrong move could be fatal.
Photography, of course, gave him a feel for composition and an interest in
visual effects, qualities evident in all of his films: he controls their
photographic textures by working in close collaboration with his lighting
cameramen, and occasionally shoots certain hand-held camera sequences
himself. Jazz, finally, gave him a grounding in rhythm, in editing and in
the art of selecting the right musical accompaniment for a scene, a talent
which will have struck everyone who has seen his films.
In 1949, Kubrick and his first wife, Toba Metz (whom he had known at Taft
High School and married at the age of eighteen), moved to Greenwich
Village. He furthered his newly acquired ambition by becoming a film-maker
by assiduously attending screenings at the Museum of Modern Art. His
tastes were -- and have remained -- eclectic, his curiosity ever alert and
his interest in formal problems constant. He admits that at that period
Eisenstein's books had not impressed him, and adds: "Eisenstein's greatest
achievement is the beautiful visual composition of his shots and his
editing. But as far as content is concerned his films are silly, his
actors are wooden and operatic. I sometimes suspect that Eisenstein's
acting style derives from his desire to keep the actors framed within a
composition for as long as possible; they move very slowly, as if under
water...Actually anyone seriously interested in comparative film
techniques should study the difference in approach of two directors,
Eisenstein and Chaplin. Eisenstein is all form and no content, whereas
Chaplin is content and no form."
When the American magazine Cinema asked him in 1963 to name his favorite
films, Kubrick listed the following titles: 1. I Vitelloni (Federico
Fellini, 1953), 2. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1958), 3. Citizen
Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John
Huston, 1948), 5. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931), 6. Henry V
(Laurence Olivier, 1945), 7. La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), 8.
The Bank Dick (W.C. Fields, 1940), 9. Roxie Hart (William Wellman, 1942),
10. Hell's Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930). In this choice one can detect a
broadminded attitude towards very dissimilar aesthetic experiences, with a
preference nevertheless for European art films strongly colored by a
pessimistic view of life (Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman); and a predilection
for American directors known for their larger-than-life, as also for their
marginal position with regard to the system (Welles, Huston, Chaplin, W.C.
Fields, Howard Hughes, Wellman). Which should not surprise us from the
future director of Dr. Strangelove.
The absence of one name, however, is striking: that of Max Ophuls, for
whom Kubrick has always had the greatest esteem and about whom he said
some years earlier: "Highest of all I would rate Max Ophuls, who for me
possessed every possible quality. He has an exceptional flair for sniffing
out good subjects, and he got the most out of them. He was also a
marvelous director of actors." All of these qualities are to be found in
Kubrick's work, along with the elaborate camera movements characteristic
of the director of Le Plaisir. Finally, one might mention his admiration
for Elia Kazan, whom he considered in 1957 "without question the best
director we have in America. And he's capable of performing miracles with
the actors he uses." By his bold choice of themes (adapted from Tennessee
Williams, as with A Streetcar Named Desire, or straight from the
headlines, as with On the Waterfront), by his introduction of a new
approach to acting (via the Actors Studio) and by his desire to keep his
distance from Hollywood (filming Waterfront with the independent producer
Sam Spiegel in New York's dockland), Kazan in the early fifties could
hardly fail to attract the attention of a young director with aspirations
to independence and originality.
For Kubrick in 1950 was determined to take the plunge and become a
film-maker. He spent his leisure hours (and augmented his modest income)
playing chess at the Marshall and Manhattan Clubs and in Washington
Square, proving to be one of the finest experts there. He would put his
strategic gifts to the test by changing boards at nightfall: "If you made
the switch the right way you could get a table in the shade during the day
and one nearer the fountain under the lights, at night." This he confided
to a physicist, Jeremy Bernstein, who visited him on the set of 2001: a
chess enthusiast himself, the scientist claimed that he always won every
fifth game. Intrigued, Kubrick challenged him. They played twenty-five
games together, Bernstein gathering valuable information for an article by
drawing Kubrick out during the breaks.
It was through meeting a former school friend, Alexander Singer (a future
director himself), that he was given his first chance to direct a film.
