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"The Art of Cinema | / Archive / 1999 / No. 10, October | Stanley Kubrick: "Biography"
Stanley Kubrick: "Biography"
No. 10, October
John Baxter
"Stanley Kubrick. 1928-1999"
On March 4, 1999, four days after finishing work on the editing of the film "Eyes Wide Closed", Stanley Kubrick died.
There are several well known characteristics concerning Kubrick.
He is a director who has polarized public opinion.
For one part of the audience (including professionally cinematic ones), he is boring, unintelligible, pretentious; the other considers him the discoverer of new horizons of visual expressiveness and a guide to the realm of unknown worlds.
He is a pedant, a mad perfectionist, who has been finishing his every opus for years.
There are only fifteen films (including short films) in his track record.
But to understand its scale, it is enough to name three - "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Mechanical Orange", "Lolita".
Having hated his early painting "Fear and Desire", he bought up all the copies so that no one could ever see this creation.
Suffice it to recall that in" The Shining " he used only one percent of the footage.
In order not to go far for an example, let's remember: the premiere of "Eyes Wide Closed", keeping fans in suspense, was postponed for almost three years, until it finally took place in mid July.
He is a quarrelsome and uncompromising dictator who does not put other people's authorities in a penny.
Dreaming of making a film adaptation of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", he refused to stage it, not wanting to give the author of the novel the right to write a script.
He was always in the thrall of obsessions - war and the dehumanization of humanity and man and images, endlessly shooting mazes and corridors, necessarily including an episode in the bathroom in every film, often using the number 114, and in the field of shooting technique he preferred a symmetrical composition of plans, long camera arrivals and departures, super large plans of characters ' faces distorted by strong emotion.
He, of course, having entered the history of cinema at least with the "Space Odyssey", which is invariably included in all lists of the best films of all times and peoples, noticeably performed a civil feat equal to his creative merits.
In 1960, he insisted that the name of Dalton Trumbo, an outstanding screenwriter who was blacklisted and appeared only under a pseudonym, be included in the credits of "Spartacus".
This was the end of the legacy of McCarthyism.
He was a recluse, rarely gave interviews and, apparently, the only time he appeared on the screen was when he allowed his daughter Vivian to film the working moments of"The Shining".
The book by John Baxter, perhaps the most prominent biographer of Muviland, was published shortly before the death of Stanley Kubrick.
It tells about this legendary and scandalous director as openly as possible as a man of flesh and blood and deeply competent as a director and will probably help every reader to lay down his image of the last giant of the cinema age.
Nina Tsyrkun
Stanley Kubrick.
Biography
John Baxter
It's the height of summer in America.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, by the grace of God, the president of the United States, has just added another one to them Alaska has become the forty ninth state.
Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba, the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet.
Nikita Khrushchev is the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union.
He is going to visit the States - but not "Disneyland": according to the host party, it is too dangerous.
The automatic space probe "Luna 2" made the first contact of mankind with the Moon, crashing into its surface.
Popular films - "Ben Hur" by William Wyler," North through the Northwest "by Alfred Hitchcock and " Some Like It Hot" ("Only Girls in Jazz") Billy Wilder.
Elvis Presley is serving his army service in Germany, so the record of the year is a sugary, rollicking smash hit by Bobby Darin based on the ballad of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht about Mackie Messer teenagers call him "Mac Knife".
It's 1959 all over our God blessed country everywhere except on the hot slope of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, separated by a hill from Greater Los Angeles.
Here, despite the distant roar of rockets at the Rocketdyne Corporation test facilities and the echoes of automobile traffic along Barham Boulevard, it is only 71 BC and a lot of people are bustling.
"If he doesnot shoot this scene quickly," one of the crew grumbles, " we'll start a slave uprising.
Three hundred extras in rough homespun brown clothes are scattered on a grassy slope under the hot sun.
Each has a large plate with a number on it.
Everyone seems unhappy.
Hanging on a crane, twelve meters above the ground, is a young man in rumpled cotton trousers, a white shirt with an open collar and a sweatshirt, black haired, browed, with a smoking Camel in his hand.
He looks down at the scene of the action.
He mumbles something to his assistant in a monotonous Bronx dialect, who brings the microphone to his lips.
Thirty two year old Stanley Kubrick is the youngest of all who became the director of this Hollywood epic.
