Stanley kubrick

Stanley Kubrick (Manhattan, New York, July 26, 1928-St Albans, United Kingdom, March 7, 1999) was a British-born American film director, screenwriter, producer, and photographer.. Considered by many to be one of the most influential filmmakers of the XX century, he was noted for both his technical precision and remarkable stylization. and the profound symbolic charge of his films.

He began working in film in 1951. That year his first project was released, the short documentary Day of the Fight, which brought him a modest financial profit after being acquired by RKO Pictures. This company also advanced him money for his next work, a nine-minute documentary called Flying Padre. After his first films, Fear and Desire (1953), The Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), was released Paths of Glory (Paths of Glory, 1957).

After this recording, he directed his first high-budget film, Spartacus (1960), which was awarded four Oscars and raised Kubrick's career to a higher level. After the film—including a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama—Kubrick was given the opportunity to devote himself to another project, 1962's Lolita. The film, starring Sue Lyon and James Mason, drew critical reviews. disparate and sparked numerous controversies due to the hebefic tendencies shown by its male protagonist. However, he was nominated for Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards and at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. Two years later he directed Dr. Strangelove ( Red Telephone? We flew to Moscow , 1963), for which he was nominated for several awards, including several BAFTAs and his first Oscar nomination, in the Best director and adapted script.

In 1968 he reached the pinnacle of his career with 2001: A Space Odyssey, a science fiction film with which he won his only personal Oscar, for special effects design. In addition, the film is considered one of the best in history within its genre. Later, Kubrick directed A Clockwork Orange, one of the most controversial films in history, mainly because of its low level of censorship. This is an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Anthony Burgess that shows the character Alex DeLarge -played by Malcolm McDowell-, a sociopathic and charismatic criminal, whose pleasures are classical music, rape and the so-called ultraviolence. The feature film was controversial in several countries, including the United Kingdom. For this reason, Kubrick asked Warner Bros to remove him from the United Kingdom, as he was under a lot of pressure and even received death threats directed at him and his family. In addition, A Clockwork Orange was nominated for four Oscars and Kubrick was nominated for this award, the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for his direction and screenplay.

He later directed Barry Lyndon in 1975, winner of four Oscars; Kubrick lost for Best Director to Miloš Forman for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with Jack Nicholson. This actor starred in Kubrick's next film, The Shining, based on the Stephen King novel. After the film was made, King commented that he disliked Kubrick's version. He also directed Full Metal Jacket (Metal Jacket, 1987) and finally Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Among his thirteen films are classic films such as Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987) or Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Biographical notes and personality

Stanley Kubrick towards 1930 with his father, Jack.

Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928 into a wealthy Jewish family living in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx. He was the firstborn of the marriage formed by Jacob Leonard Kubrick (1902-1985) and Sadie Gertrude Perveler, who also had a girl named Barbara.

Although endowed with an IQ above average, he was never a good student: he was an undisciplined student, he missed half the school days and his grades "were a disaster". own higher education.

Three hobbies marked Stanley's youth and professional career: photography, which he practiced with an SLR camera his parents had given him, music, especially jazz, and chess. In fact, he was only 16 years old when he managed to join the photography department of Look magazine. As for music, his melomania allowed him throughout his career to discuss all aspects related to the soundtrack of his films. And also decisive would have been his fondness for chess, thanks to which he survived during a turbulent period of his life and to which he would honor in some of his films. It is possible that cultivating this game contributed to outlining his professional coldness as a director and the perfectionism that he has always attributed to it. Precisely on this issue, however, the filmmaker was in open disagreement: «Perfectionism: journalists use this word to attack me, and it seems unfair to me. If you try to do something, you try to make it the best it can be. I never waste my time or my money; I just try to do things right."

During his youth, Kubrick frequently attended Loew's Paradise theater and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Also, as a late hobby, he went to see mediocre movies that prompted him to far exceed them. Little by little the idea of abandoning his work in the magazine and dedicating himself to making films was born. When he was still giving interviews, he referred to Max Ophüls and Sergei Eisenstein as his two most influential film references, the first because of his work with the camera and the second because of his editing technique.

Throughout his career he has given numerous interviews and has cited several directors whom he has had as references in his works and in his career as a filmmaker, including Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Charles Chaplin or Fritz Lang.

Regarding his love affairs, Kubrick married his high school sweetheart, Toba Metz, on May 29, 1948. They moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, but divorced three years later. In 1952 he met what would be his second wife, the Austrian-born dancer and stage designer Ruth Sobotka. Together they lived in the East Village, were married in January 1955, and moved to Hollywood in July, where they remained until their divorce in 1957. Kubrick later became involved with actress and dancer Valda Setterfield.

While filming Paths of Glory in Munich in early 1957, Kubrick met German actress Christiane Harlan, who would later land a small (albeit significant) role in the film. They ended up getting married in 1958 and were together for forty years, until the director's death in 1999. In addition to his stepdaughter, they had two daughters together; Anya Renata (born April 6, 1959) and Vivian Vanessa (born August 5, 1960).

In 1961 he moved with his family to the United Kingdom, where he established his permanent residence. It has been speculated that such a decision was due to Kubrick detesting the United States and the mentality of its citizens. However, according to some of his biographers, that is not accurate; what he did not like was the city of Los Angeles and its advertising machine. In fact (after having ruled out other options such as Vancouver or Sydney), he considered moving to New York, but finally decided that, in the long run, the megalopolis would suit him. it would be too harsh, violent and expensive.

Character

Stanley Kubrick in 1949.

One of the people who has delved into the personality of the New York genius has been the journalist and screenwriter Michael Herr, who in his work Kubrick describes their personal and professional relationship. Thus, Herr observes that, although Stanley was somewhat uncomfortable with physical contact, he was naturally affectionate, brotherly in manner and fluent in speech, "melodious even". Among those who praised his treatment was his housekeeper, Betty Compton, who stated, "as long as you didn't patronize him, he was great to work with."

Ambitious, talented and self-confident, he had "a steely brain and big brass balls". Matthew Modine told Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley's biographer: "He is probably the most sincere person I ever met.. […] Beneath that appearance there is a very affectionate, conscientious man, who does not like pain, to see animals or human beings suffer.”

