The Culture is hardly understood by the people. For example, the “Cinematheque Francaise” presents the international exhibition about the american director Stanley Kubrick_ thanks to Christiane Kubrick, the widow of the director.Many of these scripts, clothes, decors, polaroid, and so more things were conserved in Childwickbury Manor (England) until the death of Kubrick. From time to time the exposition gonna move one of who is Los Angeles where lives Viviane_ the daughter of Stanley Kubrick.

It’s an extraordinary opportunity to look how Stanley Kubrick was meticulous on details to realise scenes, especially when he’s reffering to the painting of the surrealist and expressionist, he was not scared to schock the movie critics by showing how he sees us (the people) in a combination of the good and the bad who make at the same time laugh and scare the audience of teens and adults.

That’s all you spectators and his victimes can see when you look in the eyes of Malcolm Mc Dowell (Alex in “Clockwork Orange” (1971))

Stanley Kubrick, the cineast who explored with his camera the society and all the people, to schock many movie critics, was building in each movie an odyssey going to the eight step of the fear. And he want always to innovate as a visionary at that point that the cineasts who watch one of his film on the big screen didn’t know for example how he could realise at this time film’s techniques used in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). When fifty years ago the Russians send the first man in Space, people really believe to go in the space, particularly in the scene where there’s zero of gravity. The screenplay who was co-written by Stanley Kubrickand Arthur C. Clarck tell us the story of the American spaceship Discovery One who is bound for Jupiter. On board are two mission pilots and scientists astronauts Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) , and three other scientists who are in cryogenic hibernation. “Hal” (voiced by Douglas Rain) is the ship’s HAL900,the supercomputer, which runs most of Discovery’s operations.

Please check it out now:

When “2001: A Space Odyssey” triumph over the world and Stanley Kubrick has just crashed into the caste of directors” of genius. ” Everything is permitted and no project is too big for him now. ” He wanted now to make the final movie on Bonaparte” recalles Jan Harlan, his producer ever. For a design so vast, the American director want to know everything about Napoleon: “He read everything that exists on the subject in English”, says Jan Harlan. As if this were not enough, he offered the services of the largest specialist English that freelancing for a year in exchange for the right to disturb him at any time of day and night for a precision, a doubt or a point of history. Maniac for detail, Kubrick wants to know everything about Napoleon and envisages a reconstitution to the authentic … Meanwhile, an armada of assistants are sent to track all the places where Napoleon spent, real soldiers’ uniforms of Napoleon’s army arrived during the film of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and envisages a recovery in real! A bit expensive. He then thinks to make costumes for a quality “decreasing”. Extras for the foregrounds, a replica identical to those in the bottom of the battles, costumes cared less… the project, very ambitious, was dethroned by the competition, even if Nicholson, has revived a time. David Hemmings, the hero of “Blow Up”, must have been Napoleon. The Film should begin in three months, the Romanian army was mobilized for the battle scenes when MGM decided to stop everything. A similar project with Rod Steiger is already in preparation for the competition. “The actor was a real international star. The film could have been good and a big success. This incredible mass of documents, Taschen has drawn a fascinating book in which we suffer in place of Kubrick’s imagining the disappointment of having to abort his plan, as the research had been thorough and exhaustive. Locked in a box as “Napoleonic book,” 9 books reflect the breadth: 17 000 images of costumes, prints, drawings related to Napoleon, 15 000 photos of key places in his life, talks between Kubrick and the specialist at Oxford he had committed, the production notes of correspondence with various stakeholders around the project, the script … At the end of this extensive reading, we regret even more the film has never emerged.

If you have the time may I suggest you to see this big film:

If Stanley Kubrick has never created Napoleon‘s greatest film, he recycled very well his project into the film Barry Lyndon where he had seen everything in more big with the production designer Ken Adam, who had worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove. He asked Kubrick to visit the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built and prepared for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement. This was honored until after his death in 1999, when in 2000 the fact was revealed by Adam in the documentary on the making of The Spy Who Loved Me on the special edition DVD release of the movie.

