Research Paper

Chris Powell
Terra Williams
Writing Studio
October 9 2009

The Final Draft: A Look on Stanley Kubrick's Legacy in Film

For years, artists and writers alike have come to question the many obscurities that surround our distraught society. People like Salvador Dali and James Joyce have all approached those facets through the genius of their creativity. Given that cinema is a relatively unprecedented and fragmented art form, where it is divided between story and film , it is difficult to find one particular individual in film that could have accomplished as much as the great artists and writers of our time. However, there is one man whose traits have distinguished him from any other 20th century film director. Born in 1928 to a Jewish immigrant family in New York's Bronx, Stanley Kubrick would soon emerge as an auteur of American cinema (Nelson 2). While he was considered eccentric for being meticulous with his work, it was his perfectionistic nature which led to many innovations to the filmmaking process. Through understanding his directorial methods, as well as his inner beliefs, one can recognize the full extent of Stanley Kubrick's legacy.

Before going into detail of his accomplishments, one must first acknowledge that Kubrick was yet susceptible to flaw. One case was that Kubrick never had the luxury of going to a film school. Nor did he had any experience in the theater. He performed horribly in high school, notably for failing English and having a 68 average(Kagan 1). Not surprisedly, no college would have dared to accept the young artist. Instead, Kubrick turned to photography to compensate for his shortcoming. For some people, including other film directors, photography is perceived to be incongruent to the craft of film. This perception is often attributed to photography's singular role in composition and lighting, whereas film covers so much more like story development and production. While this can be true to a certain extent, what should be highlighted is that photography was Kubrick's gateway to his own artistic expression. On the day of Frederick Roosevelt's death, Kubrick took a camera shot of a street vendor grieving over the late US president. It was that very camera shot that helped Kubrick to earn a photography job by the renowned magazine firm of the time, Look. Writer, Norman Kagan, said that it was Kubrick's professional photography experience that granted his “aesthetic sensibility”, which Kubrick distilled into his filmmaking career (Nelson 12). Some of Kubrick's own photography even influenced the way he directed his films. For example, in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's last film before his death, actress Nicole Kidman was asked to cockily pose her hips for the opening scene. Interestedly enough, that particular gesture mirrors a photograph that Kubrick shot of a nude woman, in 1949. (Naremore 7)

Beyond that, Kubrick's photography experience also influenced his method of composing scenes. One of his visual trademarks was the way he staged his camera, in which its placement was set to where its subject was the vanishing point. In A Clockwork Orange, the film opens up with a zoom out of the protagonist, Alex, sitting on a couch, with him being place dead centered within the shot. As the camera zooms out, the audience see more of the interior space of the room through a compositional, linear, one-point perspective: where both sides of the a walls are seen horizontally across from each other. This one-point perspective method is used again in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the protagonist walks through a confined, visually symmetrical, space shuttle. In this regard, Kubrick's compositional understanding that he gained from photography made his films visually distinctive.

On many levels, Kubrick's lack of any formal directorial training was what made him cunningly inventive as a film director. He was always open to the artistic opportunities that could potentially enhance the visual scope of his films. In particular, his science-fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was regarded by many as the most technologically innovative film in the history of cinema (Kagan 134). Just by itself, the film pioneered such visual effects like front projection and slit-scan photography. In the opening of the film, where the apes first learn to use tools, front projection technique involved the integration of a real foreground stage with a filmed backdrop, to achieve the authenticity of the scene. As with the slit scan photography technique, being focally integral in the visually rich Star Gate sequence, it was achieved through a movable slide of painted images which was inserted between a camera. In both cases, those achievements in the cinematography were used to evoke a visual resonance to the audience, that was never witnessed before in history. Thus, this set a standard for the application of special effects in film, as seen in the forthcoming works of George Lucas(Star Wars) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) (Day). Taking back a step from the technologically futuristic themed 2001, Kubrick was only just as visually inventive with his 18th century period film, Barry Lyndon. During filming, Kubrick wanted to create a film that captured the aesthetic realism of the time period. Therefore, his goal was to shoot his film's interiors on location, without the help of in-studio set designs. To achieve this authenticity, Kubrick obtained a special kind of camera lens developed by NASA, which was used for lunar photography at the time (Naremore 172). This yielded Kubrick the ability to capture the natural lighting of his interior scenes, which were only lit by candle-light. Never was this accomplished in any preceding period film, which were all shot within the confinement of a propped, Hollywood film studio.