To critics who say he was misogynistic, he reminds them that some women, like Jean Simmons, Susanne Christiane, Sue Lyon, Marisa Berenson, and Nicole Kidman, looked very beautiful in his movies and that, in fact, for some of them" he felt so much respect that he made them as dangerous as any of his male characters."

To those who label him as cold, lacking in humanity, withdrawn from people, attitudes that were attributed to his supposed neuroses, Herr objects that all of them were nothing more than symbols of his purity; that it wasn't so much misanthropy as irreverence. He tended to be somewhat hypochondriac and paranoid, but he wasn't a lunatic. Other negative epithets he's received are: "eccentric, lonely, and misanthropic; crazy, autocratic and dour; cold, manic and arrogant". A certain film critic came to portray him as "[that] bizarre maniac full of phobias and obsessed with controlling everything". Because the psychological sciences at the time of his childhood were not so developed, it was impossible to make a diagnosis that would allow us to know the causes of his peculiar personality. However, some experts have speculated that he may have suffered from Asperger's syndrome or a condition belonging to the autism spectrum disorder.

Ideological position

Although their parents were married according to the Jewish rite, they never tried to instill in their children a religious sense of life. Furthermore, Kubrick would profess an atheistic view of the world throughout his life.

A supporter of capitalism as an economic system, but attached to social justice, for him democracy was no more than "a noble and failed experiment in our evolutionary path", an experiment unfortunately devalued by low instincts, money, the selfishness and stupidity of human beings, so no one better than a "benevolent despot" to rule them.

Art and business

He was a champion of show business. Herr describes it like this:

According to Herr, “He was a good friend and wonderful to work with, but he was a terrible, terrible guy to do business with. His stinginess was proverbial [and he had a] pathological obsession with money." In this sense, Kubrick used to quote the composer Sammy Cahn, who when asked what he considered first, the music or the lyrics, answered: "The check". But, while it is true that Kubrick participated in distribution strategies and was interested in audience profiles to the point of knowing the capacity and collection of hundreds of movie theaters, essentially he was a man who made films for himself. "He was calculating, but his most exact calculations were all artistic."

Death

Mansion of Childwickbury Manor where Stanley Kubrick lived the last years of his life.

On March 7, 1999, four days after a private session for his family and cast for his latest film, Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep; he was 70 years old.

He was buried next to his favorite tree in the grounds of Childwickbury Manor, in Hertfordshire, UK. In his book dedicated to Kubrick, his wife Christiane included a quote from Oscar Wilde that the filmmaker often evoked: "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one remains young."

Five days after his death, the funeral was held at his residence in his memory; The solemn act was attended by barely a hundred people belonging to his closest circle. At the express request of the family, the media were kept one mile (1.6 km) away from the front door.

Career

First projects

Day of the Fight would be his first filming as a thirteen-minute documentary, in 1951, based on a photographic work, made by himself for Look, about the boxer Walter Cartier; he financed it out of his own savings at age twenty-three, learning to use the equipment from the person who rented it to him. The documentary was purchased by RKO for incorporation into the series This is America which was shown at the Paramount Theatre, in New York, giving Kubrick a small financial benefit. RKO itself advanced him money for the following nine-minute documentary called Flying Padre (through which he obtained his pilot's license, although years later he would refuse to continue flying), which narrated the life of a priest who travels by plane from town to town in the state of New Mexico . The last of his documentaries that lasted 30 minutes would be Los sailors ( The Seafarers ), his first work in color by him. By this time Kubrick had already resigned from his job at Look and would dedicate himself fully to the film industry.

Photograph taken by Kubrick, where the streets of Chicago are shown. This would be published by the magazine Look. in 1949.

His first feature film, and his first formal apprenticeship with a camera, was Fear and Desire (1953), which he financed with $13,000 raised from family loans (his uncle, Martin Perveler, invested money in the film on the condition that he be credited as executive producer). The film is about a platoon of soldiers fighting in a nameless land, and it was shown on the art-room circuit as it was a quality experiment. After the film was made, he separated from his first wife, Toba Metz.

The film was poorly successful, and he lost money. The same thing happened with his next job, Killer's Kiss (1955), whose budget amounted to $40,000, half of which they were lost (he would eventually pay back family and friends who had helped him); it is a remarkable thriller about a boxer who meets a gangster's wife and falls in love with her. In the film, Ruth Sobotka, who would be his second wife, appears in the role of the ballerina sister of the protagonist. The film had little means, and did not charge anything. He served as operator, editor, assistant editor, special effects technician, as well as director, and Kubrick's work with black-and-white photography caught the eye of James B. Harris, a producer for NBC.

1956-1960: First stage

In 1956, Kubrick and Harris partnered in a production company called "Harris-Kubrick Pictures", a company that was active until 1964. From this union came Perfect Heist (The Killing; 1956), his first major film, with a budget of $320,000 and a cast of important Hollywood actors, starring Sterling Hayden. Based on a novel by Lionel White, and based on a script by Jim Thompson, Kubrick told the story of a robbery at a racetrack. The use of film time made by Kubrick was an innovation for the time. The film begins to lay the foundations of the director's thinking: the fight of an anti-hero in his confrontation with the world, and his conflictive ending.

The film caught the eye of some Hollywood celebrities including Dore Schary, MGM's head of production. They also included Kirk Douglas, who signed Harris-Kubrick to a five-film deal. The first of these would be Paths of Glory (Paths of Glory; 1957), based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb, which Douglas himself would play as Colonel Dax, in charge of defending his soldiers, accused of cowardice before the enemy, in the framework of the trench warfare of the First World War. And it would also be Kubrick's first polemic, though not the last. The tape's anti-war message meant that in France, whose army the protagonists belonged to, it was banned for decades. The film was shot at the Geiselgasteig studios in Munich, Germany.In the filming of the film he would meet Christiane Susanne Harlan, who appears in the credits as Susanne Christian, who would become his third and last wife.

After the film, Kubrick worked with Marlon Brando in the pre-production of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), although after several months he would be fired due to disagreements with the actor, who ended up directing the film.

1960-1968: Consolidation

In this situation, Douglas found him again, who was looking for a director to replace Anthony Mann at the helm of Espartaco (Spartacus; 1960). Kubrick accepted, knowing that such a high-budget film could boost his career as a director. Although he hardly had a chance to intervene in the script (as he had done before and would do in all his films after), the film marked the end of the blacklists (due to Douglas's strategic interest in reducing the salary of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, in exchange for to put his real name in the credits). The film won four Academy Awards and was a commercial success. Kubrick's career was definitely launched.

