For unrequited cinephiles (a dwindling minority, it seems), nine years without being able to look forward to a Stanley Kubrick movie has been something to endure with as much stoicism as can be mustered in these overhyped times.
The only saving grace has been the willingness of his family to make up for the compulsive and all-encompassing secretiveness Stanley practiced during his life by doling out over the last several years choice chunks of material from his archive. There has been Taschen’s mammoth Stanley Kubrick Archives book, which reproduced only a minuscule portion of his holdings at around 300 pgs; Stanley Kubrick: Drama and Shadows which collected a good size chunk of Kubrick’s photos for Look magazine, where he was a staff photographer in the late 40’s and early 50’s, before he moved into filmmaking; and Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, which contained never before seen on-set stills of him at work.
Now the dam has broken and almost the entire archive, which had been donated by the family to the University of The Arts, London has come forth. Kubrick lived and worked in Great Britain for the last thirty years of his life. The archive totals more than 1000 boxes and spans Kubrick’s 40-year career. This month it has just opened to the public, and to celebrate this event, Channel 4 in London has been running a retrospective of his films along with several newly commissioned documentaries.
One of the most fascinating is Jon Ronson’s Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, which can be viewed here. Ronson spent the last five years going through the boxes at Stanley’s house, before they moved to the University. The documentary is witty, poignant, somewhat melancholy, and maybe a little troubling. Now we know what Stanley was doing with his time during the increasingly long gaps between his movies. He was working his ass off, but not always on movie projects. He was also designing better boxes to hold his archive; designing collars with bells on them for his beloved cats, so they wouldn’t be able to kill so many birds while out and about his English garden estate. He collated all his fan letters by tagging them “fan” or “crank” and then filed them by the sender’s address -- so he had files of fans in Tempe Arizona, Atlanta Georgia, and so on. He had serious OCD, seems to have known it, but even this self knowledge didn’t help him keep his desires in check. He sounds a bit like a protagonist from one of his flicks. He had too much fun (we hope) gathering all the world’s information at his fingertips. Dr. Strangelove indeed. A choice bit is about 37 minutes in, where we see a few scenes of Kubrick working behind the scenes on Full Metal Jacket, from footage shot by his daughter Vivian. One moment he’s arguing with his crew about taking too many tea breaks, later on he’s showing the actors playing the raw Marine recruits how many times to grab their crotches while shouting ”this is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.” For more choice Kubrick, you can also take a look at some of his recently published correspondence. It’s nice to know that we can still look forward to more work from Stanley, if not up on the screen, then from out of the boxes.
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Comments on this entry:
I guess I'm not a cinephile for I think the man was an overrated hack. I don't know the first thing about moviemaking, but even I could have made an infinitely better movie than "Eyes Wide Shut". Watching paint dry is far more entertaining than "2001".
I think my sentiments are more commonly shared in Hollywood, but no one wants to admit it. After all, the man's a "cinematic genius". How dare someone bring him down a notch, right?
If you don't want to spring the money for the various books referenced in this article, you might instead just read the Stanley Kubrick interview from the September 1968 Playboy, which is online in the Cyber Club:
http://cyber.playboy.com/members/magazine/interviews/196809/
Kubrick was among the most "visual" of all filmmakers, so his movies always implied more than they explicitly said. The "message" is often ambiguous, even after repeated viewings, and that's often frustrating to modern audiences, who aren't so much accustomed to movies that are intended to make you **think**. It's easier to go see a typical special-effects blockbuster for a couple of hours of mindless entertainment.