Kubrick and Control


Book Description

Kubrick and Control is an examination of authority, order, and independence in the films directed by Stanley Kubrick, as well as in his personal life and working habits. This study explores the ways in which these central preoccupations develop and reformulate through the course of Kubrick's career, as he moved from genre to genre and shifted stories, locations, time periods, scope, and technical facilities. Separating the productions in accordance to their wider filmic classifications, the individual chapters examine a variety of productions, allowing for a categorical as well as a developmental approach to the works. In addition, following concurrently with each individual film discussed, details about Kubrick's life and evolving directorial practice are recounted in relation to these same concerns. In studying the stylistic and narrative features of his work, examples illustrate how Kubrick took these themes and applied them consistently yet with significant variation, manifest in relation to mise-en-scène construction (how Kubrick composed his images); characterization (individuals establishing, exerting, seeking, and/or abusing their authority); narrative (stories about characters and situations dependent upon order and control); and the actual filmmaking processes of the director (Kubrick was both praised and damned for his authorial management and obsession with order and perfection).




Stanley Kubrick Produces


Book Description

Stanley Kubrick Produces provides the first comprehensive account of Stanley Kubrick’s role as a producer, and of the role of the producers he worked with throughout his career. It considers how he first emerged as a producer, how he developed the role, and how he ultimately used it to fashion himself a powerbase by the 1970s. It goes on to consider how Kubrick’s centralizing of power became a self-defeating strategy by the 1980s and 1990s, one that led him to struggle to move projects out of development and into active production. Making use of overlooked archival sources and uncovering newly discovered ‘lost’ Kubrick projects (The Cop Killer, Shark Safari, and The Perfect Marriage among them), as well as providing the first detailed overview of the World Assembly of Youth film, James Fenwick provides a comprehensive account of Kubrick’s life and career and of how he managed to obtain the level of control that he possessed by the 1970s. Along the way, the book traces the rapid changes taking place in the American film industry in the post-studio era, uncovering new perspectives about the rise of young independent producers, the operations of influential companies such as Seven Arts and United Artists, and the whole field of film marketing.




Stanley Kubrick


Book Description

An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor’s son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. He was a self†‘taught filmmaker and self†‘proclaimed outsider, and his films exist in a unique world of their own outside the Hollywood mainstream. Kubrick’s Jewishness played a crucial role in his idea of himself as an outsider. Obsessed with rebellion against authority, war, and male violence, Kubrick was himself a calm, coolly masterful creator and a talkative, ever†‘curious polymath immersed in friends and family. Drawing on interviews and new archival material, Mikics for the first time explores the personal side of Kubrick’s films.




Stanley Kubrick and Me


Book Description

This intimate portrait by his former personal assistant and confidante reveals the man behind the legendary filmmaker—for the first time. Stanley Kubrick, the director of a string of timeless movies from Lolita and Dr. Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and others, has always been depicted by the media as the Howard Hughes of filmmakers, a weird artist obsessed with his work and privacy to the point of madness. But who was he really? Emilio D'Alessandro lets us see. A former Formula Ford driver who was a minicab chauffeur in London during the Swinging Sixties, he took a job driving a giant phallus through the city that became his introduction to the director. Honest, reliable, and ready to take on any task, Emilio found his way into Kubrick's neurotic, obsessive heart. He became his personal assistant, his right-hand man and confidant, working for him from A Clockwork Orange until Kubrick's death in 1999. Emilio was the silent guy in the room when the script for The Shining was discussed. He still has the coat Jack Nicholson used in the movie. He was an extra on the set of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's last movie. He knew all the actors and producers Kubrick worked with; he observed firsthand Kubrick's working methods down to the smallest detail. Making no claim of expertise in cinematography but with plenty of anecdotes, he offers a completely fresh perspective on the artist and a warm, affecting portrait of a generous, kind, caring man who was a perfectionist in work and life.




Depth of Field


Book Description

Director of some of the most controversial films of the twentieth century, Stanley Kubrick created a reputation as a Hollywood outsider as well as a cinematic genius. His diverse yet relatively small oeuvre—he directed only thirteen films during a career that spanned more than four decades—covers a broad range of the themes that shaped his century and continues to shape the twenty-first: war and crime, gender relations and class conflict, racism, and the fate of individual agency in a world of increasing social surveillance and control. In Depth of Field, leading screenwriters and scholars analyze Kubrick's films from a variety of perspectives. They examine such groundbreaking classics as Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey and later films whose critical reputations are still in flux. Depth of Field ends with three viewpoints on Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, placing it in the contexts of film history, the history and theory of psychoanalysis, and the sociology of sex and power. Probing Kubrick's whole body of work, Depth of Field is the first truly multidisciplinary study of one of the most innovative and controversial filmmakers of the twentieth century.