Kubrick and Harris managed to extend their contract with Douglas for another three films. Kubrick's artistic and commercial aspirations led him to make Lolita (1962): it was his next work. After arduous negotiations, he convinced Vladimir Nabokov not only to agree to sell the rights to his novel, but also to adapt the script himself, although Kubrick subsequently kept only part of his work. The film was involved in scandal for adapting such a controversial story by the standards of the time, since it tells the story of the seduction of a minor by a mature man, and hence conservative leaders urged not to see the movie. This film tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged divorcee played by James Mason who falls in love with Lolita, a fourteen-year-old pubescent girl (played by sixteen-year-old Sue Lyon, whom Kubrick saw on The Loretta Young Show ), and that to obtain it he is willing to marry the mother of the minor. Actor Peter Sellers finishes composing the cast as the multifaceted Clare Quilty. The film not only focuses on the relationship between Humbert and Lolita, but also has effective doses of humor, an aspect of the film supported by Sellers' trade that was encouraged by the director to improvise. Kubrick again worked from a non-linear narrative, something that did not happen in the book, in order to give the plot more suspense. Kubrick substituted love for the simple lust and desire that the Professor felt for Lolita in Nabokov's novel, thus avoiding as little censorship interference as possible. The budget was $2 million and he made a good profit. Due to financial and legal aspects, as well as censorship issues, filming took place at ABPC studios in England, where Kubrick finally settled permanently, in the county of Hertfordshire. Despite living and working in England, at the beginning due to temporary problems, he never felt like an expatriate; Circumstances kept him there, and he returned to the United States several times a year, almost always by boat.

After the success of Lolita, she allowed herself to take on more risky projects. He parted ways with his partner and his friend Harris to produce his new solo film. So, in the midst of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kubrick would start shooting Dr. Strangelove or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, in 1964. The Spanish title for this film was Dr. Unusual with which he was known in the Spanish-speaking world except in Spain, where it doubled with the title of ¿Teléfono rojo?, we flew to Moscow .

Based on the Peter George novel, Red Alert, which was not a comic tale, but whose tone Kubrick changed for plausibility. Although at first he intended to directly address the novel about the Cold War and the possibility of an atomic conflict, as it was documented he found increasingly hilarious and grotesque aspects of the nuclear strategy of both blocs, so he decided to make a black comedy according to the lightest parts of the book. The British actor Peter Sellers, would be in charge of giving life to three characters in the film, under pressure from Columbia, since they considered him responsible for the success of Lolita; completing the cast Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and Slim Pickens. The script by Terry Southern, Peter George himself and Kubrick is full of gags and sexual allusions, and tells how a fit of madness by General Ripper, played by Hayden, orders several American B-52 intercontinental bombers to attack their targets on Russian soil. with nuclear weapons, causes the much-feared "Mutual Assured Destruction" to come true, as boss Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) seeks to deter him. On the other hand, President Merkin Muffley and Mr. Strangelove (Sellers in both cases) debate with Major Buck Turgidson (Scott) about a possible solution to the problem. Inside a B-52, Major T.J. King Kong (Pickens) has not yet come out of his astonishment along with his crew for the mission entrusted to them. Kubrick hired decorator Ken Adam to carry out the ambitious, ahead-of-the-time settings (the war room, the military base, and the interior of the bomber) at the English Shepperton Studios, using natural lighting in an innovative way to give it greater realism to the staging. The film found a Kubrick fully installed in the English countryside, showing off his obsession with detail based on the resources at his disposal. An example of this is the scenery that recreates the B-52 interior. The US Air Force did not want to collaborate with the director and he had to, based on a photograph in a specialized magazine, and the controls of a B-29, reconstruct the plane's instrument panel with enormous realism, emphasizing the claustrophobic atmosphere of the ship. The original music is commissioned to Laurie Johnson, but two melodies have special relevance, laying the foundations for the use that Kubrick would later give to the music in his tapes: Try a Little Tenderness in an instrumental version in the credits initials accompanying images of planes docked for refueling and Vera Lynn's theme We'll Meet Again, suggested by Sellers, in the final scene. In both cases the themes counterbalance the strength of the images.

1968-1980: Masterpieces

In 1968 Kubrick would reach the zenith of his career with 2001: a space odyssey (2001: A Space Odyssey). The film not only sought to elevate the status of a minor genre at the time, science fiction, which was limited to anthropomorphic aliens and flying saucers, but also to tell a bold parable about the evolution of man: an ellipsis of 4 million years.

The film is built on the basis of a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, The Sentinel, which Kubrick read in 1964 and in that year, together with Clarke, began to build the initial script for the film starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester and Douglas Rain as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer. By 1966 Kubrick had already filmed all the scenes with actors at Shepperton Studios in England. In 1968 the special effects were concluded. The initial budget of $5.5 million rose to $10 million. But it was in the editing room that Kubrick established the biggest changes between this film and its predecessors: it contains only 40 minutes of dialogue for a 141-minute length, besides being the director's first film without any narration. With unprecedented special effects (designed by Kubrick himself and executed and supervised by Douglas Trumbull), and blind self-belief, Kubrick would ultimately make one of the most complex, cutting-edge, and risky films in cinematic history. The story begins with a group of hominids in their struggle for subsistence and their encounter with a monolith and then moves to the future, millions of years ahead, where a man already evolved into Homo sapiens explores the system solar energy in a ship controlled by an omnipresent computer. Kubrick touches on various themes in the film (intelligence, loneliness, death, evolution, immortality, self-reflection, artificial intelligence...) that make the work a continuous reason for reflection, keeping it current in the end.. His special effects and the recreation of space travel continue to be appreciated for his technical fidelity, establishing a before and after in the technological innovation of effects and the genre itself.

Another notable aspect is music, a section where Kubrick has also contributed a lot. He discarded the score originally composed by Alex North, who had provided the music for Spartacus , using the classical compositions he used in the editing room. Among the scores used, in addition to Richard Strauss or Aram Khachaturián, Kubrick widely used the avant-garde music of the Hungarian composer, György Ligeti, greatly boosting his worldwide fame. With this film, Kubrick won his only Oscar in a personal capacity (for design of special effects) and several BAFTA awards, among others.

