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[[image:Stanley_Kubrick.jpg|right|frame|Stanley Kubrick in the late 1990s.]] |
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subject_name=Stanley Kubrick | |
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image_caption=American filmmaker | |
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quotation="I would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself." | |
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date_of_birth=[[26 July]] [[1928]] | |
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place_of_birth=[[New York City]], [[U.S.A.]] | |
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date_of_death=[[7 March]] [[1999]] | |
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place_of_death=[[Hertfordshire]], [[England]] |
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'''Stanley Kubrick''' ([[July 26]], [[1928]] - [[March 7]], [[1999]]) was a [[Jew|Jewish]]-[[United States|American]] [[film directors|film director]] born in [[The Bronx]], [[New York City]] who lived most of his life in [[England]]. His films are highly acclaimed for their technical perfection and deep symbolism. As a director he was legendary for relentless perfectionism. Several of his films were extremely controversial upon release for their supposed thematic repugnance and stark portrayal of sexuality and violence. |
'''Stanley Kubrick''' ([[July 26]], [[1928]] - [[March 7]], [[1999]]) was a [[Jew|Jewish]]-[[United States|American]] [[film directors|film director]] born in [[The Bronx]], [[New York City]] who lived most of his life in [[England]]. His films are highly acclaimed for their technical perfection and deep symbolism. As a director he was legendary for relentless perfectionism. Several of his films were extremely controversial upon release for their supposed thematic repugnance and stark portrayal of sexuality and violence. |
Revision as of 19:49, 21 March 2005
Stanley Kubrick |
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Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 - March 7, 1999) was a Jewish-American film director born in The Bronx, New York City who lived most of his life in England. His films are highly acclaimed for their technical perfection and deep symbolism. As a director he was legendary for relentless perfectionism. Several of his films were extremely controversial upon release for their supposed thematic repugnance and stark portrayal of sexuality and violence.
Explaining his theory of the role of director, Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis: "A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it's the director's job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible." Describing his aesthetic approach to Michel Ciment, he said "I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else... Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality."
Early career
Kubrick started his career as a photographer. He entered the field by selling amateur photos to New York's Look magazine, then was hired by the magazine as a full-time photographer. An avid moviegoer, Kubrick was convinced he could make better films than he saw, and he set to prove his claim right. His first feature films, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer's Kiss, (1955) caught the attention of Hollywood, and he won major acclaim for the classic film noir The Killing (1956) before making the award-winning World War I drama Paths of Glory (1957). Kubrick's cinematic style began to develop in these pictures with the introduction of techniques that were to become his trademarks, such as long takes and extensive tracking shots.
During the production of the Hollywood epic Spartacus (1960), creative differences arose between Kuberick and some of the cast (especially the film's producer and star Kirk Douglas) and crew. Kubrick was frustrated that he did not have total creative control over the film, a result of having been selected as the second director after Anthony Mann dropped out for similar creative differences. Although well-received by critics and moviegoers, the battles waged over Spartacus convinced Kubrick that he would never work within the Hollywood system again and he remained an outsider to the end of his life. Financially, however, Kubrick would prove uniquely successful in harnessing Hollywood's resources for his own ends even as he brazenly defied its conventions.
The first major films
Kubrick moved to Britain in the early 1960s to make an adaptation of Lolita, and he lived there for the rest of his life. He owned and resided at Childwickbury Manor in the district of St Albans in the south of England. Much of the filming of his later movies involved careful reproduction of foreign locations in England, eg. scenes in the Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket were filmed at Beckton Gasworks.
Lolita (1962) would cause Kubrick's first major controversy. He worked with the book's author, Vladimir Nabokov, to produce a screenplay that would allow the book to be filmed without being banned from theaters worldwide. It was with Lolita that he discovered the talent of Peter Sellers. Kubrick asked Sellers to play four roles simultaneously in his next film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and Sellers accepted (though he eventually only played three of those roles).
Kubrick's decision to film a Cold War thriller as a jet-black comedy was a daring risk, one that paid off handsomely for both himself and Columbia Pictures. By belittling the sacrosanct norms of the political culture as the squabbling of intellectual children, Strangelove foreshadowed the great cultural upheavals of the late 1960s as well as Kubrick's next project.
Kubrick the auteur
Kubrick's great success with Strangelove persuaded the studios that he was an auteur who could be trusted to deliver popular films despite his unusual ideas. Kubrick thus entered into a fruitful relationship with Warner Brothers, who gave him almost complete artistic freedom on all his ensuing projects.
Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey (photographed in single-film MGM Camera 65/Super Panavision 70 Cinerama). Kubrick collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke, adapting parts of Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" (Clarke also wrote a novelization of the screenplay, which was released alongside the film). The film was groundbreaking in its use of visual effects, which Kubrick himself supervised. It was also notable for its use of classical music (including Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube). 2001 represented a radical departure from both Kubrick's previous films and the mainstream Hollywood paradigm. While Kubrick would never again push the experimental envelope quite so hard, paradoxically Kubrick would win a uniquely total creative control from Hollywood by succeeding with easily the most "difficult" film ever to win such a wide release. Kubrick and 2001 are sometimes associated with the Hippie Counterculture due to the final, abstracted chapter of the film; the marketing campaign of 2001 certainly exploited this idea by calling the film "the ultimate trip." Critics were initially divided in their response to the film, but it was a huge popular success. As Clarke put it in 1972, "As for [those] who still don't like it, that's their problem, not ours. Stanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank."