Singer worked as office boy at March of Time (a famous newsreel company)
and had discovered that his employers would spend 40,000 dollars on films
lasting only eight or nine minutes Kubrick and he decided to make the same
kind of film for a tenth of the cost. The subject of their first
documentary was the middleweight boxer Walter Cartier, on whom Kubrick had
already done a photo-feature for Look entitled "Prizefighter." The result
was a 35mm film, Day of the Fight, whose musical score was written by
another friend, Gerald Fried (subsequently a collaborator on Kubrick's
early features, then a notable Hollywood composer.) Kubrick endeavored to
sell the film, but was offered less than its cost price of 3900 dollars.
When March of Time went into liquidation, RKO bought the documentary for a
derisory sum (one hundred dollars more than its production cost), but
offered an advance of 1500 dollars on a second documentary, The Flying
Padre. After the violence of sport, this gave Kubrick a chance to deal
with another of his favorite subjects, aviation: the film centered on a
priest in New York who used to fly from one parish to another in a Piper
Cub. Having recovered his costs, Kubrick decided in 1953 to direct his
first feature and resigned from Look. He was encouraged by Joseph Burstyn,
a New York distributor and exhibitor who was one of the first to introduce
the idea of "art-house cinemas" in the United States at a time when
European and independent films were impossible to see there. Kubrick
scraped together 9000 dollars, borrowing from family and friends, in
particular from his father and his uncle, Martin Perveler. He commissioned
a screenplay from one of his poet friends in Greenwich Village, Howard
Sackler (later to the author of The Great White Hope) and set off to
film Fear and Desire in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, as
the severe New York winter precluded any exterior shooting on the East
Coast. The crew consisted of three Mexican workers to transport the
equipment, a few friends and his wife Toba. Kubrick was director, lighting
cameraman, and editor. For twenty-five dollars a day he rented a Mitchell
camera, whose owner taught him to use it. But post-synchronization
expenses amounted to three times the shooting costs and the film failed to
make its money back.
Refused by all the major studios, it was finally distributed by Joseph
Burstyn, who screened it at one of his cinemas, the Guild Theater in New
York. Fear and Desire garnered critical attention, which encouraged
Kubrick to direct a second film -- adopting the same means of financing,
with 40,000 dollars put up mostly by Morris Bousel, a Bronx chemist to
whom he was related. Killer's Kiss was shot in 1954 in the streets of
New York, edited and mixed over a period of ten months and featured his
second wife, Ruth Sobotka, who played the role of a dancer in one brief
sequence. Though for the critics it confirmed the young director's
importance, it failed to recover its costs.
A meeting with James B. Harris gave new impetus to Kubrick's career.
Alexander Singer had known Harris in the Signal Corps where he was making
training films for the Korean War. The son of the owner of Flamingo Films,
a cinema and television distribution company, he had hopes of becoming a
producer and was on the lookout for a talented director. He made contact
with Kubrick through their mutual friend Singer; and, after seeing
Killer's Kiss, decided to give him his chance. They were both twenty-six
when they co-founded Harris-Kubrick Pictures. Together they produced The
Killing in 1956. Though appreciative of Kubrick's abilities, the
distribution company, United Artists, agreed to take over most of the
budget (its investment amounted to 200,000 dollars) only after receiving a
completed screenplay and the assurance that some well-known actor would be
cast -- in this case Sterling Hayden, who had confidence in the young
film-maker.
The Killing attracted the attention of Dore Schary, head of production
at MGM, who invited Harris and Kubrick to select a subject from one of the
novels in which the studio owned the rights. Kubrick and Calder Willingham
wrote a screenplay based on Stefan Zweig's The Burning Secret, but the
project aborted when Schary was dismissed. After Paths of Glory, (1957),
also produced by Harris and filmed in Munich, they announced several
projects for which scripts were written but never filmed: "The German
Lieutenant," a World War II story by Richard Adam, "I Stole 16,000,000
Dollars," the autobiography of a former safecracker, Herbert Emerson
Wilson; "The 7th Virginia Cavalry Raider," which recounted the adventures
of a Confederate Cavalry officer, John Singleton Mosby, during the Civil War,
with Gregory Peck slated for the leading role. During this same period,
Kubrick spent six months preparing One Eyed Jacks, for and with Marlon
Brando, but the actor finally decided to direct it himself.
