New Kubrick Perspectives
Yup, it’s Kubrick time again, however brief. Now that I have settled into my new yard and got most of the chores and arrangements completed, I have finally started to get stuck into this bruising book. It’s a series of academic level analysis of material culled from the Kubrick achieve to the London University Of Arts back in 2007. It’s taken a few years but researchers and analysts have started to put together a fascinating picture of a career which stretches back to the Greenwich Village bohemia of the late 1940’s to the sexy squalor of Soho’s Madame JoJo’s in the late 1990’s. I’m only about three essays in so far but I’ve picked up a few intriguing observations and thought strands – Kubrick was courting Joseph Heller to write Strangelove before Terry Southern or example – and then I found this;
the kubrick zoom from Connor Hinson on Vimeo.
Compounding is todays revelation on the best Kubrick Facebook Appreciation Society that somehow, someone is selling the rare import European Blu-Ray set for a mere 30 quid, which is quite a drop from the 150 quid it was trading for last year. Why? Because this is the only box set that features two newly commissioned documentaries which is not available on other media, and has been ruthless purged from YT and all the streaming sites. Only some kind mad fool would spend 30 English pounds on a boxed set containing films he already owns – well part from Strangelove which had been omitted from the widely available collection with all its controversial aspect ratios……..
Stanley Kubrick : A Life In Sounds / Candice Drouet from Really Dim on Vimeo.
In other news I did manage to see The Nice Guys last week and have started putting something together, and I’ve just booked tickets for a cool sounding Q&A at the weekend, with something a little more continental screening wise. I’ve been scouring the multiplexes for something to see to break up the week and what choices do we have? Alice Through The Looking Glass. X-Men: Apocalypse.Warcraft. Teenage Fucking Mutant Fucking Ninja Fucking Turtles Fucking Two. Worst summer season of the decade?
Ken Adam RIP (1921 – 2016)
For the Kubrickophile it has been something of a week of mourning, Tuesday was the anniversary of his passing in 1999, and just a couple of days ago we learned of the sad passing of Ken Adam, one of Stanley’s key production design collaborators. Alas I’m too busy to really do his contribution justice, but here is a flavour of the screen talks he conducted with Christopher Frayling a few years ago – I was privileged to see an identical event at the BFI but I can’t find any footage of that specific evening;
Naturally some Kubrick related material has resurfaced due to the anniversary, here is one of the more insightful articles on his final and still mysterious movie that still strengthens and deepens with age. Alongside picking up the Oscar for Barry Lyndon Adams is still best known for the Bond movies of course, but naturally I gravitate to arguably the most relevant and terrifying black comedy of all-time – a certain US presidential candidate just slips easily into this nightmare vision of power and insanity doesn’t he?
As for this weekend I’ll try to crowbar in screenings of Anomolisa and The Witch among two other films which I think look intensely essential, not to mention wrapping up my Melville season, crafting coverage of a certain Menagerie mecca that I saw this week and then prepare for two imminent and essential BFI screenings as part of this before we get to Kurosawa in April when we suicidally unleash the dogs of war. Oh, and I need to find a new place to live in the next six weeks. Madness, absolute, end of the world madness….
Dr. Strangelove (1964) – 35mm Show Reel
Another month, another Kubrick rarity unearthed, it seems as if the 50th anniversary and the renewed interest in the film is paying radioactive dividends. This is quite a find for we complestests, as this showreel features alternative takes and glimpses of missing scenes from the final picture, with the added bonus of narration from the legendary man himself – here’s part one;
A rather stilted delivery from Stanley don’t you think? Must be a temp track to cut the images to whilst he sourced a professional to replace the audio. I’m assuming that this is the type of extended peek that were (and indeed are) used to shop round for distributors at trade fairs and conferences, rather than designed for being seen by the general public. Anyway, here’s part two;
Or maybe it’s something he cut together for studio executives or th marketing department to give them inspiration for the publicity campaign? So many questions, so little time. I’ve also sourced perhaps the most illuminating and instructive essay on Eyes Wide Shut yet published, it’s a piece which comes closest to penetrating that enigmas numerous & mysterious layers – enjoy….
