Kubrickiana

Warner's recent release of five films by Stanley Kubrick in high-definition DVD formats set off an orgy of Kubrick viewing and contemplation around these parts. Since I brought up high-definition, I suppose that's the issue I ought to address right off the bat.

"I'll state what I said about the hi-def A Clockwork Orange" Gary Tooze says of the hi-def Eyes Wide Shut on his invaluable DVD Beaver site. "What purchasers should be aware of is that this will NOT climb the heights of high-definition DVD image quality. It doesn't look that way nor was it intended to (IMO). Don't fear this image—its looks as it should."

I concur. I'll go a little further, too. I'm lucky enough to own the enormous Taschen book The Stanley Kubrick Archives, the first part of which contains expertly reproduced frame enlargements of all the Kubrick films (rather akin to the spectacular frame enlargements in Kevin Brownlow's David Lean biography). The hi-def DVD of Shut is in fact a bit brighter and hotter than what the frame enlargements indicate. Particularly in the post-2001 films, the effect of Kubrick's insistence on direct lighting, the grain of the film stock he used, and so on, gave his pictures a very particular look quite unlike the Hollywood product of then or now. I think that for the most part the new DVDs capture that look extremely well.

That look—manifested in its rawest form in A Clockwork Orange—is indeed a huge part of what defines Kubrick's post-2001 work. It's probably somewhat inaccurate to employ Manny Farber's terminology here, but I think it's useful to consider 2001 Kubrick's final break from "White elephant art" and all the pictures thereafter his attempts at "termite art." To consider the likes of The Shining as termite art might seem oxymoronic, given the grand scale of the picture's sets. And yet those sets were navigated by a crew the size of which would have been considered more apt to a D.A. Pennebaker documentary. If Kubrick was unique as termite artists go (recall Orson Welles' remark about RKO Studios looking like "the biggest train set a boy ever had;" Kubrick was able, after shooting Clockwork and Barry Lyndon largely on "real" locations, to pursuade Warner to build him one train set after another), he was also eccentric as "personal" directors go. After Clockwork, a picture that is as much a burlesque as Dr. Strangelove and can in some respects be best considered in relation to that picture, all his films were genre exercises, as if he was testing the force of his personality against material of the type that had already been thoroughly defined by Hollywood: period romance, horror, war, "erotic" thriller.

The personality is expressed, first and foremost, by the look. The occasional harshness and oddness of the direct lighting. The meticulous compositions, the gliding camera. The false objectivity of setting up a shot at the far end of a corridor and holding it until the characters coming up from that far end meet the camera. It's a meticulous artist's (anti-Kubrick critics will prefer the term "control freak's") way of framing a world, keeping it at arm's length. No, Kubrick is not the most congenial of filmmakers. I'm actually kind of miffed that Warner did not see fit to upgrade Barry Lyndon to high-definition, as it's really the most perfectly sustained, tonally, of Kubrick's post-2001 films, and now that Ryan O'Neal is no longer even a blip on the cultural consciousness, the absolute aptness of his work in the title role is powerfully apparent.

A couple other willy-nilly observations:

—I think critic/screenwriter Jay Cocks' observation that "Realism, for Stanley, was a dead end" on the commentary track for Full Metal Jacket is absolutely on target. Kubrick's reputation for incredible research and preparation for each film preceded him, and led too-many literal minded souls to conclude that this came from an impetus to make "realistic" films. Where of course it was the opposite; the "realism" of the details was nothing more than a springboard from which to dive into cinematic "delirium," as Cocks notes. As far as the massive critical misunderstanding of Eyes Wide Shut is concerned, both the nature of its cinematic delirium, and Kubrick's refusal to draw conventional narrative lines around the differing delirious modes therein, contributed greatly to the drubbing. (As did certain extra-artistic considerations we won't address here, or probably ever.)