In 1960 the producer of Spartacus, Kirk Douglas (also the star of Paths
of Glory), asked Kubrick after one-week's shooting to replace Anthony
Mann, with whom he had serious disagreements (Mann had directed the
opening sequence and prepared the gladiatorial bouts). However remarkable
his achievement, Spartacus is an exception in Kubrick's oeuvre: he did
not contribute to the screenplay (as he invariably does), had no control
over casting, and so simply had to accommodate himself to a project which
he had not initiated.
He once more collaborated with James B. Harris on Lolita. Because of the
exertion of pressure by various leagues of decency and the possibility of
easier financing, Kubrick shot the film in Britain, then settled there for
good. The interest aroused by an adaptation of Nabokov's novel placed him
in a strong bargaining position, and he signed an agreement with MGM which
would henceforth guarantee him real financial independence. After Lolita
he and Harris separated, the latter branching out as a director ("The
Bedford Incident"). Thanks to the commercial success of Lolita, it was
Kubrick himself who produced his subsequent films, Dr. Strangelove
(1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1972),
Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980), five unique works, all of
them bearing the stamp of a single man who had mapped out a private,
artificial space for himself in which to pursue his preoccupations. In the
sixties and seventies, Kubrick enjoyed absolute security, the product of a
hard-won independence.
Free to choose his projects, supervising each stage of their creation, he
is able to make whatever films he pleases. He has often been compared to
Orson Welles, and indeed there are parallels in their independence of
character, moral preoccupations, extraordinary visual invention and
showmanship. As their careers developed, however, they could scarcely be
more different. Both of these young prodigies turned to film direction at
the age of twenty-five. But Welles began at the very top of the pyramid --
Hollywood and its huge technical crews -- and was offered carte blanche on
his first film, Citizen Kane, without the least interference from the
studio; whereas Kubrick directed his first film on a tiny budget. Yet,
never having had economic control of his films, Welles has always been at
the mercy of his producers. Kubrick's strength derives from his
realisation that if the film-maker is not in charge of every element of
his product -- from the original rights via the screenplay down to the
advertising campaign that will launch his film and the very cinemas in
which it will be screened -- three or four years' work may go for nothing.
But Kubrick appeared on the film scene ten years after Welles, and in the
decade beginning in 1950 significant changes took place which he, unlike
his brilliant precursor, was able to turn to his advantage. The fifties
marked the decline of the hierarchical, all-powerful major studios,
outside of which nothing could be achieved in Hollywood. The growing
popularity of television, coupled with the movement of urban populations
away from the inner cities, would deprive the cinema of its regular
audience. In order to regain it, the studios sought out younger talents
bursting with new ideas (the generation which started in television:
Frankenheimer, Lumet, Ritt, Mulligan, Penn), while according a greater
degree of independence to its most prestigious directors who now became
their own producers (Hitchcock, Wilder, Kazan, Preminger, Mankiewicz,
etc.) Making The Killing, which would be distributed by United Artists,
allowed Kubrick to step into this breach. His case is both unique and
exemplary, however, and may be compared rather to the future French New
Wave (Killer's Kiss, shot in 1954 in the New York streets, predated A
Bout de Souffle by six years). Unlike his confreres, Kubrick was not the
product of TV, the theatre, or film; nor had he ever been an assistant
director, producer, or actor. He was an independent who learned everything
on the spot, starting out with whatever means were available and ending up
with absolute control over highly sophisticated technical equipment.
He has never really been absorbed into a system on which he is
nevertheless financially dependent; jealous of his autonomy, juggling with
millions of dollars, he probably enjoys greater freedom now than in the
straitened circumstances in which he started his career. And today all his
efforts are channelled into preserving the same autonomy in his films
which he had in his first films so that, instead of becoming the victim of
the means at his disposal, he can on the contrary make them serve his
purpose, one which has never changed: self-expression. This is how he
summed up his personal experience: "The best education in film is to make
one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by
himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the
things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I'm doing now
as a director and producer. There are a lot of non-creative aspects to
film which have to be overcome and you will experience them all when you
make even the simplest film: business, organization, taxes, etc...It is
rare to be able to have an uncluttered artistic environment when you make
a film and being able to accept this is essential.
"The point to stress is that anyone seriously interested in making a film
should find as much money as he can and quickly go out and do it."
