Kubrick Essay - RB

Famous Film Director Paper: Stanley Kubrick 10/9/2000 1.

Student Name: Andrew Novell Hand in Date: 18/9/2000

Course: BA Directing Word Count: 3000

Level: 3

Module: 2.2

Unit: 5

Famous FilmDirector Paper

Title...

“Does the Director studied have a coherent style? How does this style function aesthetically and in its reception by an audience.”

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STANLEY KUBRICK'S USE OF STYLISTIC TECHNIQUES IN

THE FILMS 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY AND THE SHINING.

Introduction.

Stanley Kubrick.

Stanley Kubrick's brilliantly orchestrated

images of perpetual gliding motion, perceived

through a cold, unflinching, and dispassionate

eye, probably represent one of the most instantly

recognisable stylistic ‘signatures’ in cinema

history.

However, Kubrick was a far more than merely a

visual genius - he was also a great contemporary

philosopher who adopted and adapted the medium of

film to explore the deepest, and often darkest,

recesses of the human psyche. Kubrick's

biographer, Vincent LoBrutto writes:

“In his heart Kubrick was a fatalist, and existentialist, and he was attractedto literary material, which spoke to his

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growing dark vision. Photographicallyhe was on a quest to take the implementsof cinematography and reinvent them for his own purposes. The viewfinder he used to determine and plan shots became an important bridge between his inner eye and the final light-struck result onfilm.”1

To illustrate something of Kubrick's ‘dark

vision’, and how this is transferred

stylistically from Kubrick's own ‘inner eye’ to

the final ‘light-struck result’ perceived by his

audience, it is interesting to focus on two of

his best known films; 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),

and The Shining (1980).

Kubrick's use of Movement.

A compulsive autodidact, Kubrick taught

himself film making by studying and absorbing the

work of the greatest exponents of the art.

Kubrick was especially influenced by directors

who concentrated on the technical aspects of

cinematography to convey their vision,

particularly European directors like Sergei

1 Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, (London: Faber And Faber, 1998), p.126.

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Eisenstein (1898 - 1948) and Max Ophuls (1902 -

1957), and American directors who shared the

European's fascination with the technical

possibilities of the medium, like Orson Welles

(1915 - 1985). From these illustrious peers,

Kubrick began to evolve his own personal

cinematic style. As LoBrutto explains:

“Kubrick learned lessons from the masters. The fluid tracking shots he so admired from Max Ophuls and the deep-focus, low wide-angle shots that became Orson Welles's signature are articulatedthrough Kubrick's geometric, symmetrical, photographer's eye.”2

Kubrick's most distinctive stylistic device,

and one of the most influential on the minds and

emotions of his audience, is the movement of his

camera.

Like Max Ophuls, Kubrick's camera is ever on

the move. Something of this overwhelming sense

of camera motion may be gleaned from the critic

Max Kozloff's description of camera-work in 2001:

“Every moment of the lens has a

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surprising yet slow lift and lilt to it.With their tangibly buoyant, deceleratedgrace, Kubrick's boom and pan shots wield the glance through circumferences mimed already by the curvature of the screen itself... Equilibrium seems always to be widening itself through thepanorama, and finally tracking across the adjusting tangents of orbiting objects.”3

Throughout Kubrick's work this inertia-free

symphony of boom and pan, tracking, and slow zoom

shots form the backbone of the unmistakable

‘Kubrickesque’ cinematic repertoire. Yet

Kubrick was not merely interested in movement for

movements sake, but in thoroughly exploiting its

potential for dramatic effect, as LoBrutto

observes:

“Throughout his career Stanley Kubrick had tried to find new ways to move the camera and to explore the grammar of themotion picture.”4

Kubrick's camera movement brings a sinisterly

3 Max Kozloff, “2001,” Film Culture, No. 48-49, (New York: Winter and Spring, 1970.)

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beguiling and darkly mesmeric quality to his

films - a quality which not only serves as a

constant subliminal reminder to the audience of

the all powerful auteur behind the view-finder -

but also appears to hold sway over the lives of

the characters court under its spell, who appear

trapped inescapably in its pre-destined course.

As LoBrutto notes:

“Kubrick inherited the mantle of the moving camera from Ophuls, but when combined with his own bleak vision the dance became not Ophuls's dance of elegance and humanity but a Kubrick dance of doom.”5

In The Shining the slow panning shots of Jack

Torrance (Jack Nicholson) entering the Overlook

Hotel for the job interview which will ultimately

seal his fate, seems to lead him to his pre-

ordained destiny rather than follow his progress.