Kirk Douglas, the screen star and executive producer, handed him this position, firing a not so young and less compliant Anthony Mann by the end of the first week of filming.
The Sunday papers report that Kubrick, known only as the director of the low budget detective film "Murder" and the drama about the First World War "Paths of Glory", suddenly found himself at the head of a production with a budget of $ 12 million, with twenty seven tons of dresses, tunics and aluminum armor (made to order in Rome) and with a solid cast of performers playing senators, slaves and dictators among the actors were Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov.
But if his modest experience hindered Kubrick, he did not show it.
The young director has already managed to dismiss the performer of the main role and infuriate Kirk Douglas by shooting the film at his own unhurried pace.
The star had an unpleasant feeling that he had hired the wrong person.
Douglas counted on the fact that the young man would be easy to push around, and suddenly found himself at the mercy of a determined and inflexible director of production, who at times seemed to be able to measure himself with perseverance and self conceit.
Tony Curtis, one of the leading actors of the film, recalls: "Kubrick had his own approach to filmmaking.
He wanted to see the actors ' faces.
He didnot need constant wide shots from a distance of ten meters, he wanted to shoot close ups, he wanted to make the camera move.
That was his style.
Everyone urged Stanley: "Come on quickly, Stanley... no, you donot have to take it off like that!"
And Stanley replied: "I want it that way."
What inflated the film and the budget by an order of magnitude was Kubrick's ideas about interesting mise en scene.
He wanted to shoot only two plans a day, the studio wanted him to shoot up to thirty two, so Kubrick compromised by agreeing to eight.
He wanted to do long distance panoramic shots with a large number of participants and at the same time follow the leading actor.
If you watch the film carefully, you will notice that he has achieved this."
"If Kubrick wasnot a film director," says the lead actor of his film "A Clockwork Orange" Malcolm McDowell, " he should have commanded the US armed forces.
He keeps everything in his head right up to the purchase of shampoo.
Nothing passes him by.
He has to keep an eye on everything and everything."
Why?
First of all, this is a property of character.
Kubrick is shy.
And shyness, which has turned into a pose of heartlessness and neglect due to a high innate intelligence, is not so rare among artists.
Calder Willingham, co writer of "Path of Glory", accuses Kubrick of having " an almost psychopathic indifference and coldness towards people - a flaw that, I may add, sadly colors Kubrick's work throughout his life.
He doesnot like people too much, they interest him mainly when they do disgusting things or when their idiocy is so pernicious that it becomes eerily funny."
Barbara Green wrote about her cousin, the writer Graham Greene, in similar terms.
"I felt that, apart from the three or four people to whom he was really attached," she says, " the rest of humanity was like a mass of insects for him, which he liked to explore with a cold and clear head - the way a scientist could explore experimental animals."
For some people, this is manifested only in creative activity.
Kubrick was a loving husband, a devoted father of two daughters and a stepdaughter, and was not devoid of feelings of affection or compassion.
But he rarely showed emotions in public, and showed them even less often.
Only one person saw him crying in public, and that was a very long time ago.
Kubrick's mental and physical isolation was most often a conscious, volitional act.
He loved cars.
His third wife, Christian, said: "Stanley would be happy with eight tape recorders and one pair of trousers."
Since adolescence, surrounded by movie cameras, televisions and short wave radios, he achieved, not always successfully, their impeccable work.
But at the same time, I knew that the mechanisms could fail.
This awareness is the key to his life and work.
Here is an explanation for the fact that he did not want to fly or drive a car fast, as well as the fact that he made the films "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Doctor Strangelove" - films about technical developments that failed.
Jack Nicholson, who played the main role in the film" The Shining "and intended to play in the project" Napoleon " conceived by Kubrick for a long time, understood the master's character before others.
"Just because a person strives for perfection," says Nicholson, " does not mean that he is close to it."
But it is certainly not a shame to strive for perfection.
Nicholson, himself not at all a diplomat and not a reckless, but quite a zealous admirer of Kubrick.
"Stanley is good with sound," he says.
-- Many directors are doing fine, but Stanley is good with the selection of new equipment.
Stanley is fine with the tone of the microphone.
Stanley is good with whoever he buys the microphone from.
Stanley is good with the daughter of the person from whom he buys the microphone - with the daughter who needs the help of a dentist.
Stanley is generally good."
The most attractive thing about Stanley Kubrick's appearance is his eyes.