The script of Kubrick's never-realized project, Napoleon.

The story of Napoleon, a project in which he intended to recreate the life and most important battles fought by the French leader, was a long-cherished dream of Kubrick, who carried out enormous pre-production research in the late 1960s, which finally did not materialize due to its enormous costs: it needed 40,000 soldiers near a city, to accommodate 50,000 people, a suitable place as a battlefield; in addition to its similarities with other films released on those dates Waterloo and War and Peace. Yet he read hundreds of books and prepared the plans meticulously.He was attracted to both his epic and his sex life, which was "worthy of Arthur Schnitzler."

During those years, Kubrick received a gift from Terry Southern: the novel A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess. Kubrick read the book in one go and thought of Malcolm McDowell to play the role of Alex, whom the director compared to Richard III. The story satirically narrates the escapades of Alex, a violent young man whose distractions are rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven, as the film's promotion stated. The "Droogs", the film takes up the language used in the book that used variants of Russian with street English called Nadsat, cause destruction, acts of violence and sexual crimes. But things will get out of control and the Ludovico process will be put into practice to seek to correct the behavior of young Alex. The director scouted locations in England through contemporary architecture magazines and only built three sets at Borehamwood studios: the Korova bar, the prison, and the bathroom in the writer's house. A Clockwork Orange features some technical innovations such as the use of faster lenses, lightweight handheld cameras and Sennheiser Mk. 12, which allowed for no re-recording of dialogue taken from the live scene, as well as the use of new lighting equipment such as Lowell 1000-watt quartz reflectors, which allowed Kubrick to turn the camera in any direction. without worrying about capturing any lighting equipment in the room. The scene with the woman and the cats is a good example.

The music was once again another noteworthy element, due to its avant garde character in the use of electronics to adapt the melodies to the scenes by the composer Wendy Carlos, who recreates the march through synthesizers of the Funeral of Queen Mary, by Henry Purcell in the opening of the film together with the image of the actors, forming a scene of a hypnotic and atmospheric nature. Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Scherzo) is also used as a background for the dance of the embracing statuettes of Jesus Christ and Gioachino Rossini's William Tell Overture for the electronically accelerated orgy in Alex's room. It is even claimed that Kubrick contacted the progressive rock band Pink Floyd to use passages from the song "Atom Heart Mother", but ultimately they did not reach an agreement.

Released in the United States in 1971 and in England in 1972, the film aroused a controversy never before seen in the United Kingdom for a film, around its content and its repercussions on viewers; divided critics, generated public debates in the written press, television and radio as Christian Bugge analyzes in The Clockwork Orange Controversy. To all this was added the fact that the crimes committed, even a murder, at that time, with a lot of attention given by the English press, by young people who apparently replicated scenes from the film or in some cases wore costumes similar to those of the protagonists. This increased the pressure on the debate and led Kubrick, who according to various sources was extremely concerned, to pressure Warner Bros., his new distributor, to cancel any public showing of the film in 1973 in any theater in the UK. This lasted until the year 2000. The film won 7 BAFTA Awards, 2 Golden Globe Awards, 4 Oscar Award nominations, 2 Director Guild of America, among others. Perhaps the most important achievement that Kubrick obtained with this tape was to formally ensure by Warner Bros., through a lucrative contract, total control over his tapes, at a technical and above all artistic level, including distribution. The success at the box office of the film, which on an investment of 2 million dollars was able to earn 40 million, allowed the director to sustain his contract. Kubrick also received about 40% of the profits, for which he created a database of theaters where this type of auteur films had better commercial options.

The pre-production work he had done for Napoleon helped him lay the groundwork for his next production, Barry Lyndon. It was based on the Victorian novel by William Makepeace Thackeray published in 1844 as The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which tells the story of the rise and fall of a boy in Europe in the XVIII, and starred Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenson in 1975. Once again, Kubrick's extreme attention to detail is evident in the film process using art books and documents of the time to search for locations, create objects, cars and costumes that were made using clothes from that century as models, following the sewing techniques that were originally used and hiring 35 tailors who they worked for 6 months. At the director's insistence, the interiors were shot exclusively by candlelight, thanks to special lenses from Carl Zeiss (maximum aperture of f/0.7) that he had bought from a contact his and whose design was ini cially made for NASA. According to the actress Marisa Berenson, the actors, in some close-up shots, could hardly move so as not to get out of focus. Current emulsion and developing techniques made this technology obsolete. The movie was filmed in Ireland and in England. In the first country, Kubrick received some threats from the IRA terrorist group because the extras represented soldiers waving the British flag on Irish soil.

The music that was used was the result of the compilation of all the recordings containing compositions of the XVIII century that Kubrick obtained. But seeing that the character of it was mostly festive, he also resorted to Franz Schubert and his Piano Trio Nº2 in E Flat, composed in 1828 and additionally added score recorded by Leonard Rosenman to fill the director's request. Preceded by great anticipation due to its two previous titles and their effect on audiences, the film was met with mixed reviews in the mid-1970s, failing to make an initial box office despite the 4 Oscars he won in 1975. Since then, the film has gained stature within the director's legacy for its technical and artistic achievements.

Multi-selling writer Stephen King's late-1970s novel and a genre that was hot at the time, horror, motivated Kubrick for his next film. Based on the novel The Shining by the American writer, he rewrote the script with Diane Johnson, and the result was one of the best film adaptations of any of King's works. In The Shining ( The Shining ; 1980), Kubrick's version is a variation on the book version, especially in the character of the protagonist and his motivations. The film, shot at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood for interiors doing exterior shots of the Timberline Lodge, in Portland, Oregon, to recreate the Overlook Hotel, shows the transformation of the character of Jack Torrance (played by the Oscar winner Jack Nicholson), who takes care of the hotel during the intermissions of the season, presenting him as a temperamental being and with a progressive disturbance that ultimately affects the safety of his own family. Kubrick made extensive use of a recent innovation, the Steadicam, a stabilizing gyroscope that allowed the camera to pan through space without vibrations, allowing him to effectively film Torrance's son, played by Danny Lloyd, riding his plastic tricycle through the hotel corridors or Nicholson walking through the garden maze. The music again falls into the hands of Wendy Carlos, who once again modifies the original music through electronics; an adaptation by the composer Hector Berlioz, of the medieval theme Dies Irae. Other composers whose pieces are used are György Ligeti, Béla Bártok, Krzysztof Penderecki and band themes from the first quarter of the XX century. The film received a good response from the public and the box office, but criticism was once again divided around this work by the American director. In the opinion of the novel's author, Stephen King, who was initially flattered by Kubrick's idea of adaptation, the film does not delve into the true theme of the novel, which even has autobiographical overtones. This first makes a new adaptation for television of his book, in 1997. Kubrick's daughter, Vivian, made a documentary about the filming of the film in 1980.