Dr. Strangelove (1964) 50th Anniversary
50 years ago to the very day the finest black comedy ever committed to celluloid was released, Stanley Kubrick’s ferocious cold-war satire Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love The Bomb. Firstly I think I need to make a full disclosure, yes I had tickets to see the film at the BFI last weekend complete with special Q&A guests, alas no I didn’t attend as I was out with friends having a jolly good time involving alcohol and Chinatown eateries so for once I put my social life ahead of my cinema life – fucking sue me. I have seen the film before at the BFI with legendary production designer Ken Adams in attendance back in those dark pre-blog days of around 2005, I will track it down eventually and craft a full review alongside all the remaining Kubrick texts (like I said I’ve got my cross-hairs set on A Clockwork Orange as part of the upcoming BFI Science Fiction season) so although I do feel a little guilty at evading this opportunity I can at least throw together a short tribute post to celebrate one of Stanley’s more terrifying achievements;
The film still casts a long phallic missile shaped shadow across just about every black comedy made over the past five decades, and every nuclear themed movie is measured against its radioactive blast radius, not to mention the etching of the War Room and Strangelove himself into popular culture as the sputtering idol of modern military insanity. As you may be aware the film was initially scoped as a earnestly serious movie on the then emerging concepts of MAD and Game Theory but as Kubrick delved into the material with his usual perfectionist poise he realised there was no way this would be swallowed by an audience, and the only way he could truly excavate the intellectual horror that was propagated by the evolving military industrial complex was through a comedic delivery system – mission accomplished. In terms of context it’s useful to consider that the film was being shot in London’s Shepperton studios as the world held its collective breath during the Cuban missile crisis, not to mention the film’s very first test screening was initially programmed for the now infamous date of November 22nd 1963, with that event prompting a few swift changes to the film’s dialogue. As you’d expect it was mauled by the right-wing press with the tediously predictable allegations of those responsible being ‘communists’, a rabid assertion which ignorant idiots always seem to vomit if any criticism is offered of their precious nationalist ideological infrastructure, and I’ve always enjoyed the revelation of a few NORAD inspectors touring the sets during production and turning pale and visibly distressed when they saw some of the technological details that Kubrick and his team had culled from publicly available mechanics and aeronautics manuals – apparently the CRM114 discriminator was absolutely spot-on.
I think what also made some viewers uncomfortable on a potentially unconscious level was precisely what mischievous screenwriter Terry Southern brought to the poker table (which was the design ethos Kubrick suggested for the War-Room), and that was the satirical melding of sex and death. The swooning, elegantly meandering B52 bombers are penetrated and de-couple to the romantic strains of ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ during the opening titles, and the film is replete with aphoristic boasts of impressive yields, powerful payloads and Sterling Hayden’s magnificently mentalist musings of ‘precious bodily fluids’. Infidelity and innuendo are endemic on both divides of the Iron Curtain, as these powerful men bolster their testosterone powered prestige on the world stage, sensuously interfering with the very infrastructure of civilisation which of course ends in an orgiastic series of multiple explosions. Whilst we’re on the subject someone really needs to commission Blue Movie, Southern’s Hollywood set novel which he dedicated to Kubrick (and whom at one stage he considered adapting), it’s tale of A grade Tinseltown stars actually consenting to full penetrative hardcore sex movies for general release, one assumes that such material was a little too transgressive even during the permissive 1960’s when now we are in the era of Nympomaniac for better or worse….
Naturally there are plenty of articles and dissertations being launched which supersede any comments I could make on the context of the film or its craft, however the truly terrifying reportage is here which shows just how close Kubrick and Southern came to nuking the paranoid mindset of the era, and let’s face sweet fuck all has changed in the intervening half century. I particularly like the image of some drunkenly obliterated US general insisting on staggering up on stage to blast out a few Beatles numbers in front of a shocked Soviet delegation, that’s pure Strangelove and one of those tales which you couldn’t put in a film for fear of being too ridiculous. More sobering is that jaw-dropping revelation that the Russkies infernal Doomsday Weapon actually exists, was implemented and they neglected to tell anyone else about it, and it may very well still be operational – oh well, it’s not the end of the world;
Minty's Menagerie 
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