It’s adapted of  the picaresque novel “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” written by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in serial form in 1844, about a member of theIrish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy. Thackeray, who based the novel on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish rakehell and fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney, later reissued it under the title The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon. Director Martin Scorsese has cited Barry Lyndon as his favorite Kubrick film. Quotations from it appeared in such disparate works as Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and Lars von Trier’s Dogville. 

Principal photography took 300 days, from spring 1973 through early 1974, with a break for Christmas. Many of the film’s exteriors were shot in Ireland, playing “itself, England, and Prussia during the Seven Years War.” Drawing inspiration are from ” the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough. The film as a whole was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, more than any other Kubrick’s film. Despite this, Barry Lyndon was not a box office success in the U.S., although the film found a great audience in Europe, particularly in France. As in his other films, Kubrick’s cinematography and lighting techniques were highly innovative. Most famously, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed Carl Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. This allowed many scenes to be only with the light of day or lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional diffused-light images reminiscent of the painting A Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssoucis (18th century).



Several of the interior scenes were filmed in Powerscourt House, a famous 18th century mansion in County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland. The house was destroyed in an accidental fire several months after filming (November 1974), so the film serves as a record of the lost interiors, particularly the “Saloon” which was used for more than one scene. The music you just hear is Handel ‘s Sarabnande was played in the movie ” Barry Lyndon “ and was later used by Coca Cola. Maybe cause the movie became so popular.

The work of Kubrick slowed considerably after Barry lyndon, the public got to wait five more years to see another movie. It’s the psychological horror film Shining (1980) co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring the excellent actor Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name written by Stephen King. The plot is about a writer who accept to go, with his wife and a young son, to work as an off-season caretaker in an isolated hotel. The son, who possesses psychic abilities, is able to see things in the future and past, such as the ghosts in the hotel. Soon after moving in, and after a paralyzing winter storm that leaves the family snowed in, the father becomes influenced by the supernatural presence in the haunted hotel; he descends into madness and attempts to murder his wife and son. Unlike most films by Stanley Kubrick, which saw a slow gradual release building on word-of-mouth, The Shining was released in a manner more like a mass-market film, opening at first in just two cities on Memorial Day, and then a month later seeing a nationwide release (including drive-ins) after extensive television advertising. Although initial response to the film was mixed, later critical assessment had been more favorable and it is now viewed as a classic of the horror genre. Film director Martin Scorsese, writing in The Daily Beast, ranked it as one of the best horror films. Film critics, film students, and Kubrick’s producer, Jan Harlan, have all remarked on the enormous influence the film has had on popular culture which ranges from other macabre thrillers. Danny (Danny lloyd) has had a terrifying premonition about the hotel and they come true when he turn at the corner:

Then Stanley Kubrick allowed his 17-year-old daughter, Vivian Kubrick, to make a documentary about the production of The Shining. Created originally for the BBC Television’s show Arena, the documentary offers rare insight into the shooting process of a Kubrick film. Created by Vivian Kubrick, it’s included on the DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases of The Shining. The film was shot entirely on London soundstages, with the exception of second-unit exterior footage, which was filmed in Colorado, Montana, and Oregon. In order to convey the claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth camera movement in enclosed spaces. Although used for a few scenes in a few previous motion pictures, the inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown, was closely involved with this production and regarded it as the first picture to fully employ the new camera’s potential.

The social context or point of view is for the film critic Jonathan Romney, that the film has been over time interpreted in so many different ways, as being about the crisis in masculinity, sexism, corporate America, and racism:

“It’s tempting to read The Shining as an Oedipal struggle not just between generations but between Jack’s culture of the written word and Danny’s culture of images….” Romney writes, “Jack also uses the written word to more mundane purpose – to sign his “contract” with the Overlook. “I gave my word,” [..] which we take to mean ‘gave his soul’ in the [..] Faustian sense. But maybe he means it more literally – by the end [..] he has renounced language entirely, pursuing Danny through the maze with an inarticulate animal roar.”

The Historical context is for Geoffrey Cocks that the film has a subtext about Native Americans to arguing that the film indirectly reflects Stanley Kubrick’s concerns about his fear of the Holocaust, and not the madness as we believed.

“Kubrick wanted his entire life to make a film dealing directly with that subject, but could never quite get the handle on it that satisfied him.”