Coal black in the photos (but in reality greenish brown), these eyes burn us with a passionate rejection of evasiveness, they are like the doors of a hot oven, occasionally allowing us to see the inner flame.
When we pay money for a ticket to a Kubrick film, we pay for his eyes.
His understanding of the cinematic image, his sense of how the frame should be constructed, how the camera should move, what perspective the optics should take - these are the visual equivalents of the fine tuning of a musical instrument or the artist's feeling of how a brushstroke will appear to the viewer looking at the canvas from a ten meter distance.
His films are a gallery of indelible images that will live as long as cinema will exist: milky white spaceships fragile as Dresden porcelain against the velvet of the Universe; dandies in wigs fencing on a foggy morning; open elevator doors, past which a stream of dark blood slowly flows along the corridor of an empty hotel; a mysterious Vietnamese landscape under a sky covered with the smoke of war.
One can be dismissive of Kubrick's subject matter, skeptical of his artistic method, or reject, like the critic David Thomson, his "cold, humorless authority", but it is much more difficult to describe his eyes.
Stanley's eyes are good.
Over a century of the development of cinematography, half a dozen other creators have shown the ability to see: Sergei Eisenstein in post revolutionary Russia, Joseph von Sternberg in Hollywood in the 30s, Max Ophuls in Austria and France during the interwar period.
In Kubrick's films, the image reigns, the mind in them fades into the background.
In an essay about the "All Metal Vest", the English critic Gilbert Eder makes a special emphasis on the fact that "Kubrick's speech is always elementary official.
For him, language is a product of the environment, which is very little affected by the speaker's individuality, quirks, shades and modulations of individual expression."
As evidence of Kubrick's conviction that language is a cipher that obscures rather than reveals thought, Eder quotes Lolita's teenage slang and her mother's speech, resorting to saving hackneyed cliches ("I am a passionate and lonely woman, and you are my love
He recalls the catchphrases and verbosity on which the speech of all the characters in "Doctor Strangelove" is based (General Terjidson tells his mistress, forcing her to erotically stimulate herself: "Start the countdown."
Or such a phrase: "I'm not saying that our hair will not be disheveled when we support millions of victims of nuclear war").
Or the stunning serenity of the computer HAL in the "Space Odyssey", a Testament to the fact that every phrase has been programmed ("Why didnot you take the pill from stress, Dave...").
Refers to the language cocktail slang, coined by Anthony Burgess for "a Clockwork orange", the official, dry conversations Barry Lyndon and his silent courtship of lady Lyndon, Jack TORRANCE in the Shining, writing a book, which consists of a single phrase, repeated page after page: "Jack is bored only work and no play", and finally a few hundred curses and scraps of soldiers ' slang instead of dialogues in "full Metal jacket".
Why is there such a suspicious attitude to the language?
At first, it was the reaction of a timid, silent child to the aggressive sociability of the environment.
But Kubrick soon became convinced that words are too inaccurate a means of expressing the truth.
His films constantly show that there are worlds where language as a means of communication passes next to what the eye sees.
If an image tells a story convincingly enough, why do we need words?
There is no human activity - with the possible exception of sex - that reduces communication to an elementary level like war, and Kubrick has been interested in armed conflicts since his adolescence.
All this experience was embodied in "The All Metal Vest", a 1987 film about Vietnam based on the story by Gustav Hesford.
Throughout his life, Kubrick adhered to the Manichean view of being.
This medieval heresy, which even captured St. Augustine for a while, claims that the universe was created not only by God, but by the opposing forces of good and evil, who are fighting for domination over it.
In 1980, during the filming of The Shining, Kubrick noticed: "There is something inherently vicious in the human personality.
She has a bad side.
Horror stories reveal the archetypes of the unconscious, making it possible to see the dark side of a person without encountering it directly."
Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick on the set of "Spartacus"
Kubrick's style of work is extremely antagonistic, as if from the very beginning he set out to show how little he respects the accepted rules of American cinema.
In "Paths of Glory" he kept the plot of the story of the source, but changed all the names, and the film was shot in Europe, however, having delivered there almost a full American cast of performers.
Soon after, he went to the UK to shoot "Lolita", looking for "American" highways and motels in the London suburbs.
In England, he managed, working at night and sleeping off the day, to remain an American director, rejecting an informal connection with the American film industry, which has become a second homeland for him.