There is no doubt that Kubrick's ideas were confirmed by his period in
Hollywood. The years spent there waiting for the go-ahead from MGM on "The
Burning Secret," as well as on his other projects, made him suspicious of
production companies which kept directors in a permanent state of
inactivity. Similarly, the filming of Spartacus -- on which, as he
himself phrased it, he was just a "hired hand" -- could only make him more
determined that it should never happen again. In fact, it was after
Spartacus -- whose commercial success, the first for him of such a
magnitude, helped him to gain his independence -- that he opted
definitively to work in London. It is as if his geographical separation
from the United States might henceforth be a metaphor for the distance
which he was determined to keep between himself and the mecca of cinema.
Everyone knows how exacting Kubrick can be, how he insists on being in sole
command of a film from its preparation and shooting to the editing process.
"Stanley is an extremely difficult and talented person. We developed an
extremely close relationship and as a result I had to live almost
completely on tranquillizers", remarked one of his set designers, Ken Adam.
And Arthur C. Clarke, the scenarist of 2001, added, "Every time I
get through a session with Stanley, I have to go lie down." In effect,
Kubrick submits his scenarists (Jim Thompson, Calder Willingham, Vladimir
Nabokov, Terry Southern and Arthur C. Clarke) to a gruelling work schedule
in which he himself actively participates (he wrote A Clockwork
Orange and Barry Lyndon on his own), devoting between six months
and a year to the preparation of the script. But his view of screenplays
remains pragmatic: "Thinking of the visual conception of a scene at script
stage can be a trap that straitjackets the scene. I find it more
profitable just to try to get the most interesting and truthful business
going to support the scene and then see if there's a way to make it
interesting photographically. There's nothing worse than arbitrarily
setting up some sort of visual thing that really doesn't belong as part of
the scene."
Kubrick has no interest in theories and, like all American directors, gives
prominence to his actors. Shooting a film is the natural extension of
writing it and actors are the essential means by which a director can give
flesh to his vision. "Writers tend to approach the creation of drama too
much in terms of words, failing to realize that the greatest force they
have is the mood and feeling they can produce in the audience through the
actor. They tend to see the actor grudgingly as someone likely to ruin
what they have written rather than seeing that the actor is in every sense
their medium." James Mason, Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor and Kirk
Douglas have all recognized Kubrick as a great director of actors, who is
willing to spend his 'breaks' in lengthy discussions with them. Much has
been written about the number of takes which he requires for each shot in
his search for perfection; but none of his actors has ever questioned the
merits of this method, however much he might have suffered from it. As
Lady Lyndon's spiritual adviser, Murray Melvin recalls having played one
scene fifty times. "I knew he had seen something I had done. But because
he was a good director he wouldn't tell me what it was. Because if someone
tells you you've done a good bit, then you know it and put it in
parentheses and kill it." Jack Nicholson adds, "Stanley's demanding.
He'll do a scene fifty times and you have to be good to do that. There are
many ways to walk into a room, order breakfast or be frightened to death in
a closet. Stanley's approach is: how can we do it better than it's ever
been done before? It's a big challenge. A lot of actors give him what he
wants. If you don't he'll beat it out of you -- with a velvet glove, of
course." Malcolm McDowell has spoken of the long discussions he had with
Kubrick about his character, emphasizing the degree to which the director,
far from browbeating the actor, leaves him free to invent gestures and
suggest variations: notion of using 'Singin' in the Rain' to accompany one
of A Clockwork Orange's most violent sequences. "This is why Stanley is
such a great director. He can create an atmosphere where you're not
inhibited in the least. You'll do anything. Try it out. Experiment.
Stanley gives you freedom and he is the most marvellous audience. I used
to see him behind the camera with the handkerchief stuffed in his mouth
because he was laughing so much. It gave me enormous confidence." Anthony
Harvey, who edited Lolita and Dr.Strangelove, has noted how Kubrick would
adjust the editing to the performances: "If an actor gives something
terribly exciting in terms of performance, I think it is important to stay
on his face, even though the conventional thing is to cut every so often to
the person he is talking to. I think the audience can imagine the other
character's reactions for themselves. There was a scene in Lolita where
Sue Lyon is talking to James Mason and they are alone in the room: she was
so extraordinary that we remained on her for the entire scene without
cutting to him at all." The shooting script of Dr.Strangelove, though
regarded by Harvey as the most brilliant and most perfectly constructed he
had ever read, was also modified at the editing stage. Once the film had
been shot, they realised that the rhythm was not sufficiently varied and
the tension did not develop properly. They therefore decided to delay each
change of scene in order to gain clarity and sustain interest.