Similarly, in 2001 the endless spiralling motion

of the camera seems to epitomise a mankind

trapped within the gravitational certainty of

5 Ibid., p.138.

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some mysterious and dominating cosmic ‘plan’.

Kubrick's use of the Still.

Conversely, given Kubrick's relentless camera

movement, the selective use of the still shot

becomes an incredibly powerful cinematic tool,

and one which the director often reserves for the

most enigmatic or disturbing moments in his

films. In 2001, Kubrick fills the screen with

the motionless still of the HAL 9000's red eye to

illustrate the computer's complete dominance over

the Discovery crew. Similarly, Kubrick again

using the still in 2001 to enhance the silent

enigma of the monolith looming over the

bewildered proto-historic man-apes. In The

Shining the still is almost exclusively used for

the recurrent master shot of the Overlook Hotel,

the epic cyclorama of the Colorado Rockies

framing its already imposing edifice, and

reinforcing our sense of the insurmountable

forces, both sociological and natural, bearing

down upon the Torrance family. Interestingly,

Kubrick often uses still shots of Jack Torrance

too, and by already establishing the still shot

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with the hotel, cleverly manipulates the audience

into a subconscious merging of Torrance with the

hotel.

Kubrick's Voyeurism.

Kubrick's camera, prying ceaselessly into the

most intermit corners of his character's lives,

brings a distinct ‘voyeuristic’ quality to his

films. The camera's POV as an omnipotent

‘Peeping Tom’ is often employed by Kubrick to

illustrate a character's obsession with

surveillance - most notably in the HAL 9000's

malevolent voyeurism in 2001. In The Shining,

Kubrick's ‘stalking’ camera become a voyeuristic

entity in its own right, as critic Stephen Shiff

observed:

“Most of the film feels like an endless subjective shot: we appear to be watching the hotel and its inhabitants through the eyes of an unearthly prowler, someone who sees very differently from the way we see.”6

Kubrick's creation of this ‘unearthly prowler’

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owes much to his use of the Steadicam. Kubrick

had personally shot his earliest films with a

hand-held 35mm Eyemo camera. Developed

principally for filming newsreel footage, the

Eyemo proved ideal for allowing the freedom of

movement and accessibility demanded by Kubrick's

developing style. Kubrick continued to use

hand-helds on his later films, but the heavy and

cumbersome nature of the professional hand-helds

made them difficult to manœuvre and their picture

quality shaky, limiting their use only for

specific shots - for example the Cat Woman's

murder in A Clockwork Orange (1971). When filming

of The Shining coincided with the development of the

Steadicam by the American cinematographer Garrett

Brown, Kubrick was quick to exploit the new

invention. With the Steadicam, which combined

technical sophistication with almost unlimited

movement, Kubrick's was able to return to the

freedom he had enjoyed with his Eyemo.

On The Shining, Kubrick shot an unprecedented

amount of footage with the Steadicam, where, as

mentioned above, the device takes on an almost

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supernatural life of its own. The critic

Alexander Walker writes:

“The Steadicam tailing Danny as he pedals his sturdy little tricycle down the hotel’s haunted corridors supplies an invisible companion far more chillingly than a wagging digit or ventriloquial trick courtesy of The Exorcist.”7

In The Shining, the Steadicam effects the audience

so powerfully not only because it creates the

impression of some un-known prowler following

Danny (Danny Lloyd), but more disturbingly, hints

that the audience and prowler - like Torrance and

hotel - are somehow one and the same. Kubrick

also inverts the Steadicam so as to shoot from

Danny's POV, further heightening the audience's

sense of his vulnerability.

Interestingly, Kubrick's use of the hand-held,

and its successor the Steadicam, make the

voyeuristic nature of his films strongly

reminiscent of the “fly on the wall” documentary.

7 Alex Walker, Stanley Kubrick - Director: A Visual Analysis, (London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), p.294.

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Kubrick began his career as a photojournalist

for the pictorial magazine Look. One of his

assignments was a photo-montage of a young prize-

fighter preparing for a fight, which also formed

the bases of his first film, a documentary short

entitled Day Of The Fight (1951). Many of

Kubrick's later stylistic techniques continued to

resemble those of photography and documentary -

most notably his cold objectivity and detached

POV.

One way in which this objectivity is created

technically is by Kubrick's frequent use of short

focal length or ‘wide-angle’ lenses which produce

extreme depth of field or ‘deep-focus’ - i.e.

where objects in the foreground, mid-field, and

background appear equally in focus but highly

exaggerated in comparative scale. This,

combined with Kubrick's habitual placing of his

actors in the mid-field, has the effect of making

his characters appear part of the visual image but

rarely the sole focus of it, and surrealistically

disproportionate to the surrounding architecture.