If Kubrick praised a film, it was most often because the director for example, Wells, Chaplin or Howard Hughes denied the generally accepted rules of filming.
In 1979, he called" All This Jazz "by Bob Foss, an unusual autobiographical film that re sings Fellini's "8 1/2", "the best film he thinks he has seen".
In his way of thinking, Kubrick followed the Viennese psychoanalysts, in particular Carl Gustav Jung.
The English critic Adrian Turner noted that Kubrick's films raise questions of "universal natural evil".
Modern cinema knows nothing more cynical and fatalistic.
"He's a genius," says Malcolm McDowell, " but his humor is as black as coal.
I doubt it... humanity".
In Kubrick's films, love dies, aspirations die.
Everything is won by power, but it is also fleeting.
And there remains always and forever only the eye.
However, how much can the eye see as such?
Kubrick's view of life is monocular, like the view of his camera.
Alone in his secret isolation, pressing his eye to the photographic visor, but seeing the world in snatches, with flashlights, he is forced to guess the essence of a person by a fleeting conversation, character by movement, by shadow.
In his adolescence, Kubrick preferred the life of the eye and mind to the life of the soul and spirit.
Focusing on such a narrow vision of the world brings its own insights, but they can be limited and fruitless.
The fact that at the end of his career Kubrick comes to the film "Eyes Wide Closed", a film about two self absorbed people and their fantasies, indicates a certain bitterness.
When the light goes out, the lens turns into a mirror, returning its image to the viewer.
Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in the film "Spartacus"
While Kubrick found himself in the films "Murder" and "Paths of Glory", the panorama of world cinema was changing.
By the end of the 50s, the criterion of success for a director, producer and leading actor was the ability to cope with a movie epic.
In 1953, the large format film "Scarlet" opened a new era of large scale cinema.
The audience was hungry for panoramic images and stereo sound, and American directors, realizing that only such a spectacle can surpass TV, rushed abroad in search of an exciting and inexpensive entourage.
The huge profits from the epics hypnotized Hollywood for almost a decade.
Kubrick also fell under this charm and did not change it.
He realized that he had the very look that is needed for epics, even earlier than in Hollywood, there were funds for such filming.
It is believed that every ambitious soldier carries a field marshal's baton in his backpack.
Kubrick had an anamorphic lens with him.
Kirk Douglas threw himself into this business with his head.
He ordered scripts for two more incredibly expensive films - "Montezuma" and "Spartacus".
The second film, based on the 1952 novel by communist writer Howard Fast about a gladiator who raised a slave revolt against Rome in 73 BC, should have been shot earlier.
In both cases, Douglas was supposed to be the producer and the lead actor.
Douglas offered " Spartacus "to United Artists, but they replied that they were already preparing for the production of the film "Gladiator" - the story of Spartacus, retold by Arthur Koestler.
Yul Brynner and Anthony Quinn participate, directed by Martin Ritt.
The indomitable Douglas took " Spartacus "to the" Universal "and convinced the company to invest so much in the film that Ritt and" UA " realized that their film would not stand up to competition.
They offered to co produce, but Douglas declined.
Humiliated, Brynner had to telegraph Douglas about his surrender.
Douglas did not have his own office, he did without a desk.
"Such things," he said carelessly, " interfere with creative achievements."
He had every reason to stay away from the" Universal", because from the very beginning the business with" Spartak " did not go well.
Although Douglas got the rights to Fast's book, he did not have a script.
The text ordered by Fast himself was, according to Douglas, " a disaster, it was no good.
It does not use the dramatic moments of the book.
His characters are walking monologues, they proclaim ideas, and that's all."
This was to be expected.
Fast's book was an example of Marxist historiography, it contrasted the views of Spartacus - an illiterate immigrant slave and therefore an original humanist - and Crassus, who decided his fate, an educated, corrupt and ambitious military leader, a potential dictator, for whom slaves were just "tools", like livestock.
Most of what is successful in the film is taken from a more detailed and in depth retelling of the story of Spartacus by Arthur Koestler.
"Spartak"
The script was created by Dalton Trumbo, a well known left wing screenwriter who got into the "black list" of film and television figures for his beliefs.
Douglas did not immediately suggest that Trumbo write the script.
Dreaming of an authoritative name, he turned to Dudley Nichols, Lillian Helman, Irwin Shaw and Maxwell Anderson - all of them were on the "black list", but they had a reputation as liberals.