For Kubrick to maintain such autocratic control over the work in hand, he
needs total isolation. Pursuing his Pascalian reflections on the infinity
of space during 2001, he cloistered himself in a private protected
estate far removed from any distractions. He lives in a country house
about twenty miles from London with his third wife, the former German
actress Susanne Christian (who played the cafe singer in Paths of
Glory and is now a well known painter), his three daughters and lots of
cats and dogs. There he leads a real family existence, with everyone
interested in what everyone else is doing and he only very occasionally
goes up to town. He travels as rarely as possible, forbids his chauffeur
to drive faster than 40 miles an hour, and while filming 2001 wore
his safety helmet rather more often than was necessary. His clothes are
famous for their simplicity (baggy trousers, open-necked shirt and anorak
-- "a balloon vendor," his wife says), and his working-day meals for their
frugality -- he has no time to waste.
For his whole life seems to be a race against the clock, a battle against
the relentless passage of time. He has, for example, turned part of his
garage into an editing room so that he can continue working at home; he has
had a 35mm projection room installed in which, with voracious curiosity, he
has the latest films screened for him; and he communicates essentially by
telephone, telex, video, tapes and brief memos. He employs an entourage of
technicians, secretaries and assistants to form an empire within the vaster
empire of the company which distributes his work, but from which this
parallel power allows him to retain his independence. There is no
affectation in such an attitude (social standing means nothing to him and
he has no interest in acquiring it; money serves exclusively to guarantee
him independence): wholly absorbed in his work, he is not the kind of
person to make capital out of his inaccessibility. When, on the release of
a film, he agrees to be interviewed by a few critics, he does so with good
grace and modesty. I observed, on the occasions we met, how measured and
methodical were his replies to my questions, his obvious concern being to
get down to essentials without either showing off or spouting paradoxes.
His features are alert and extraordinarily intense, their authority
accentuated by his beard and dark, l spoken, with a crisp, surprisingly
youthful voice, alternately serious and humorous in tone. Later, he will
insist on checking each sentence entrusted to the tape recorder. What
could be more natural, given that so many remarks are distorted then quoted
again and discussed without the speaker having any further say in the
matter? His sole contact with the press, then, takes place every four or
five years. A chauffeur drives the chosen few (Kubrick would be happy to
arrange more of these meetings, but his other activities make it
impossible...) to a roadside pub near the director's home or to his
office, or even to the editing room piled high with cans of film,
newspapers, files and card indexes, like some enormous artist's loft in
Montparnasse or Greenwich Village where this 'eternal student' can work
away in privacy.
Since Kubrick sees only those who may, in one way or another, be of
assistance to the career of his films, his principal concern he has been
spared the increasingly frequent globe trotting to which his less fortunate
colleagues have to resign themselves in order to launch their films,
repeating the same remarks over and over again (how they must envy him!).
He prefers to prepare a project, collect material for it over a period of
months, even years, pore over books and magazines with the systematic
curiosity of an autodidact, monitor the seating capacity and average
takings of cinemas in each foreign capital or the design and deployment of
posters or even the distance between seats and screen at press shows, not
to mention the size of newspaper ads and the rates of currency exchange.
He also has the subtitles of every foreign version of his films completely
re-translated into English to make certain that nothing crucial has been
omitted, supervises all dubbed versions, and checked out the quality of the
seven hundred prints of The Shining which were released the same day
in the United States.
He may interrupt the interview to ask you about some technical detail or
plot point of a film which he has never seen. Alexander Walker, the critic
who has written about him best, described how on a single evening in
Kubrick's company the conversation ranged over an incredible variety of
subjects, all of which required his close attention. "An evening's
conversation with him has covered such areas as optical perception in
relation to man's survival; the phenomenon of phosphene; German coastal gun
emplacements in Normandy; compromised safety margins in commercial flying;
Dr Goebbels' role as a pioneer film publicist; the Right's inability to
produce dialecticians to match the Left's; the Legion of Decency's
pressures during the making of Lolita; S.A.M.-3 missiles in the
Arab-Israeli conflict; Irish politics and the possibility of similarities
in the voice prints of demagogues; and, of course, chess."