Kubrick's passion for deep-focus is another

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inheritance from Welles, who utilises it

extensively in Citizen Kane (1941), interestingly

another film dominated by documentary techniques.

Other Kubrick documentary devices include

captions, (‘chapter headings’ appear in both 2001

and The Shining), narration (newsreel of the

Discovery mission to Jupiter in 2001, and of

blizzards in The Shining), and interviews (news

interviews with the Discovery crew in 2001).

Kubrick's use of Structures.

Kubrick's style demands structural perfection

in his films. The brilliance in balance and

composition of Kubrick's images is remarkable -

the symmetrical fastidiousness of almost every

frame is surely a legacy of Kubrick's exacting

photographic eye, but also perhaps representative

of the director's deeper personality. LoBrutto

writes:

“Since Kubrick's early days as a still photographer, he had used a pictorial approach that centred his compositions. A centred image represents order, control, discipline, logic, and organisation - the very qualities inherent in Kubrick's personality and

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his psyche as an artist.”8

Kubrick's obsession with order may also have

resulted from his fascination with chess, as

LoBrutto also explains:

“In the years when he was developing hisskill as an image maker Kubrick spent hundreds of hours sitting over a chess-board - a visual emblem of order, with its sixty-four squares in eight rows of eight alternate dark and light blocks. The representation of a chessboard - real and symbolised - appears often in Kubrick's films.”9

Indeed, 2001 and The Shining reveal themselves to

be just as ordered as a chessboard - dominated,

physically and symbolically, by two rigid

structural forms: the straight line and the circle.

Kubrick's rectilinear structuring is most

powerful in the invisible lines drawn in the mind

by the convergent perspective of his ubiquitous

deep-focus shots. Kubrick often uses the power

of these subliminally ‘railroad tracks’ of

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9 Ibid., p.423.

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perspective to fix the point of focus as an

alternative to selective focusing. In The

Shining the convergent perspective of the

perfectly symmetrical hotel corridors not only

concentrates the eye down to a specific point of

focus, but also adds to the sensation of the

building's claustrophobic entrapment of its

victims. This effect is mirrored outside by

the passages of the giant maze, which continually

funnel down and lead the eye to a suspected

horror lying in wait at their end.

In fact Kubrick frequently uses architectural

structures to increase the audience's sense of

man's repression by external forces. As in the

previous example of Danny and the Steadicam,

Kubrick habitually uses low-angle shots to expose

the ceilings of sets and heighten their

architectural dominance, another technique

pioneered by Welles on Citizen Kane. This

architectural repression is further enhanced by

Kubrick's frequent use of wide-angle lenses,

which together with their depth of field also

produce the subtle optical effect of

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‘equidistant’ projection - i.e. a curving of the

image around the edges of the frame. In The

Shining, the wide-angle lens is particularly

effective in making the already architecturally

repressive hotel appear to be enveloping Torrance

- while the Steadicam wide-angle shots of Wendy

(Shelley Duvall) and Danny exploring the maze,

create the illusion that the hedges are folding

around them.

By contrast to the dominance in The Shining of

lineal imagery, 2001 is a film composed almost

entirely of circular structures. Here, Kubrick

uses this underlying circularity to subliminally

emphasise man's entrapment by invisible forces

beyond his control - both the physical and

metaphysical. In 2001 this circularity is

particularly evident in the architectural design

of edgeless, curving, revolving space stations

satellites. Again Kubrick enhances this with

the ‘wrap-around’ effect of wide-angle lenses,

which add to the already enveloping nature of

this architecture. Kubrick also takes the

effect to its extreme by using the ultra wide-

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angle or fisheye lens to depict the eye of the HAL

9000 and its monocular ensnaring of the Discovery

crew.

Metaphysically, circularity also seems to

equal entrapment. In The Shining, Torrance is

trapped circularly in a perpetual time-loop,

doomed for eternity to re-enact his terrible

crimes - while in 2001 the “The Dawn of Man” on

the African savannah is mirrored by the last

enigmatic image of his re-birth as a Star Child,

and again a mysterious cyclic return to his

origins.

Kubrick reinforces this mysterious cyclical

regeneration through language - a favourite

Kubrick yardstick of man's level of humanity or

de-humanisation. In 2001, Kubrick parodies

mankind's return to pre-cognitive inarticulacy in

the HAL 9000's slow wind down from crystal clear

articulation to childish rendition of “Daisy,

Daisy.” - while in The Shining, Torrance

degenerates from raconteur and aspiring literary

genius to prattler of the second hand catch-

phrase “He-e-e-e-e-re's Johnny!”