His next film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), was darker in tone than 2001 (and originally released with an "X" rating in the US). The film was based on Anthony Burgess's novel about a criminal who undergoes treatment to be 'cured' of violent urges; the novel asks questions about how society defines morality. Its depictions of teenage gangs committing acts of rape and violence made the film controversial, and the controversy increased when copycat acts were committed by criminals wearing the costumes of the film's characters. Kubrick was apparently genuinely perplexed by critics who said he was glorifying violence. When he received death threats targeting himself and his family, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain, with the result that the film was not shown again in Britain until its rerelease in 2000, after his death.
Kubrick's next project was to be an epic biopic of Napoleon. Explaining his interest in Napoleon to interviewer Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said "he fascinates me. His life has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler." He did a great deal of research and wrote a preliminary screenplay, but ultimately the project was cancelled due to the release of Waterloo, a movie starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon. Instead, Kubrick decided to adapt William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel about an 18th century gambler and fortune hunter. He told an interviewer, "At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film... as soon as I read Barry Lyndon I became very excited about it." It would be Kubrick's least appreciated post-Strangelove film. Wildly overbudget and two years in filming, the film also effectively nullified the career of then-superstar Ryan O'Neal. Despite a number of passionate defenders, Barry Lyndon (1975) was considered by many critics to be cold, slow-moving, and lifeless. More than Kubrick's other films, it has gained acclaim with time.
Kubrick's filmmaking pace slowed considerably after the release of Barry Lyndon. He made only three more films in the next twenty-five years; but his reputation and his "mystique" were such that the premiere of each new Stanley Kubrick film was an event hailed by audiences worldwide.
The Shining (an 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) and Full Metal Jacket (one of several films in the 1980s which dealt with the Vietnam War) did not reach the heights of Dr. Strangelove and 2001 in the eyes of many critics, though they are still seen as exceptional examples of their genres, and they contain many Kubrickian moments.
After Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick spent years planning a film entitled A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, but he abandoned the project due to the limited special effects technology of the time, and eventually chose to film Eyes Wide Shut instead. Released in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple caught up in a sexual odyssey (Cruise and Kidman were married at the time). The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's novella, Traumnovelle.
Just a few days after completing the editing of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick died from a heart attack, and was interred in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England.
Trivia
- One of the many popular myths about Kubrick is that he was a chess grandmaster. He was not, although by all accounts he was a highly skilled player; indeed, it has often been noted that he approached his projects from the point of view of a chess strategist. On occasion, Kubrick himself was known to recall how, as a young director, he would earn enough money to feed himself by hustling chess games for quarters in Manhattan's Washington Square.
- He is the voice of Murphy, the soldier on the other end of the radio communication, in Full Metal Jacket.
- The only female character in Paths of Glory, the beautiful singer in the final scene, became Christiane Kubrick a year or two after starring in the film.
- Kubrick often had an antagonistic relationship with the writers with whom he collaborated. Arthur C. Clarke was upset that Kubrick's actions caused the delay of the publication of his novel "2001: A Space Odyssey" so that it appeared the book was a novelization of the film rather that the film an adaptation of the book as the pair had agreed. Anthony Burgess was appalled that he was called on to defend "A Clockwork Orange" when Kubrick refused to as the film contradicted the message of his novel. Stephen King was so upset by Kubrick's deviations from his novel that he commissioned a new film version of The Shining.
- The last occasion on which Kubrick was seen in public was at a performance of "The Blue Room" at the Donmar Warehouse then starring Nicole Kidman.
- Citing contractual obligations to deliver an R-rating, Warner Bros. digitally altered one scene for the American release of Eyes Wide Shut, blocking out images of explicit sexuality.
Unrealized projects
- Over the years, Kubrick worked on a number of projects which did not evolve beyond the script stage. Some of the more well-developed film ideas that were never realized include Napoleon (1969-1971), which was canceled upon the release of Waterloo; Aryan Papers (1988-1991), a Holocaust story postponed because of Schindler's List; and Blue Movie (late 1960s, early 1970s), about a director so highly regarded he is allowed to direct a pornographic movie starring major Hollywood stars. This project was proposed by Terry Southern following their collaboration on Dr. Strangelove and was the basis of his novel lue Movie. For a short time in 1997, it was believed that Kubrick was making his own "blue movie" with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (this later turned out to be Eyes Wide Shut). See also Uncompleted Kubrick films.
- In the year 2001, Steven Spielberg filmed A.I., an uncompleted project that Kubrick had worked on before Eyes Wide Shut. Basing his film on a lengthy treatment by Kubrick, Spielberg clearly directed many scenes to evoke Kubrickian moods, although the sentimentality that prevails throughout the film is alien to Kubrick's aesthetic. The film received a lukewarm response from audiences, and was a box-office disappointment for Spielberg.
Unsubstantiated tabloid rumors
- A popular rumor, started in the mid-1980s, was that Kubrick had not only shot a fan who intruded on his property, but delivered a coup de grâce gunshot to the intruder's face because he had bled on the grass. This was untrue and was intended to irritate Kubrick into giving an interview; he didn't, though he was deeply upset.
Filmography
Early documentary short films
Feature films
- Fear and Desire (1953)
- Killer's Kiss (1955)
- The Killing (1956)
- Paths of Glory (1957)
- Spartacus (1960)
- Lolita (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A Clockwork Orange (1971)
- Barry Lyndon (1975)
- The Shining (1980)
- Full Metal Jacket (1987)
- Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
See also
External links
- Stanley Kubrick at IMDb
- Stanley Kubrick at All Movie Guide
- Visual Memory - The host of an archive of Kubrick-related materials and an extensive FAQ.
- Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide
- archivioKubrick - A large collection of materials. (Mostly in Italian.)
- A 2004 Guardian article by Jon Ronson about Kubrick's home and archives.
- A Stanley Kubrick website by Warner Bros.
- Kubrick interview & photograph list
- Homage to Stanley Kubrick