We have become too accustomed to the romantic image of the artist as
someone creating in an ivory tower not to entertain doubts about such
indefatigable attention to economic, technical or administrative questions.
But in Kubrick's case one can draw no strict line between his work and this
kind of super-technician's existence. Some film-makers find their
inspiration in the contemplation of nature, others from the study of news
items, still others in constant contact with the world at large. Kubrick's
films reflect his perfectionism, his inordinate taste for technology, his
fascination with diagrams and statistics, but also his fear of any flaw in
a totally programmed system, of an excessive dependence on machines. It
should be understood that the power which Stanley Kubrick has acquired
within the film industry (he not only has the right to the final cut -- that
goes without saying; but he also, in the case of Barry Lyndon and
The Shining, received millions of dollars from Warners, the distributors,
without being obliged to screen either film to the studio heads more than
ten days in advance of their release date) he means to exploit solely in
furtherance of his work. Unlike Coppola, who has extended his empire to
include real estate, newspapers and distribution, Kubrick's only concern is
an artistic one. At the centre of the extraordinary organization which he
has created, he remains as much a craftsman writing, photographing,
directing and editing his films as the young amateur who started out in the
streets of New York if now with infinitely greater means at his disposal.
And the painstaking care he brings to the release of his films simply
reflects his concern to see them presented in the best possible conditions
without their being compromised by a bad print, faulty projection or flat
dubbing. Kubrick, who in his youth sensed the arrival of TV as a dangerous
competitor, has undoubtedly understood that, if the cinema is to compete
with the small screen, it must make each film an 'event' displayed to
advantage in technically perfect conditions.
Thus his career has been guided by logic and lucidity, since they alone can
guarantee his freedom vis-a-vis a system which he has succeeded in beating
at its own game.
For if the major studios MGM and Warners have for twenty years given him
carte blanche on his most unconventional projects and most extravagant
budgets, it is because he has enjoyed an unbroken string of commercial
successes, with the exception perhaps of Barry Lyndon (even though
that too, in the long term, should prove profitable). Of course, Dr.
Strangelove's takings (5 million dollars to the United States
distributor), Barry Lyndon's 10 million, A Clockwork Orange's
15 million and 2001's 25 million cannot compare, even if one takes
inflation into account, with Star Wars' 175 million, Jaws'
135 million and the 85 million each of The Exorcist and The
Godfather. But they represent an undeniable and enduring financial
success for what are exceptionally personal works, blockbuster 'auteur
films', projects so much riskier and more original than those of
Hollywood's Movie Brats (who venerate Kubrick no less for his independence
than for the films themselves).
The director of 2001 appears to have mastered the subtle game of art
and finance that was the downfall of his celebrated predecessors. I refer
to those powerful and ambitious artists who seem to surface every ten years
in Hollywood to shake it up, rebel against its conventions and revitalise
its genres. Griffith at the beginning of the century, Stroheim in the
twenties, Sternberg in the thirties, Welles in the forties, Kazan in the
fifties, Kubrick in the sixties and Altman in the seventies. In the past,
each of them found himself virtually forced into retirement or exile .
Orson Welles (a man not given to fulsome praise) recognized this lineage
when he remarked in 1965: "Among the younger generation Kubrick strikes me
as a giant." With Griffith Kubrick shares a penchant for super-productions
(2001 is his Intolerance, Barry Lyndon his Birth of a
Nation) and for the primacy of the image; with Stroheim the relentless
search for the telling detail and a taste for novelistic length (his dream
of a film lasting twenty hours and the 'Greed in high society'
aspect of Barry Lyndon); with Sternberg the fusion of visual
invention with detached irony; with Welles the influence of expressionism,
the sense of deep focus and mobile camerawork; and with Kazan the pleasure
of letting the actor contribute by drawing out what is most deeply rooted
in him.