Kubrick's Men


Book Description

A provocative re-reading of Stanley Kubrick’s work and its focus on masculine desire The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic—or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone. The stories that Kubrick’s movies tell range from global nuclear politics to the unpredictable sexual dynamics of a marriage; from a day in the life of a New York City prizefighter preparing for a nighttime bout to the evolution of humankind. These male melodramas center on sociality and asociality. They feature male doubles, pairs, and rivals. They explore the romance of men and their machines, and men as machines. They figure intensely conflicted forms of male sexual desire. And they are also very much about male manners, style, taste, and art. Examining the formal, thematic, and theoretical affiliations between Kubrick’s three bodies of work—his photographs, his documentaries, and his feature films—Kubrick’s Men offers new vantages on to the question of gender and sexuality, including the first extended treatment of homosexuality in Kubrick’s male-oriented work.




Masters of Cinema: Stanley Kubrick


Book Description

Stanley Kubrick (USA, 1928–99) was a master who took the art of filmmaking further than any other contemporary director, a creative perfectionist whose work now fascinates new generations. He started out as a photographer before moving into film noir aged barely 25, after which the power and originality of his work soon brought him box-office success. In the 1960s he lived and worked in London, away from the scandal caused by his adaptation of Lolita (1962) and from the major studios, from which, uniquely, he was able to wrest total control of his films. He made only a dozen features in 50 years, each of which displays an extraordinary degree of technical and aesthetic invention. From the sci-fi 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) onwards, each of his masterpieces explores new genres and controversial topics, such as Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket, 1987), violence (A Clockwork Orange, 1971), horror (The Shining, 1980) and sexuality (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999).




Stanley Kubrick


Book Description

This a highly illustrated guide to the work of film director, Stanley Kubrick.




Stanley Kubrick


Book Description

Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives brings together essays by scholars who have examined the traces that Kubrick's work has left in archives, in particular his own collection of film-related materials, which was donated to the University of the Arts London in 2007. Richly illustrated with film stills and previously unseen material from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, this book is designed to open the reader's eyes to the wonder and richness of Kubrick's oeuvre. The collection held by the University is made up of a range of material including props, scripts, research, production paperwork such as call sheets, costumes and photographs for all his films and Look, as well as material for those projects that were conceived but never visualised. By maintaining a high degree of control in the film making process, Kubrick was able to retain material generated by his pioneering techniques, research and production work: arguably making this collection one of the most complete examples of film making practice world wide. Kubrick's films have inspired a huge amount of critical commentary, yet until recently critics and scholars have made little use of archival resources. The essays included in this collection offer new perspectives on Kubrick's working methods, the manifold influences on his films, their themes and style as well as their marketing and reception. Between them, the essays cover the totality of Kubrick's career, from his beginnings as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker in the late 1940s and early 1950s to his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, which was released a few months after his death in 1999. Ranging from low-budget noir thrillers to spectacular historical and futuristic epics, from war films to erotic dramas, from horror to topical movies, Kubrick's work explores fundamental questions about sexuality and violence, military organisations and combat, male bonding and marriage, human nature and social change. In doing so, he has produced iconic images (and sounds) representing key events and developments of the 20th century, including World War I, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, the space race, the Vietnam War, the rise of juvenile delinquency and family breakdown.




On Kubrick


Book Description

On Kubrick provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). The book offers provocative analysis of each of Kubrick's films, together with new information about their production histories and cultural contexts. Its ultimate aim is to provide a concise yet thorough discussion that will be useful as both an academic text and a trade publication. James Naremore argues that in several respects Kubrick was one of the cinema's last modernists: his taste and sensibility were shaped by the artistic culture of New York in the 1950s; he became a celebrated auteur who forged a distinctive style; he used art-cinema conventions in commercial productions; he challenged censorship regulations; and throughout his career he was preoccupied with one of the central themes of modernist art – the conflict between rationality and its ever-present shadow, the unconscious. War and science are key concerns in Kubrick's oeuvre, and his work has a hyper-masculine quality. Yet no director has more relentlessly emphasized the absurdity of combat, as in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the failure of scientific reasoning, as in 2001 (1968), and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality, as in Dr Strangelove (1964) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The book also argues that while Kubrick was a voracious intellectual and a life-long autodidact, the fascination of his work has less to do with the ideas it espouses than with the emotions it evokes. Often described as 'cool' or 'cold,' Kubrick is best understood as a skillful practitioner of what might be called the aesthetics of the grotesque; he employs extreme forms of caricature and black comedy to create disgusting, frightening yet also laughable images of the human body, creating a sense of unease that leaves viewers unsure of how to react.