A French general has three of his own men shot for cowardice after an impossible attack (1957)
Paths of Glory — banned in France for years; Kirk Douglas then hired him for Spartacus.
Film · Hollywood
Stanley Kubrick
1928–1999 · American
American auteur cinema; formalist perfectionism
Stanley Kubrick made only thirteen features in forty-six years, changing genre every time and working with a control that became legendary. A teenage magazine photographer, he moved to England in the early 1960s and never left, running his productions from a Hertfordshire estate. His films are cold, symmetrical and exact, and almost all of them were controversial on release and canonical within a decade.
How to spot them
- ▸One-point perspective: corridors and rooms receding to a dead-centre vanishing point
- ▸The Kubrick stare — a face tilted down, eyes raised into the lens
- ▸Slow zooms, wide-angle Steadicam glides, and classical music used against the image
- ▸A different genre each time: war, science fiction, horror, costume drama, satire
- ▸Notorious numbers of takes, and years of research before a foot of film was exposed
Key films
A war room, a doomsday machine and a pilot riding a bomb down like a rodeo bull (1964)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb — Peter Sellers plays three roles.
A bone thrown into the air becomes a spacecraft, and a computer refuses to open the pod bay doors (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey — his only Academy Award was for its visual effects.
Droogs, milk-plus and a reconditioning treatment with the eyes clamped open (1971)
A Clockwork Orange — from Anthony Burgess; he withdrew it from British cinemas himself in 1973.
An 18th-century Irish adventurer rises and falls, in interiors lit only by candles through lenses built for NASA (1975)
Barry Lyndon — from Thackeray; four Oscars for its craft.
One sentence typed thousands of times in an empty mountain hotel, and twins in a corridor (1980)
The Shining — from Stephen King, who disliked it; an early showcase for the Steadicam.
A Parris Island drill instructor's obscene litany, then a sniper in the ruins of Hue (1987)
Full Metal Jacket — Vietnam recreated in a demolished London gasworks.
A doctor wanders one night through New York and a masked ritual in a country house (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut — with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; he died days after showing the studio his final cut.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in the Bronx on 26 July 1928; he was a staff photographer for Look magazine while still a teenager
- •He took over Spartacus (1960) after Kirk Douglas sacked Anthony Mann, but had no creative control and later disowned it
- •His single Academy Award was for Best Visual Effects, for 2001; he was nominated four times for Best Director and never won
- •He asked Warner Bros. to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from British distribution in 1973 after copycat claims and threats to his family; it was not shown again in Britain until 2000
- •He lived and worked at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire from 1978, and is buried there; he died on 7 March 1999
- •The 2001 Star Gate sequence used slit-scan photography devised by Douglas Trumbull
- •Shelley Duvall's scene with the baseball bat in The Shining is often cited as the most takes for a single scene in a feature film
- •Lolita (1962) was shot in England for censorship reasons, with James Mason and Peter Sellers
- •Steven Spielberg directed A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) from the project Kubrick had developed for decades
- •A long-planned film about Napoleon was never made; its research archive is famous in its own right
Drill it — 10 cards
1 / 10new card
Sources
- Senses of Cinema — Great Directors: Stanley Kubrick
- Vincent LoBrutto — Stanley Kubrick: A Biography