Stanley Kubrick – A Life in Pictures (2001) – Jan Harlan
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Saturday evening the Belgian TV station Canvas aired Stanley Kubrick – A Life in Pictures, a 2001 documentary film by Jan Harlan (Kubrick’s executive producer and brother-in-law) on the life of Stanley Kubrick. The documentary made me realize why I like Kubrick only moderately.

Stanley Kubrick is a universally acclaimed director. His filmography includes Eyes Wide Shut (1999), The Shining (1980), Barry Lyndon (1975), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Lolita (1962). Of these my favourites are A Clockwork Orange (because of the subject matter), The Shining (because it’s a horror film), Eyes Wide Shut (because its slowness teased me and because of its erotic subject matter) and Barry Lyndon (I don’t know why, I saw it when I was in my teens and I have fond memories of it since). Kubrick liked classical music. A lot. He used works from composers such as Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian, Beethoven, Shostakovich and many others.

Are Kubrick’s films cold and unemotional?

“This is perhaps the most often-stated criticism of Kubrick’s work. … While, ironically, Kubrick’s films abound with scenes of emotional extremity and “outrageous” performances, such as: Jack Nicholson in The Shining; George C. Scott in Dr Strangelove; Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange, etc. it’s much more common for critics to cite Kubrick’s “icy distance” from his “cold, unemotional characters” as the defining characteristic of his work.” —http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index4.html [Oct 2006]

Are Kubrick’s films playful or serious?

Serious, dead serious. And that and their coldness and unemotionalism are the two main reasons that I like Kubrick only a moderately. He is just as serious and unemotional as most high modernists. If I compare his work to two other directors born in 1928, the other two win: Nicolas Roeg and Marco Ferreri; although I must say that towards the end of the documentary I grew increasingly curious about who Kubrick actually was, what made him choose the subjects he chose, why this interest in human sordidness and why did he abhor the feelgood feeling we all sometimes enjoy in film.

Stanley Kubrick eschews sentimentalism and the “feelgood”. He favors image over discourse or narrative, and his images have the immediacy and crispness and autonomy one associates with an Imagist aesthetic. —http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0092.html [Oct 2006]

It was mentioned in the documentary that Kubrick made films about things (machines, bombs, space ships, etc…) not about humans.

It was also mentioned that Kubrick had the final cut or director’s cut to the extent that he was able to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from distribution after a wave of copycat crimes. No other director had that control over his films.