If the general public has had no difficulty appreciating such a rebel and
individualist, his relations with the critics have always been ambiguous --
at least since Lolita, which is to say for the last twenty years after they
had been virtually unanimous in their praise of his first features, The
Killing and Paths of Glory. With hindsight, the vast majority
of critics have acknowledged his importance. When in 1978 the Cinematheque
royale in Belgium polled 200 international specialists (film-makers,
critics, historians, etc.) on the most important films in the history of
the American cinema, Kubrick's name was cited 138 times, preceding that of
every other post-war director and figuring in sixteenth place. In the same
year, 300 readers of the French magazine L'Avant-scene du cinema
established their ideal film Pantheon and placed 2001 at the top of
their list ahead of Citizen Kane, Les Enfants du Paradis, Modern Times
and Battleship Potemkin. Finally, at the end of the seventies, the
Parisian weekly Les Nouvelles litteraires questioned about forty
well known personalities on what they considered the outstanding films of
the preceding decade: both A Clockwork Orange and Barry
Lyndon were listed, with Kubrick and Fellini coming out on top.
But such a consensus is deceptive, as the admiration which it appears to
reflect is scarcely borne out by the reception accorded his films on their
initial release, a reception which their subsequent prestige has consigned
to oblivion. Who now remembers the firing squad directed at 2001: A
Space Odyssey by New York's 'establishment': "It's a monumentally
unimaginative movie" (Pauline Kael, Harper's magazine); "A major
disappointment" (Stanley Kaufman, The New Republic); "Incredibly
boring" (Renata Adler, 'The New York Times'); "A disaster" (Andrew Sarris,
The Village Voice)? Variety, the American show business
bible, is the most reliable barometer of the profession's suspicion of any
unique, unconventional artist. It could hardly have foreseen 2001's
enormous success when it wrote prior to its release: "2001 is not a
cinematic landmark. It compares with but does not best, previous efforts
at film science-fiction; lacking the humanity of Forbidden Planet,
the imagination of Things to Come and the simplicity of Of Stars
and Men. It actually belongs to the technically slick group previously
dominated by George Pal and the Japanese," and, as the ultimate criticism,
"Film costs too much for so personal a film." Seven years later, writing
of Barry Lyndon, it noted "The point which seems to be made is that
some people are hustlers, a few succeed, life goes on, the sun still comes
up in the East. Well, we knew all that walking in" (17 December 1975). As
for The Shining, it was demolished in almost parodic fashion, with
Variety complaining above all that Warners "not having learned its
lesson with Barry Lyndon was silly enough to let him do it" (28 May
1980).
The reaction of the Hollywood community at Oscar time perfectly illustrates
the ambivalence of Kubrick's status. Because of his ambition and
commercial success they are obliged to recognize him, but his refusal to
become one of the 'family' and the distance which he maintains from
Hollywood have wrecked his chances of ever being honoured Nominated Best
Director for four films in succession (Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon), he shares with Charlie Chaplin, Josef von
Sternberg, Orson Welles and Robert Altman (rebels, all of them!), but also
with Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch, the
unique distinction of never once having received an Academy Award for Best
Direction.
The explanation for his equivocal position vis-a-vis critics and film
people lies in the very nature and personality of his art. Disturbing both
stylistically and thematically, refusing ever to do what is expected of him
though sometimes infiltrating traditional cinematic genres (the war movie,
science fiction, horror), ceaselessly experimenting yet prepared to play
the commercial game, preferring spectacle and fantasy to moral complacency
and philosophical certitudes, Stanley Kubrick, as an intellectual and an
artist, has contrived to win over the public without sacrificing any of his
ambitions. Which is surely because as a visionary film-maker bringing
personal obsessions to life on the screen of his fantasy, he has been able
to apprehend the underlying tensions of his period and tap its collective
unconscious.
Excerpted from the book "Kubrick" by Michel Ciment (translated from the
French by Gilbert Adair), Copyright ©1982 Michel Ciment, All Rights
ReservedMilestones
Standards
The essays above were published in the early
1980's; since that time, Kubrick has gone on to finish or to prepare three
more features: the Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket, and the erotic
thriller Eyes Wide Shut. In
1997 he received the D.W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement from The
Directors Guild of America. Mr. Kubrick passed away Sunday morning, March
7th, 1999, at his home in St. Albans, UK.