1987-1999: Final stage; the fall and the return

Seven years have to elapse until his next film appears, Full Metal Jacket, in 1987, where he once again touches on the war theme, this time the Vietnam War and again it is an adaptation of a novel. In this case it is Gustav Hasford and his book The Short-Timers. The film has two clearly differentiated parts: the preparation of the soldiers at the Parris Island Marine base in South Carolina, United States and the war itself, located in the Vietnamese city of Huế. During filming Kubrick rewrote the script on the fly, modifying the original scenes. The film was shot between 1985 and 1986 in England, at the British Army base at Bassingbourne, the Enfield studios, and the Beckton gas station in east London, the demolition process of which was used to recreate the modernist town of Huế, to where they took 66 palm trees. The film stars Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, Adam Baldwin and Lee Ermey. The music was written by Abigail Mead, an alias used by Vivian Kubrick, using a synthesizer. For the songs, Kubrick draws on the charts from the 1962-1968 period, including hits by Johnny Wright, The Rolling Stones, Nancy Sinatra, The Trashmen, among others. Although the film was released shortly after Oliver Stone's hit Platoon (1986), it garnered good reviews and box office success during its run.

After this film Kubrick began evaluating new projects. First, Artificial Intelligence, the story of a robot boy abandoned by his mother. Kubrick had always wanted to adapt Brian W. Aldiss' story, but it wasn't until he saw Jurassic Park (1993), by American director Steven Spielberg, that he knew that the technology needed to shoot the film was ready. finally within his reach. He was also interested in The Aryan Papers, based on the book Wartime lies by Louis Begley, a film about two Jewish refugees during Nazi persecution that was to star Jodie Foster. and Joseph Mazzello, the kid from Jurassic Park. However, Spielberg himself would go ahead with the film Schindler's List (1993), mainly due to the difficulty that Kubrick posed for the cinematographic fitting of the Jewish Holocaust, according to his own criteria. The similarity of Spielberg's film with his own project and problems of various kinds would make him give up.

Finally, Kubrick made Eyes Wide Shut (1999), based on the novel Dream Story, by Arthur Schnitzler, which he had praised years before. The original story is set in 19th century 19th century Vienna but the film is set in turn of the century New York XX, narrating the life of an upper-class New York couple who apparently live a happy life together, but whose dreams and sexual fantasies manifested in a moment of intimacy begin to destabilize their relationship. The film featured a real-life couple of Hollywood stars of the day, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, as the Harfords, with Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson in supporting roles.

The film, as with his previous films since Lolita, was shot in England even on exterior shots, with only some general shots done in New York. The final work is a display of Kubrick's usual virtuosity for filming and composing, playing intensely with colors and light, especially artificial light to reinforce certain sensations, even going so far as to force the development of the tapes to give the image the sought-after aura.. The score was very varied, composed for the occasion by Jocelyn Pook, including works by György Ligeti, Franz Liszt, Chris Isaak and Dmitri Shostakóvich. After almost 12 years, Kubrick returned with a film, generating strong expectations among the public, partly due to the rumors that circulated in the press about his life habits, especially his misanthropy, which was denied by the director in two interviews. during his lifetime. The film again generated some controversy around the censorship that the tape received in the version for the United States, where the genital areas of certain extra actors were digitally covered during an orgy, otherwise quite shameful to be such. The film, of great narrative quality, was received somewhat lukewarmly by a sector of critics at first, and with enthusiasm by other sectors, especially French critics who even gave it the award for best foreign film of the year. The film's budget was $65 million.

Management style

Background Thought

Interpretation of the works

HAL 9000, computer 2001: A space odyssey

For some, Stanley Kubrick's films often show expressions of an inner struggle that is examined from different perspectives. However, Kubrick himself was particularly careful not to offer his own perspectives on the meaning of his works, with in order to leave them open to free interpretation. In a 1960 interview conducted by Robert Emmett Ginna, Kubrick explained:

"One of the things I always find difficult, once the work is finished, is when a journalist or a critic asks: "What were you trying to say in the film?" Without trying to seem too presumptuous with this analogy, I like to answer what T.S. Eliot told someone who asked him that question. I think it was about The waste landa question about what he meant with the poem. He replied, "I would like to understand what I said." If I could say the same differently, I would have."

According to Herr, “Kubrick always referred to movies as dreams, dreams about dreams, including daydreams and nightmares […]; he never made a distinction—and […] that characterizes his peculiar materialism—between dream and vision.” He argued that the emotional reactions evoked by movies were far more powerful than other art forms involving speech and dialogue. For this reason Kubrick would leave long periods of his films without dialogue, emphasizing images and sound.

He also sought that his films could be compared to popular music, since in this the intellect or cultural background of a person does not matter so that a work —for example, a Beatles song— can be understood as much by a Alabama trucker as by a Cambridge intellectual. According to him, "everyone's emotions and subconscious are more alike than his intellect."

In an interview for Time magazine in 1975, Kubrick:

"The essence of performing arts is to allow an idea to reach people without the idea being clearly explained. If something is said directly, it stops being as powerful as when you let people discover it on their own."

He also asserted that "realism is probably the best way to stage arguments and ideas. Fantasy can best deal with themes that are based on an unconscious background".

Choice of themes for films

Diane Johnson, who wrote the screenplay for The Shining with Kubrick, remarked that he "always said that it was better to adapt a book than to write an original screenplay and that it was preferable to do so. choose a text that was not a masterpiece, in such a way that it could always be improved. That is what he always did, except for Lolita"., regardless of your expectations about it.