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Similarly, musical symmetry also functions in

creating this circularity. This is

particularly noticeable in 2001, where humanity's

odyssey from primitive genesis, through

technological mastery, and eventual return to

embryonic innocence, is shadowed by the

primordial percussion of Thus Spake Zarathustra

(Richard Strauss) forming the prelude and coda to

the heights achieved in the strict rhythmical

perfection of The Blue Danube (Johann Strauss).

Technically, editing was fundamental in

creating many of the above subliminal structures.

Kubrick placed great emphasis on editing,

devoting a tremendous amount of post-production

time to the process, as he himself revealed:

“When I am editing, I work seven days a week. In the beginning I work ten hours a day and then as we get closer tothe deadlines I usually push that up to fourteen or sixteen hours a day.”10

Kubrick, like so many, had learnt from

Eisenstein the limitless dramatic possibilities

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of cinematic montage, but he had also discovered the

power of montage through his own photo-montage

studies for Look magazine. In montage, the

director can create associations in the

subconscious of the audience simply through the

juxtaposition of opposing shots. For example,

in The Shining, Jack Torrance wandering through the

‘labyrinth’ of the hotel is cut with Danny and

Wendy walking through the literal ‘labyrinth’ of

the maze. Later, as Torrance stands looming

like a colossus over a scale model of the maze,

Kubrick immediately cuts to an aerial shot of

Danny and Wendy entering its heart. Here,

through cinematic montage, Kubrick creates in the

subconscious of his audience the association of

hotel as the labyrinth and Torrance as its

Minotaur.

Kubrick and the Actor.

Although Kubrick did utilise some innovative

techniques to assist his performers - his use of

improvisation and ‘mood music’ greatly assisted

the performances of the extrovert Nicholson and

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the inexperienced Danny Lloyd respectively in The

Shining - it is clear that Kubrick considered that

the main responsibility of creating and fleshing

a role lay squarely in the hands of the actor

concerned. Vincent LoBrutto writes:

“Kubrick never gave his actors too much direction. He listened to suggestionsand worked by having them refine their characterisations through constant searching for every nuance in the scene by shooting repeated takes.”11

Kubrick's repeated takes may also to have been

deliberately designed for their psychological

effect on the actor, and consequent stylistic

effect on his performance - another technique

which may have originated from Kubrick's

photographic background. Author Frederic

Raphael observed:

“There is nothing that a serious photographer wants less than a model that smiles. On the contrary, he wants for his subject to be bled of personality. He clicks on, and on, until they reveal their real appearance

11 Ibid., p.403.

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by no longer having the energy or the will to put a good face on themselves.”12

The director John Boorman makes a similar

point:

“Kubrick likes to do many takes. JackNicholson told me that on The Shining, Stanley sometimes did seventy or eighty takes on a set-up, when I saw the film Icould see what Kubrick had been up to. He was trying to get performances that came out of extremity, exhaustion.”13

Through this slow psychological stripping away

of his actor's will-power, Kubrick often

succeeded in revealing the more primitive, more

instinctive, and more haunting facets of an

actor's performance - an effect frequently

exploited in creating the predominately

‘dehumanised’ characters which inhabit Kubrick's

worlds, and one which contributes greatly to the

overall stylistic vision of his films.

Conclusion.

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13 John Boorman, The Emerald Forest Diary, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), p.173.

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Kubrick's Style: ‘coldness’ or ‘dark vision’?

In the final analysis, Kubrick's exceptional

aesthetic skills clearly succeed in elevating

films like 2001 and The Shining to the level of high

art.

Yet there remains a constant criticism that

Kubrick's style is flawed by its ‘coldness’ -

i.e. his film's apparent lack of emotion, of

human scale, and dispassion towards characters.

This apparent ‘coldness’ is particularly

perplexing given Kubrick's clear humanist

ideology. Friends and colleagues generally

agree that Kubrick was a deeply sensitive and

perceptive man - one who cared passionately,

perhaps obsessively, about humanity and the

challenges to its survival.

In fact it appears that much of Kubrick's

‘coldness’ in his films stems from a deliberate

stylistic choice to focus less on man as an

individual, to permit a greater exploration of the

wider, and darker, questions about mankind as a

species.

Interestingly, Kubrick's films are often

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referred to as ‘epics’. Indeed the critic Jack

Kroll described The Shining as, “The first epic

horror film.”14 It could be argued that in many

ways a Kubrick ‘epic’ resembles less a

traditional Hollywood epic - like for example The

Searches (John Ford, 1956) - and much more the

theatrical ‘epic’ of Bertolt Brecht.