—One of the problems with Clockwork is that it's a film in which it's protagonist's callousness dovetails a little too comfortably with its creator's. Which is not to imply that Kubrick ever behaved anything like Alex DeLarge (or "Alex Burgess" as he's referred to in one of the many newspaper articles we glimpse in the picture, a nod of course to author Anthony, who wrote the source novel); but there's a puerility in several of the picture's more bravura moments—starting with the fast-motion sex scored to the "William Tell Overture"—that makes you think you're in the presence of two nasty/clever teenage boys rather than one. In an early version of the Strangelove script, written by Kubrick alone before Terry Southern came on board, the Turgidson character's named "'Buck' Schmuck"; another is called "Toejam" (which latter became a soldier's nickname in Jacket); a lot of what goes on in Clockwork gives a similar sense of "Kubrick Gone Wild." And Malcolm McDowell's affectionate, dishy commentary on the new disc buttresses that notion, with his anecdotes of Kubrick inviting him to pick actresses for nude work in the film based on what they thought of their breasts, and their switching off on choices. (One is reminded of the passage in John Baxter's Kubrick biography, in which Adrienne Corri, a friend of Kubrick's, lobbies for the part of the raped wife of the writer, and Kubrick says "What if I don't like the tits, Corri?" Corri did get the part...) McDowell and film historian Nick Redman also discuss how Clockwork and Eyes Wide Shut are structurally identical stories, forward then rewound, a mode that goes back a long ways and one I'm interested in brushing up on...

Comments

[Allen B.]

Excellent points one and all...especially agreed on Clockwork, which is the only Kubrick film that's waned for me...incredible filmmaking as always, but disturbing in the worst kind of way - not the kind of disturbing that gets you to pondering your reaction, but the kind that reminds one that when one begins to explore the darker depths of humanity one must take great care to be sure one doesn't get seduced...

[Joel]

Hi-def Kubrick sounds enticing, especially the warm domestic lighting in Eyes Wide Shut. But why isn't Lolita considered termite art? Perhaps I've never understood Farber's terms...

[Glenn Kenny]

Well, Farber's terms do have some elasticity to them, which I may well have abused. "Lolita" is an interesting case. Nabokov's book was an exemplary termite work that was, in a sense, transformed into white elephant art via the scandal that turned it into a best-seller. Hence, Kubrick's adaptation of it was launched on white-elephant terms. King's "The Shining," on the other hand, was a pure white-elephant that Kubrick mutated into a termite work...Anyway, all of Kubrick's work, save maybe "Spartacus," have termite elements in them, I just consider "2001" the final break from White Elephant elements...

[cinephile]

Great piece. Like you, I am disappointed to learn that Barry Lyndon is not in the box. I consider it Kubrick's best film, and its absence feels strikingly symptomatic: it's the one SK film that lies outside the fatalistic, deterministic narrative/thematic patterns that dominate the rest of his movies. In excluding it, Warners seems to be reconfirming the image of Kubrick as "cold" that you rightly note is a large part of his image (I would disagree, though, that it's only the "anti-Kubrick" people that read him that way; I think are large parts of his fandom-- especially among impressionable undergrads-- that are drawn to that image, too. As Woody Allen says of Sylvia Plath in "Annie Hall"-- the poet whose death was misinterpreted as "romantic" by the college mentality.

[JamesB]

Interesting piece--being a film neophyte, I was inspired to go and search out the white elephant vs termite article.

So I'm presuming with this new release, the aspect ratio questions are answered now?

[Glenn Kenny]

If only, James. "Shining," "Jacket" and "Eyes" are all presented in a matted 1:85, which was their theatrical exhibition ratio, altough they were shot in 1:33 and initially released in that ratio on home video. Over at Dave Kehr's website there's some discussion of the issue. See here: http://davekehr.com/?p=250#comments

For myself—someone who saw "The Shining," for instance, about a dozen times during its 1980 theatrical run (it became the default social activity of my crew—"Whaddya wanna do tonight?" "I dunno..." "How about 'The Shining'?")—the theatrical ratio works like nothing else. But as Dave points out, the 1:33 videos still contain more "visual information." And Kubrick had sufficient compositional acumen to create an image that was valid in either ratio...so the question remains for many. As I said, I'm good with the ratio on the new discs.

[JamesB]

Thanks for link, I tend towards the "more visual information" side of the discussion, but then again I've never seen any of the theatrical releases of Kubrick's films (I know, sacrilege, but I'm waiting for a 2001 revival). I will say that after seeing Eyes in 1:33, I was startled to see how well crafted the compositions were in that ratio, and it made me search out other modern films that made use of the seemingly constricting space. Needless to say, there are not many--perhaps I should seek out more tv shows.