According to producer Jan Harlan, Kubrick "wanted to make films about relevant issues, that had not only form, but also substance". Kubrick himself also believed that audiences are drawn to "enigmas and allegories" and they avoid films where everything is clearly explained.

Some have wanted to show that Kubrick was trying to confound audience expectations, with radically different moods between one film and the next, as if he were "obsessed with contradicting himself, making each work his own a critique. to the previous one'. However, Kubrick stated that "there is no intentional pattern to which stories to bring to the screen. The only aspect that I try to maintain in each work is to try not to repeat myself".

Sexuality

Although there are no characters in his films performing sexual acts, sexuality in Kubrick's films is often portrayed outside of marriage, in hostile situations. For biographer John Baxter, the New York director explores "the furtive and violent paths of sexual experience: voyeurism, domination, slavery and rape" in his films. Furthermore, he points out that films like A Clockwork Orange are "potentially homoerotic", from Álex walking in front of his parents with one eye "made up with eyelashes fakes", until her innocent acceptance of her adviser's sexual advances.

Vision about evil

On the other hand, British critic Adrian Turner noted that there seems to be a certain "concern with questions of universal evil' in Kubrick's films. Meanwhile, Malcolm McDowell referred to Kubrick's humor as "black as coal", suspicious of his vision of the human being. Indeed, some of his films are clearly satires and black comedies, such as Lolita or Dr. strangelove; while others contain less obvious traces of satire and irony. His films are considered unpredictable, examining "the duality and contradictions that exist in each one of us. " On the other hand, it must be considered that Kubrick was often misinterpreted by critics; only once was this unanimously positive, with the film Paths of Glory.

Script and staging

The tunnel that appears in Mechanical orange

Kubrick was based on the auteur theory, in which the director ends up working as a screenwriter. This allows collaboration and improvisation with the actors during filming. McDowell recalls the emphasis that Kubrick placed on collaboration and the possibility of improvising a scene, pointing out that "there was a script and we followed it, but he knew when it wasn't working and kept us rehearsing until boredom".

Kubrick would not deal with the visual aspects of the shoot until he had full confidence in the mise-en-scène and the actors' performances. He then he took care of the camera effects and lighting. Walker is of the opinion that Kubrick was "one of the few directors able to tell his cinematographers the precise effect he was looking for". It has been argued that Kubrick was influenced by his predecessors, maintaining a European perspective on of cinema and linked to his admiration for Richard Strauss.

On the other hand, the critic Gilbert Adair has commented, regarding Full Metal Jacket, that "Kubrick's approach to language has always been reductionist and intransigently deterministic. He seems to see him as a mere product of environmental conditioning, only marginally influenced by elements of subjectivity and the whims, shadows, and modulations of personal expression'. Instead, other critics point out that, despite Kubrick's being a "visual filmmaker", not for that reason he neglected the dialogues. Furthermore, Kubrick has come to be compared to a writer for the way he approached the text and the stories themselves. Kubrick would try to have the script ready before shooting began, without this preventing him from making changes during production. filming of the movie. His primary objective was, after all, to "avoid blocking during staging".

As Kubrick remarked to Robert E. Ginna:

"I think it's necessary to see the whole problem of bringing a story to the screen. The problem begins with the choice of the place; it continues with the creation of history, the shots, the dresses, the photograph and the performance. And when the film is shot, it's only partially finished. I think postproduction is just the continuation of the direction of a movie. I believe that the use of audio-visual effects and main titles are part of the way of telling the story. I believe that the fragmentation of this work, which is carried out by different people, is something harmful. "

Kubrick also noted:

"I think the best plot is that there is no plot. I prefer a quiet start, that it gets stuck in the skin of the spectators and that it wraps them in such a way that they can appreciate the notes of grace and soft tones, so that they do not have to be beaten with spins in the plot or tools of suspense."

Relationship with his writers

Kubrick was impatient with his collaborators: "I need this scene finished with milk pouring out"; "I don't want it to be fine, I want it to be on Tuesday"; «Michael, these pages that you sent me today are from number 10; in fact, I think they could be number 12".

For his part, Frederic Raphael, who had worked extensively with him as a screenwriter for Eyes Wide Shut, spoke of "Stanley the tyrant, Stanley the obsessive perfectionist, Stanley the ice man, Stanley the hermetic, Stanley the one who only thinks of himself, and of a new Stanley: the Jew who hated himself.

Writer Gustav Hasford described it graphically with an analogy from the animal world: "It was an earwig: it would go in one ear and not come out the other until it had eaten away at your brain."

Even the calm Herr could lose his temper. During the preparation of the script for Full Metal Jacket , he received "from three to thirty" calls from her, usually after ten at night; "subjected" to long nightly interrogations, monologues and, also, to certain displays of wisdom by the New York genius, Herr thought to himself: "Does this guy never get tired?"

But it wasn't all criticism: Diane Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay The Shining with Kubrick, has spoken of the director's "pure and rigorous conception of art"; In this same film, the inventor of the steadicam, Garrett Brown, also participated, who would later remember the long conversations that the two had about the "elusive quality of perfection".

Directing and dealing with the actors

Kubrick's style of directing actors is legendary, among other reasons for the large number of times —up to fifty, according to Jack Nicholson— that he made them repeat the same scene. For actress Nicole Kidman, the filmmaker's intent was for the actor to eventually lose control of his "sense of self", the part of the mind that internally watches one's performance, and stop "censoring" himself. This feature of Kubrick's direction was even considered by critics to be "irrational"; however, he considered that the actors showed the best version of him in this way, due to the intense emotions that were generated.In this regard, he once stated:

The actors are primarily generators of emotions, and while some are always tuned and ready, others will arrive at an optimal level only in a shot that will never perform in the same way, regardless of how much they try.

And also:

When you wheel a movie, it takes several days to adapt to the staff you're with, because it's like getting naked in front of fifty people. Once you have become accustomed, the presence of another person in the assembly is dissonant and creates self-consciousness in the actors.