After they all refused and Trumbo got the job, Douglas decided that one of them should still put his name on the script.
A team of unnamed writers from the "black list" worked for Douglas; he used them in the future, paying at reduced rates and promising legalization in return.
To immediately indicate Kubrick's subordinate position, Douglas decided to introduce him to the film crew in the scenery of the gladiator school.
Almost all the actors gathered there.
"It was a funny scene," Douglas recalled.
- Kubrick, with his eyes wide open, looked like a seventeen year old boy in short trousers.
You can imagine how the actors looked at him."
This technique turned against Douglas, as Kubrick soon took over all the responsibilities for the film, which were not clearly assigned to someone.
From the very beginning, Douglas and Trumbo's views on the essence of the future film were completely different.
Douglas, an ardent advocate of Zionism and Israeli independence, wanted the film to be, as the film historian Derek Ellie put it, "a Roman variation on the theme of "let my people go", while Trumbo preferred to produce "agitprop" in the spirit of his own socialist views.
He belittled the role of Spartacus and emphasized the role of Crassus, in which he parodied the American military industrial complex.
Crassus is very rich, he has political power and a high military rank, and with insinuating confidence utters demagogic grandiloquent phrases.
"Someday I will clear Rome, which I inherited from my ancestors, " Crassus promises.
To the remark "Rome is a rabble", he furiously replies: "No, Rome is an eternal idea of the divine mind."
Trumbo omitted everything in the script that did not correspond to his point of view.
The Spartacus uprising, which in the film appears to be a mass popular movement that lasted for several years, actually had limited support and ended after two years.
Spartacus rebelled in the gladiatorial school of Capua in 73 BC and was defeated in 71.
In the film, he is something like a plaster statue of a saint.
In his life, he destroyed three hundred prisoners in revenge for the murder of his friend Crixus.
To show his soldiers what awaits them if they are captured, before the battle, in front of both armies, he crucified a Roman soldier.
Twice he led the rebels to the borders of Italy and could easily escape from pursuit.
But both times he returned for looting and destruction.
The script accordingly denigrates Crassus.
The character of Crassus, as played by Laurence Olivier, resembles General Patton, MacArthur and even John Kennedy.
The historical Crassus did not intend to seize power.
When Crassus defeated Spartacus, he was a rich retired military commander and never became a dictator either in Rome or anywhere else.
Gracchus in such a "floating" form of various members of the genus Gracchus did not exist at all.
The last of the Gracchi, who led the Roman plebs, died fifty years before the uprising.
However, the biggest historical mistake of the film is the statement that Spartacus lays the foundation for a "new society", a Christian world in which there will be no slavery.
Slavery flourished in the Christian era, and in many countries of the world it still flourishes.
Trumbo excluded from the script some moments that played a big role in the book by Howard Fast.
Some of them were reliable (for example, the body of Spartacus was not really found).
Others were fabrications, like the rumors that Crassus, who considered slaves to be livestock, sold the bodies of crucified rebels for sausage stuffing.
Instead of the deleted one, Trumbo inserted stories copied from Arthur Koestler, including about Spartacus ' plan to put his army on pirate ships.
The first thing Kubrick did when he became the director of the film was to fire Sabine Bethmann, who was supposed to play Varinia.
He fired her, although the costumes were already ready for her and she even posed in them for advertising with other actors.
Such non negotiable dismissals were typical for the production of first class films.
They marked a ritual division of territories, a landmark action like the mass killings of captured enemies in the Circus Maximus of Rome which meant the destruction of the old order and the appearance of a new one.
Whether Bethmann was a good actress or a bad one was irrelevant, but Douglas began to object, mainly because the replacement required expenses.
Kubrick agreed, but said that before finally firing her, you should check whether she is talented, by improvisation.
- What kind of improvisations?
- Douglas asked.
"We'll tell her that she just lost a role in a movie," Kubrick replied with the most serious look.
-- Eddie Lewis can play the producer, and you can play the lead actor and executive producer.
Lewis refused to participate in this and left.
Douglas stayed, but did not want to play the role that Kubrick intended for him.
But his participation was not needed.
Kubrick told the actress the news, and she was petrified.
The issue of dismissal was resolved.
She was replaced by Jean Simmons, the former contender for the role of Varinia, and nothing was required of her except to portray patrician prudery, and she had long specialized in such roles