Like every artist, or at least the great ones, Kubrick was widely acclaimed as a perfectionist. Practically all of his works have idealized some facet of filmmaking: cinematography, acting, writing, editing. Since his major directorial debut of Spartacus, virtually all of his films have been recognized by the Academy Awards for those thematics (The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut being the exceptions). His eye for perfectionism has also garnered him the reputation of being performance-sensitive, to the brink of asking his actors to execute an innumerable amount of retakes. When Rolling Stone's editor, Tim Cahill, asked Kubrick about his dauntingly meticulous attribute, he responded, “It happens when actors are unprepared. You cannot act without knowing dialogue. If actors have to think on words, they cannot work on the emotion...” (qtd. in Falsetto 7). This axiom by Kubrick reveals that his perfectionism is quite often the result of his actors' own failings of really immersing into their specified roles. So from Kubrick's viewpoint, it is only through repetition can one achieved his ideal conception of true emotional portrayal.
Although his perfectionism yielded outstanding onset performances, like Dr. Stangelove's George C. Scott and A Clockwork Orange's Malcolm McDowell, it yet proved damaging in Kubrick's working relationships with his actors. In the making of the Shining for example, Kubrick placed heavy demand and stress upon actress, Shelly Duvall. This director-actor conflict is well anecdoted in the case where Kubrick insisted Shelley to perform 127 takes, of the haunting baseball-bat scene (which broke a world-record for the most retakes of a single movie scene with spoken dialogue). From that flaw, Kubrick can sometimes be seen as cold and overbearing to his fellow crewman and actors. Even the Academy-award winning actor, Jack Nicholson, had once expressed that while he cooperated well with Kubrick, he was a “different director” to the young actress (Harlan).

While many of his films were adaptations from novels, Kubrick never completely went by the source material. For example, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove was based on the book Red Alert, which deals with the nuclear threat between the US and the Soviets. The book itself was a suspense thriller, as were many Cold War-era themed publications (Nelson 84). Kubrick's film adaptation, however, was just the polar opposite. It was a black satire, which quite possibly reflected Kubrick's viewpoint of the outright absurdity, of the fear created between the two superpowers. Many films at the time were also heavily reverent to the script treatment of the novel, but Kubrick was one the few directors to change each novel's tonal structure, to what he thought best fit for his own work. In particular, both audiences and critics alike felt as though there was a hint of pessimism that Kubrick subjectively adds to the story. This was seen A Clockwork Orange, a film based from Anthony Burgess' own classic novel. Both the film and the book shared the same dystopian story about a young gang leader, Alex, where he and his “droogs” carry out violent and perversive atrocities. They both also examined human free will, in which Alex undergoes an aversion therapy that turns hims into a good member of society. However, what changed between the works of Kubrick and Burgess was their ending, where Burgess's Alex willfully learns from his wrong doings, and in contrast, Kubrick's Alex does not learn anything, hinting that he will continue his immoral ways. This view of pessimism on society was also displayed in some of Kubrick's' later works: Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. This could suggest that Kubrick might of had some nihilistic intentions he wanted to express to the world, both in the thematic and the contemporary sense.