Among the actors who worked with him there seems to be a certain consensus that, at the time of the final cut, a strange and irresistible demand to keep his actors as far away from a "naturalistic" style as possible led the New York filmmaker to select the shots where they looked more histrionic, awkward and emotionally confused. The tensions on the set led actor Kirk Douglas to rant, in the aftermath of the stormy filming of Spartacus: "Stanley is a piece of talented shit." For his part, George C. Scott publicly complained that the director not only made him bring out his most histrionic vein, but in the end he chose the most exaggerated shots. In this sense, Herr speculates in Kubrick that Jack Nicholson's performance turned The Shining into a work to a large extent "failed as a genre film, but one that is unforgettable where it doesn't matter if there is a film or not." a great movie star and a great actor on the set. "That was much more real," the director told him after a take, "but it wasn't interesting." […] Or: “That was great. Let's do it again.”

From Kubrick's own point of view:

It doesn't matter if the actors don't know their lines or don't know them well. An actor can only do one thing every time. Even when you know your lines well enough to tell them while you think about them, you will always find that you have to deal with the emotions that make the shot. In a scene with strong emotional load, it is always better to be able to shoot full shots to allow the actor to maintain a continuous emotion, and it is rare for an actor to reach this point more than once or twice. There are, however, scenes that benefit from the extra shots, but even in these I am not sure that the first shots are only trials to which the adrenaline is added to being recorded by the camera.

Kubrick used breaks in filming to argue with the actors. Among those who appreciated the director's attention was Tony Curtis, who referred to the New Yorker as his favorite director, adding that he "had his greatest strength in his relationship with the actors". Furthermore, he added that the director "had his own way of making movies He wanted to see the faces of the actors; he wasn't looking for cameras rolling ten meters away, he wanted close-ups, keeping the camera moving. That was his style." In the same vein, Malcolm McDowell drew attention to the long talks she had with him to develop his character in A Clockwork Orange , talks that allowed her to feel uninhibited and free during filming.

But Kubrick also occasionally allowed the actors to improvise and "break the rules," especially Peter Sellers in Lolita. This was a turning point in his career that allowed him to work in a more creative way during filming.

During an interview, Ryan O'Neal recalled his directing style this way: “He made you work hard. He moved you, pushed you, helped you, got angry with you [...] but, above all, he taught you the value of a good director. Stanley brought out aspects of my performance that had been dormant. […] He had a suspicion that he was into something big.” He also noted that working with Kubrick was “a shocking experience” from which he never fully recovered.

Photography and use of effects

Kubrick attributed his skill in handling scene photography to his early years as a photographer. His scripts often did not include camera instructions. He preferred to deal with it when the scene was in place, as the visual aspects of a film were not a complication for him. Even in deciding the settings and props to be used, Kubrick paid meticulous attention to detail, which he sought to add as much material as possible in a way that he himself came to describe as "detective." #34; and would get involved in the technical aspects of the production, including camera position, scene composition, lens selection... and even operated the camera himself. Alcott went so far as to say of Kubrick that he was "the closest thing to a genius I've ever worked with, with all the problems that a genius entails".

Some critics have noted Kubrick's use of frontal perspective with a single vanishing point. This perspective leads the viewer to focus on a single vanishing point that gives the sensation of leaving. Kubrick's use of this technique was also accompanied by an aggressive visual symmetry that used parallel lines that came to converge at the vanishing point, giving the sensation of distance. Combined with camera movements, this technique could generate visual effects that some have described as "hypnotic and exciting".

Camera used by Stanley Kubrick, probably in Barry Lyndon

Among the great technical innovations that Kubrick brought to the cinema are special effects. An example is the film & # 34; 2001 & # 34;, where he used, among others, slit-scan effects and the frontal projection effect, which led him to win an Oscar. Furthermore, The Shining was one of the first six films to use the then revolutionary steadicam system. Kubrick took this method to its finest, giving the audience smooth, calm movement of the camera. Kubrick described the steadicam as a "magic carpet" which allowed for fast and fluid camera movements that, in the maze of The Shining would have been impossible otherwise.

Stanley Kubrick was also one of the pioneers in the use of video assist during filming. When he started using it in 1966, the video assist was considered cutting-edge technology, so Kubrick had to find his own way of using it. However, this method paid off and as early as the film 2001 he was able to observe a take immediately after recording it. On some tapes—for example, Barry Lyndon—used his own custom lenses, which allowed him to start a scene with a close-up and slowly zoom out until the whole panorama was captured, as well as record long takes by changing lighting conditions by toggling different camera settings. This technical skill of Kubrick's with lenses even impressed the manufacturers, who found in him someone unprecedented among filmmakers.

For the film Barry Lyndon, Kubrick used special lenses adapted to high speed, initially designed for NASA, which allowed him to record numerous scenes lit exclusively by candlelight.. Actor Steven Berkoff stressed that the director wanted scenes of this type and that, in shooting them, Kubrick made "a unique contribution to cinema that took him almost back to painting... It was like posing for a portrait". LoBrutto has pointed out that various directors have been interested in the type of lenses Kubrick used, lenses that, on the other hand, made him seem "legendary" as a cameraman.

Music and editing

György Ligeti, whose music used Kubrick for 2001, The glow and Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick spent long hours editing, often working seven days a week and increasing hours as deadlines approached. For Kubrick, the script was an element to be contrasted with the setting. stage, music and, especially, post-production. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise, Kubrick realized that it was possible to shoot a film on the set and then 're-direct' it. Regarding this, he expressed: & # 34; I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of the process. Editing is the only part of cinema that is unlike any of the other arts, and it is such an important point that it cannot be underestimated... it can make or break a film'. Biographer John Baxter has even noted that "instead of looking for the backbone of a film in the script before shooting, Kubrick began to know what he was looking for in the final version by shooting each scene from many different angles and demanding different takes of each line of script... Then he would organize and rearrange thousands of fragments to fit a certain version that was only beginning to emerge in editing".

Another of the traits that have highlighted Kubrick's perfectionism has been the music and his attention to the smallest details. His wife Christiane Harlan attributed this to a certain addiction to music. In his last six films, Stanley Kubrick chose already composed music, especially classical compositions. He preferred pre-recorded music to film-specific music, believing that a hired composer could not have as effective an impact as classical composers already known to the public. In addition, he argued that composing scenes from large pieces contributed to creating "great scenes"; for the best films.

