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"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later" (Stanley Kubrick) Director Stanley Kubrick was born within the confines of New York on the 26 th of July 1928. The son of a physician, he began his career at the relatively young age of 16 when he began working as a freelance photographer for Look Magazine.
Around this time the growing in confidence teenager founded a passionate interest in film. After several years as an avid photographer he made a move into moving pictures, directing and producing his first piece entitled Day of the Flight in 1950. After this had kicked started his desire for film and the creation of it, he went on to create two more documentaries entitled The Flying Padre and The Seafarers. The facts about Kubrick's film debut are sketchy to say the least.
Obviously the way in which it was filmed, the film title, the name of the director (Stanley Kubrick) are all relatively factual pieces of information to obtain, however, the mystery remains of how Kubrick actually got the money to fund such a project. Some say that the film Fear and Desire (1950) was funded by Kubrick's family, others say that he was head-hunted by a big studio and handed the money (to see what he could do) and then some internet pages will tell you that he attracted investors and hustled chess games. This just goes to demonstrate the mystery, intrigue, and gossip mongering that was all part of the Kubrick saga. Within the next decade Kubrick would go on to direct two more films, these films would single him out as one of the first true independent film makers Killers Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956). Then came Paths of Glory (1957) starring Kirk Douglas. This film brought him swiftly to the attention of Hollywood, and in 1960 with the backing of Kirk Douglas, Kubrick was drafted in to direct the epic adventure entitled Spartacus.
Kubrick must have made a good impression with these studios right from the very start. This was his first big feature film, it would go on to take 167 days to shoot, employ 10, 000 people, and cost $ 12 million (making it the most expensive movie made in Hollywood at that time). This film would go on to win the Golden Globe for best picture. However, Douglas and Kubrick clashed during production and this led to Kubrick buying his way out of a three-film deal with Kirk Douglass production company. In later years Kubrick would go on to practically disown the film and cringe every time its title was mentioned (each big director seems to have one film like this, surprisingly enough with Steven Spielberg the film is Jaws he cannot stand it).
After the struggles he had encountered within the production of Spartacus, Kubrick would come across a new project only a year later to direct Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), however negotiations for the film totally collapsed. Kubrick disenchanted and sick of Hollywood he left the country completely and moved to England (from where he would make his subsequent films). The extreme creativity and imaginative resources of Kubrick and his work is clearly expressed and promoted to us within his films from 1962 onwards, with the production and release of his first film made in Britain, the controversial Lolita. In the year in which this film was released there were race riots in America as a black student had enrolled at The University of Mississippi, the scientists behind the discovery of DNA had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology and Marilyn Monroe had died in unusual circumstances. Society was still very stiff-collared, there was not as much media freedom as we have today no where near, yet Stanley Kubrick directed and released a film which opened with the most erotic scenes displayed on a cinema screen at that time. This film coming from an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's celebrated, yet controversial novel written in 1953.
It tells of a middle-aged man's unusual sexual passion / obsession for a precocious, seductive girl. The black humour and dramatic story of juvenile temptation and perverse, late-flowering lust was centred on a young girl and a mature literature professor in an aura of incest. Source (web) The topics and themes displayed and portrayed throughout this film were extremely taboo at this time within cinema. Over decades to come Kubrick would continue to play upon and enjoy shocking audiences with the unexpected and close-to-the-mark (sometimes considered over-the-mark) subject matter. The creativity within this time was the fact that this film should not have been enjoyed, it wasnt allowed, it was considered vile, yet people went to watch it and people still enjoyed it, Kubrick began to give audiences what they werent usually allowed to have, feel, or hear of. His next piece Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was the most farcical / satirical film made to that day.
Described by some critics as a cold war masterpiece the film is set at the height of the tensions between Russia and the United States, when all it would take to destroy the world was one push of a button. And General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is just the man to do it. This film based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George pokes fun at the military and almost every aspect of the tensions surrounding the cold war. American journalist, Roger Ebert, picks out the message and essence of this film brilliantly: - Yet out of these rudimentary physical props and a brilliant screenplay (which Kubrick and Terry Southern based on a novel by Peter George), Kubrick made what is arguably the best political satire of the century, a film that pulled the rug out from under the Cold War by arguing that if a ''nuclear deterrent'' destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to say exactly what it has deterred. Source (web) This film remains to this day; one of the most scathing comical attacks on the US government, all about a mad general who provokes a nuclear war.
Through the art of film showing possibly what couldve happened if the cold war had turned out differently, only four years before the release of this film, a US spy plane had been shot down over Russian airspace. Within the late sixties early seventies, Kubrick would go on to make two defining pieces of work which would arguably cement his reputation within the directorial annuals of time. These pieces of work entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) would go down in history as classics in their field, but perhaps for two different reasons. Both films (as almost every Kubrick film was) were taken from previously written stories (The Sentinel written by Arthur C. Clarke and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess). They both achieved cult status, however, one claiming this through sheer cinematic brilliance at that time (2001) and the other because it had been banned for its scenes of sheer violence and brutality (A Clockwork Orange). "If 2001 has stirred your emotions, your subconscious, your mythological yearnings, then it has succeeded. " Stanley Kubrick 1968 Source (web) Kubrick depicts several encounters mankind has with alien intelligence, from the dawn of Man four million years ago to the title year when an alien artefact is found on the Moon.
An expedition tracking its radio signal is launched to Jupiter with mysterious, haunting results. Production began in England in December 1965. By May of 1966 the live action scenes were finished and the crew spent the next year and a half filming the special effects. Originally budgeted at $ 6 million, mastering the 205 special effects shots pushed the final cost of the film to $ 10. 5 million. During editing major changes took place.
A documentary prologue in which scientists discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence was eliminated and narration explaining the Dawn of Man sequence was also cut, making 2001 the first Kubrick film without narration. This done so as not to take anything away from the viewer with regards to the shockingly accurate space-age scenes depicted within the film. This film was released an entire year before the first moon landings (July 20 th 1969 First Moon Landing) and had shockingly accurate imagery even before the visual facts had been transmitted back to Earth a year later. Kubrick's film almost predicting the future in a way. The creativity and imagination of Stanley Kubrick, in this case almost acting as a modern day Nostradamus, but in the fact that he produces the visual goods and doesnt merely shout and holler. This man will show you, and in 2001 he did.
In January 1960 Anthony Burgess was incorrectly diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour and told he had just twelve months to live. In a drugs-driven literary frenzy he wrote a brace of novels so that his family might gain from his publishing advances. Commenting on one of this...
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Research essay sample on Stanley Kubrick Clockwork Orange