Kubrick's narrative style was also highly distinguishable from any of his predecessors. In the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film was set within an almost indefinite time frame, while films prior to 2001 were much more conventionally, as they were set in a time framework of days or years (Naremore 143). Kubrick also relied on the use of symbols as a way to create indirect interpretations to the viewers. Again, this can be seen in 2001, a film that was 141 minutes long, with only about 40 minutes of actual spoken dialogue. The film itself told the story of humanity's evolutionary rise from primitive apes to technologically advanced space explorers that come across an enigmatic black monolith of some unexplained power or origin. Within that context of space exploration, the film also examines man's pitfall towards their reliance on technology for their own right towards existence. It is only when the appearance of the film's iconic black monolith, does man truly evolve, as it was seen when man's descendants discover the use of tools. This symbol is seen again with the film's protagonist, Bowman, who disconnects the space station's supercomputer, HAL 9000, after coming into contact with the monolith. Again, HAL 9000 is displayed as the antagonistic figural representation of technology. This further comes back to the idea that while technology has enabled mankind to prosper, it also has led man to lose their independence by their own manifestation. Symbolically-speaking, the monolith represents the evolutionary progression of man, as it was suggested in the final scene where Bowman evolves into a God-like omniscient, technologically aloof, embryonic being that gazes down on Earth. Under that context, the film was far more abstract and subjectively complex, so that many critics at the time missed the film's message. According to the film theory book, On Kubrick, “The film's cosmic perspective, rigorous attention to technological design and rejection of conventional dramatic values blinded most of the New York critical establishment to its special achievement... The youth audience and any viewer who attended for the sake of spirit were probably in a better position than the literary-minded critics to appreciate the unusual qualities of what she or he was seeing.” (143). Thus, because Kubrick broke the literary functions that were seen in previous works, Kubrick in a sense had instigated a new way of symbolic storytelling.

In addition, Kubrick was heavily influenced by Russian film director, Vsevolod Pudovkin. In many of his renowned film theory books, Pudkvin emphasized on the importance of editing (Nelson 5). From his method, Kubrick skillfully applied this to empower the subjectivity of his stories, like music. In particular, Kubrick distinctively utilized music to compliment or even contradict his narratives' undertones. This was the case for the ending of Dr. Strangelove. In it, there was a montage of atomic blasts, whose highlighted the Cold War era theme of nuclear warfare. Instead of playing music that reflected the gloominess of his nuclear war premise, Kubrick made use of the pleasant song of “We'll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn. For the ambitious filmmaker, this reflected the film's satiric message of creating the juxtaposition between devastation and optimism.

Moreover, when transcribing a novel for view by the masses, Kubrick always took into meticulous consideration the content of his given subject matter. For months, he would collaborate with skilled writers in articulating a detailed and well-rounded researched script. Kubrick once said, “a writer's obsession with his subject, with a theme and concept and a view of life and an understanding of character. Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts.” (Nelson 7). Thus, when directing adaptations, Kubrick favored exploring the conceptual understanding of his subject, over finding some identifiable style to create appeal. So because he did not rely on style, he allowed the audience to make their interpretation of what each film was about, rather than imposing his own bias of the subject matter on the audience. In his Vietnam War epic, Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick maintained a very ambivalent, almost subliminal, portrayal of human warfare. In an analysis conducted by Kagan, he writes, “...unlike those films [prior Vietnam War films: Platoon, Apocalypse Now, etc.], Kubrick's journey into darkness moves through conceptual and emotional that lack those moral or ideological rest areas that provide an audience the opportunity to reconnoiter and to fit the film into a familiar parabolic design.” (259). Thus, this shows that Kubrick's goal in Full Metal Jacket as a story was to depict war for what it is, and not to display any kind of one-sided moral, that would otherwise not permit the viewer any self-assessed interpretations.

In brief, Kubrick's transcendence of film directing and narrative paved the way for this creative ingenuity to become instilled into a commercialized art. His films like Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, all evaluated humanity in its truest, bleakest form, that both entranced and disturbed audiences. The technological and visual innovations that came with his works, also set in a new standard for motion pictures. As with the greats like Salvador Dali and James Joyce, Stanley Kubrick had succeeded in depicting his understandings on life through the creation of his chosen medium. Whether it be what is painted on a canvas, or what is written down for a novel, the interpretations that signify some great importance with society is what manifests a true artist.