On one occasion, for a scene in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick spent forty-two days working on editing. In that time, he listened to "every available recording of 17th and 18th century music, also acquiring thousands of recordings to find the exact version of Handel's Zarabande he was looking for". In turn, Jack Nicholson noted the attention Kubrick paid to the music in his films, noting that the director "listened to music constantly until he found something that he felt moved him in the right way".

Kubrick is credited with introducing Hungarian composer György Ligeti to a wide Western audience, including his music in 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide shut. According to Baxter, music in 2001 was one of Kubrick's fundamental aspects when he conceived the film. During early screenings, Kubrick tried using music by Mendelssohn—specifically, he would have played the scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream—although he would have also listened, along with Clarke, to music by Vaughan Williams and even Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. However, Kubrick ultimately chose Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube after hearing the piece.}} Ligeti's music used a new style with micropolyphonies, based on slowly changing dissonant chords. His presentation in the film was also a way of making Ligeti known to the general public, having placed him alongside other classics such as Richard Strauss or Johann Strauss.

In addition to Ligeti, Kubrick also collaborated with composer Wendy Carlos, whose 1968 album Switched-On Bach—reinterpreting Baroque music using moog synthesizers—piqued his interest. In 1971, Carlos composed and recorded music for the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange. In addition, the tracks that were not finally used in the film were released a year later on a separate album, called Wendy Carlos's Clockwork Orange. Kubrick collaborated with Carlos again on The Shining in 1980. For the introduction to this work, in which the camera follows Jack Torrance's vehicle through the mountains to the Overlook Hotel, Kubrick uses the interpretation of Dies irae from Hector Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony performed by Wendy Carlos herself.

Legacy

Kubrick was one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema. His influence on contemporary cinema is enormous and difficult to define in its true dimension. Not only because of the large number of books dedicated to him and his work, the compilations that place him among the most important in history, as well as television documentaries about his life and essays published in various media, but also because of the achievements films he achieved in life and the contribution he made to the status quo of the director's role within the film industry.

Kubrick fought for and achieved the long-awaited total control over his films, so that his film vision would not be affected by anything other than what he understood as artistic coherence. Without formal film studies, he participated in each stage of the production of a film, learning the techniques and trade, coming to contribute innovative technical procedures (special effects, filming system, new cameras, spotlights, lights and lenses) and narratives that they allowed the industry in general to advance several years.

Another section where he was decisive was the use of the soundtrack in the films he directed, anticipating various trends, incorporating both the encyclopedic review of the music belonging to the period in which the film was set, as well as as well as using the contributions of electronics when it was applied mostly in the experimental field. Kubrick revolutionized the way in which music and sound interact, complement and unify images. His film 2001: A Space Odyssey, is his most influential film in terms of film soundtracks and although most of the musical works were not created for the film, but were created by the director. he chose in order to give the emphasis that each scene needed; something that inspired several movies that have been created in recent years.

His films did not fail to incorporate his own intellectual interests and reflections on man and his constant struggle with his environment, be it physical, social, psychological or metaphysical. His observation of the human being always kept a prudent distance, which instead of coldness (as some critics branded it), could rather be read as a true interest and open curiosity to understand the behavior of the character as a piece in a more complex gear than what he was. purely cultural. He searches for those codes within each human being that push him to act in a particular way, both in privacy and in the titanic odysseys that change the course of history. In the process, he has created images so outstanding and timeless that they have become part of popular culture.

A final theme could be your obsession with detail and product quality. Few directors made this a major issue: understanding the film as an act of extreme learning about the character's environment, based on solid research that led, together with his perfectionism, to delay his shooting and increase the mythical aura that he projected on the screen. press. Another curious aspect of his way of working was his refusal to show the footage of his films that he discarded. In Stanley Kubrick's A Life in a Picture, it is told how the director kept all the material in a room in his house, piling up hours and hours of unused footage. Kubrick had an editing room set up in his house. His brother-in-law helped him burn all this material. It is for this reason that extra scenes are not known in the DVD editions.

In addition, Kubrick inspired directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan and George A. Romero. Even Orson Welles commented: "Among what I would call 'the young generation', Kubrick strikes me as a giant."

Due to the impact that Kubrick managed to have in the cinema and mainly in the XX century, people ask to know more about him and his works. Since 2004 an exhibition of his, created by Hans Peter Reichmann, has been presented in places like Paris, Monterrey, Berlin, Toronto, Los Angeles and Frankfurt. The tour takes the viewer to get set in the films and to learn a little more about the American director. Here we are presented with a collection of his works, among what we see there are: scripts, costumes, cameras, lenses, photographs and different emblematic pieces.

Filmography

• 1951: Day of the Fight(documentary short film).
• 1951: Flying Father(documentary nine minutes).
• 1953:Fear and Desire.
• 1953: The Seafarers (documentary 30 minutes).
• 1955: Killer's Kiss / The Kiss of the Killer.
• 1956: The Killing / Perfect Trace.
• 1957: Paths of Glory / Paths of Glory
• 1960: Spartacus / Spartacus (it was his first high-budget film).
• 1962: Lolita
• 1964: Dr. Strangelove / Red Phone: We Fly to Moscow
• 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey / 2001: A Space Odyssey
• 1971: Clockwork Orange / Mechanical Orange
• 1975: Barry Lyndon
• 1980: The Shining / The Shining
• 1987: Full Metal Jacket / Metal Jacket
• 1999: Eyes Wide Shut

Classification

You can see in Kubrick's work two distinct stages, leaving aside, as he himself wanted, his early works (Flying Padre, Day of the Fight, The Seafarers, Kiss of the Killer and Fear and Desire).

The First Stage, called, according to the criteria: "Classic Stage", "Period in Black and White" or "Youth Stage", includes The Killing, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove.

The Second Stage, called the "Renewal Stage", "Color Period" or "Maturity Stage", includes 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.

The stages are distinguished by observing their dramatic structure (more traditional in its first stage and experimental and innovative in its second stage) or the coloring of the footage (but, by way of exception, Espartaco -de its first stage - is in color, although not by Kubrick's decision).

Thus, after the temporary jump of about four years that separates Dr. Strangelove from 2001, a great change can be seen in the approach of his work, although certain plot parallels remain (sexuality in Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut, the harshness of war in Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, the social ascension with the final failure in Spartacus and Barry Lyndon,...)

Reception and criticism

Awards