Like Brecht, Kubrick's stylistic techniques

often appear to produce a similar ‘alienation’

effect. Kubrick's objective POV, documentary

techniques, stylised use of music and language,

montage juxtaposition of images, narration and

captions, etc., all seem designed to distance his

audience from experiencing too much catharsis

with the events in his films, forcing them to be

viewed more dispassionately in their wider

sociological and philosophical context.

Kubrick characters also appear stylistically

‘Alienating’. Often representational,

sometimes bordering on caricature, they seem

designed to represent archetypes rather than

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fully fleshed-out naturalistic characters.

They are often capable of commenting objectively

about themselves without emotion, as is the case

with Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) and the other

‘super-natural’ inhabitants of the Overlook

Hotel, and Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary

Lockwood) in their dispassionate TV interview

aboard the Discovery in 2001.

Again, similar to Brecht's plays, Kubrick's

films often carry simple didactic messages which

effect the audience on a more instinctive level.

Kubrick's chosen collaborators on 2001 and The

Shining - Arthur C. Clarke and Steven King - both

habitually feature folk-stories, fables, and

fairy tales in their work (consider Torrance's

line “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!”),

many of which contain simple didactic ‘lessons’

at their heart, and are derived from the earliest

forms of popular drama - like the Morality and

Mystery plays. Interestingly, critic Myron

Meisel described The Shining as:

“Our first modernist medieval morality

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play.”15

Indeed, in The Shining, Jack Torrance appears to

represent less of an individual character and

more a kind of Everyman or Faust figure who,

tempted by evil, degenerates from apparent

civilised ‘family man’ to the axe wielding

‘animal’ inherent in his bestial subconscious.

The search for more allegorical story-lines may

also have influenced Kubrick's decision to work

in the horror genre. Kubrick has stated his

belief that:

“There's something inherently wrong withthe human personality, there's and evil side to it. One of the things horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious...”16

True, Kubrick's decision to work in the fields

15 Myron Meisel, “Why The Shining is a Fourteenth Century

Film.” Los Angeles Reader, (Los Angeles, California: May 13,

1980), p.4.

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of sci-fi and horror came from the shrewd business

sense of a committed independent film maker out to

exploit their themes for their box-office

potential (2001 was released to coincide with

man's first steps on the moon - while The Shining

capitalised the huge popularity of horror films

in the late 70s and early 80s, along with

classics like The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg,

1979) and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980),

both of which share strikingly similar story-

lines to The Shining), but it is also arguable to

say that these highly popular genres served to

lift Kubrick's films out of the art-houses and

into the mainstream cinemas, and consequently

function again similarly to medieval Morality plays

in spreading their message to the widest possible

audience.

In conclusion it is perhaps wrong to criticise

Kubrick's ‘coldness’. For all the majestic

technical orchestration and aesthetic brilliance

of his films, it is the cold detachment and

clinical objectivity of his work which remains

the most coherent of ‘Kubrickesque’ stylistic

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techniques, and arguably one of the most

influential in communicating Kubrick's ‘dark

vision’ to his audience.

BibliographyBaxter, John. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. London:

HarperCollins, 1997.

Boorman, John. The Emerald Forest Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.

Brown, Garrett. “The Steadicam and The Shining.” American Cinematographer. Los Angeles, California: August, 1980.

Dalton, Stephen. “Symphony For The Devil.” Uncut. London: IPC Magazines, April 2000, pp.52-74.

Dick, Bernard. F. Anatomy Of Film. 2nd edition. New York:St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. Oxford: Roundhouse Publishing Ltd, 1997.

Kozloff, Max. “2001.” Film Culture. No. 48-49, New York: Winter and Spring, 1970.

Kroll, Jack. “Stanley Kubrick's Horror Show.” Newsweek.New York: May 26, 1980.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick. London: Faber And Faber, 1998.

Meisel, Myron. “Why The Shining is a Fourteenth Century Film.” Los Angeles Reader. Los Angeles, California: May 13, 1980.

Raphael, Frederic. Eyes Wide Open. London: Orion Books Ltd, 1999.

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Shiff, Stephen. “The Shining.” Boston Phoenix. Boston, Massachusetts: June 17, 1980.

Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick - Director: A Visual Analysis. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.

FilmographyKubrick, Stanley (dir.) 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-

Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

Kubrick, Stanley (dir.) The Shining. Warner Brothers, 1980.

Kubrick, Vivian (dir.) The Making of The Shining. London: BBC, TX. 10th April, 1980.

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