LET'S TALK FRANKLY ABOUT KUBRICK

Those essays look good, Matt. Any more? I love reading critiques on Kubrick.

Neil,

I can’t think of any others available on-line that are essentials. James Naremore’s recent book On Kubrick is worthwhile, though. Naremore talks about an “aesthetic of the grotesque” that he sees as running through Kubrick’s films. It’s an interesting angle.

Harry,

Historical epics aside, I think Mann made quite a few “artistically impressive” films, including T-Men, Raw Deal, Reign of Terror, Border Incident_, Winchester ’73, The Furies, The Tall Target_, The Naked Spur, The Man From Laramie, and Man of the West.

>>and just to set the record straight, are you saying a “big” film equals an artistically-impresssive film?<<
And just setting the record straight: Absolutely not.

I am not a Kubrick fan, though I like some of this films.

I feel 2001 is vastly overrated and one of the coldest films ever made. The technical achievement cannot be denied, some of the visuals are stunning, but it is Not an engaging film.

I do not feel that Kubrick was necessarily good with his actors, I feel the most over-the-top actors usually performed the best in his pictures, a great deal of the cast in Dr. Strangelove (most notably Scott, Sellers and Hayden), Nicholson in Shining, McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. I think the best performances were in Full Metal Jacket, D’Onofrio was brilliant, and the whole performed great.

I think it’s granted Kubrick’s gift was not storytelling, but setting up impressive shots, Malick before Malick.

If someone were to called him a great visual artist, I would agree, but he was not a great director. I feel he failed too often to engage the audience in the story he was attempting to tell, hence he failed to complete the film making process.

You may start throwing rocks… now.

…

The “cold” criticism has been beaten to death in other threads.

The acting issue is perhaps a matter of taste. He got an exactly right for the film performance out of Ryan O’Neal (not exactly the world’s greatest actor) in Barry Lyndon, he got a good performance out of a six-year old non-actor in The Shining, he got possible a career performance out of Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, etc.

“I think it’s granted Kubrick’s gift was not storytelling, but setting up impressive shots, Malick before Malick.”

Kubrick was a modernist. Michael Klein , writing about Barry Lyndon:

“There seems to be an expectation, virtually prescriptive, that the core of the film should reside in the narrative, in the sequence of events and point of view of the main characters. However Kubrick’s modernist perspective is somewhat different. While the events do shape the characters’ lives, they are relatively neutral, incomplete signs. . . The total configuration of visual and aural signs (including the music and the voice-over), that is the discourse, defines and determines our response to and comprehension of the events.”

Thought I’d post this for the Kubrick fans, but if I was going to do it I wanted to post it in one of the more thoughtful Kubrick threads here.

Enjoy this art print of Kubrick leading those characters of his from speculative fiction.

I also HIGHLY recommend you go back to Page 1 of this thread and read the discussion.

Re-framing “The ‘Coldness’ Argument”: How is composition—composedness (and maybe hand in hand with that, precision)—used as a common currency of self-aware expression in Kubrick’s works? I’d like to hear folks thoughts on this and his flirtations with tableaux, as well as his influence on subsequent filmmakers’ compositional philosophies.

I tend to not find Kubrick’s movies self-aware, at least not in the meta sense. He may not be requesting you be immersed in the narrative via the characters and narrative, but he does seem to request you be immersed (forgetful of yourself) in the space or visual construction. I am thinking of the hallways in The Shining. We are not asked to follow a boy on a toy trike for several minutes because it’s important for the story, we are asked because it is important to have the audience live in those walls and feel the maze-like claustrophobia. Self-awareness in a text as I understand it would state that we are asked to follow Danny to say something about the medium of film itself above all other concerns, but whereas any formal work begets questions and exploration of the form it’s using, that does not make it its primary purpose.

—PolarisDiB