The cult of Stanley Kubrick

By T.G. | BARCELONA

UNLIKE books or paintings, films are never the work of an individual: they are products of a collective, and children of compromise. But if any director could be called a one-man band, it was Stanley Kubrick. He was obsessive about every aspect of his films, from scriptwriting through to how they were projected in individual cinemas, and so was considered a unique kind of auteur. Both his life’s work and his legend are explored in a travelling exhibition, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), his magnum opus. Having toured America, Canada, Australia and Europe, it is currently on show in Barcelona and will move to London in 2019.

The exhibition is a thrill for film fans. Except for Kubrick’s first works, each film has a room to itself, filled with props, projections of scenes, scripts, storyboards, cameras and lenses. Jack Nicholson’s axe from “The Shining” hangs next to a clip showing how Kubrick pioneered the use of the Steadicam (a lightweight camera mount that allows for smooth tracking shots). A cabinet of outraged letters is adjacent to the scene in which Humbert Humbert lays eyes on Lolita for the first time. The technical wizardry of the space scenes in “2001” is explained next to a missive from Kubrick telling his colleagues not to reveal the film’s secrets under any circumstances. Each room offers a mix of nerdish nostalgia, film history and technological innovation.

The exhibition is organised chronologically, which allows the visitor to follow Kubrick’s own evolution. After a few forgettable early films, he made “Paths of Glory” (1957) with Kirk Douglas. Mr Douglas got him his next gig directing “Spartacus” (1960), the only all-Hollywood production Kubrick would ever make, and his first box-office hit. He hated the experience. Disenchanted with the industry—and having developed a phobia of flying—he set his family up in England, and never again travelled far from home. This geographical isolation, along with the relative paucity of his output (13 feature films and three documentaries) and rumours about his work practices, magnified his reputation for artistic integrity and perfectionism.

That reputation was solidly grounded in fact, for Kubrick’s attention to detail was exacting. He would choreograph every footstep an actor took in each scene. He once scouted an entire city to find the exact door he wanted for a single shot. He regularly did hundreds of takes: he filmed one scene in “The Shining” 127 times (and in the end did not even use it). This challenging approach had repercussions, of course. “Eyes Wide Shut” took 400 days to film, making it the longest shoot in history. And Kubrick didn’t just direct—he led the casting, lighting, shooting, marketing and publicity—complicating matters further.

What was the point of all this? One answer is that Kubrick’s chosen projects demanded it. His films lean on symbolism, using images to tell the story and reveal meaning rather than dialogue, which is often rather thin. “2001”, for example, is a non-verbal experience: out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are fewer than 40 minutes of dialogue. “The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated,” he said. “When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.”

Hence, for a certain type of fan, his films are cryptic puzzles to be solved. The cult of Kubrick feeds on the illusion of total control: it assumes that nothing in his films is accidental, and it sees patterns forming like fractals across his works. Everything is charged with significance. Take the image of a Native American on a can of baking powder in “The Shining”. That is one hint, some say, that the film is about genocide. Room 237, the haunted room in the hotel that the characters are warned never to enter? That number refers to the mean distance between the earth and the moon, and is a clue about Kubrick’s involvement in faking the moon landings. In his films, Kubrick exists as a kind of deep state, while his fans are conspiracy theorists.

Of course the illusion that fuels those theories is just that: an illusion. For all his will to control, Kubrick is not an omniscient presence in his films, for total control is impossible and a film-maker can never control what the audience makes of it, anyway. Instead Kubrick emerges from this exhibition a quixotic figure, one whose relentless pursuit of control was at once astonishing and pointless, impressive and ridiculous in equal measure.