Cocks is best-known as a cultural historian that focused the cultural impact of the Holocaust on subsequent Western culture. Cocks, writing in his book The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust, has proposed a widely discussed though controversial theory that all of Kubrick’s work is haunted by the Holocaust and in particular a strong though hidden holocaust subtext is in The Shining. This, Cocks believes, is why Kubrick’s screenplay goes to emotional extremes, omitting much of the novel’s supernaturalism and making the character of Wendy much more hysteria-prone.  Cocks places Kubrick’s vision of a haunted hotel in line with a long literary tradition of hotels in which sinister events occur, from Stephen Crane‘s short story, The Blue Hotel (which Kubrick admired) to the Swiss Berghof in Thomas Mann‘s novel The Magic Mountain, about a snowbound sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps in which the protagonist witnesses a series of events which are a microcosm of the decline of Western culture. In keeping with this tradition, Kubrick’s film focuses on domesticity and the Torrances’ attempt to use this imposing building as a home which Jack Torrance describes as “homey”.

The hotel is described by the manager as a place that was inhabited by the wealthy jet set…”all the best people”. Nonetheless, it is also a place of evil as Danny intuits with his shining ability when he asks Hallorann the cook “Is there something bad here?”. Cocks claims that Kubrick has elaborately coded many of his historical concerns into the film with manipulations of numbers and colors and his choice of musical numbers, many of which are post-war compositions influenced by the horrors of World War II. Of particular note is Kubrick’s use of Penderecki’s The Dream of Jacob to accompany Jack Torrance’s dream of killing his family and Danny’s vision of past carnage in the hotel, a piece of music originally associated with the horrors of the Holocaust. As such, Kubrick’s pessimistic ending in contrast to Stephen King’s optimistic one is in keeping with the motifs that Kubrick wove into the story.

So Kubrick made cool movie representing the good and evil, and the pulsions hidden in human nature. But seven years later he will extended his work with Full Metal Jacket by showing how the man are dressed to become killing machines. The film begins at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Paris Island, in South Carolina, U.S., where Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman relentlessly pushes his recruits through basic training in order to transform them from worthless “maggots” into motivated and disciplined.

Beneath appareances, Kubrick was against the wars and that’s why he made this movie which illustrates the big thoughts of his time about Vietnam War. In characteristic Kubrick style, the second half of the film jumps abruptly to Vietnam, following Joker (the hero), since promoted to sergeant. As a reporter for the United States military‘s newspaper, Star and Stripes, Joker occupies war’s middle ground, using jokes and sarcasm to detach himself from the carnage around him. Though a Marine at war, he is also a reporter and is thus compelled to abide by the ethics of his profession and it’s The Short-Timers (written by on Gustav Hasford) who was used as the basis of the film Full Metal Jacket.

In comparaison with his other films, we can say than Kubrick used always the more innovative cinema technic to better captivate the people into catastrophes of the world who hanted and threaten each brain by describing real life. And in comparaison to his other films, its critical status has increased immensely since its initial release.

Finally, ten years later, Kubrick given us access to the world of really married actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a wealthy Manhattan couple who guide us at the intro on a sexual odyssey. Here’s Eyes Wide Shut(1990):

The story of Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler‘s Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story in English), although the story has been moved from Vienna in the 1920s to New York City in the 1990s. It follows Dr. William Harford’s journey into the sexual underworld of New York City, after his wife, Alice, has shattered his faith in her fidelity by confessing to having fantasized about giving him and their daughter up for one night with another man. Until then, Harford had presumed women are more naturally faithful than men. This new revelation generates doubt and despair, and he begins to roam the streets of New York, acting blindly on his jealousy. And slowly he embarks on a night-long, sexually charged adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an underground cult with masks representing sexual beast.

After trespassing upon the rituals of a sinister, mysterious sexual cult, Dr. Harford thinks twice before seeking sexual revenge against his wife. Upon returning home, his wife now gives an anguished confession she has had a dream about making love to several men at once. After his own dangerous escapades, Dr. Harford has no high moral ground over her. The couple begin to patch their relationship.

Kubrick shot this drama’s film on london soundstage, because Kubrick lived in london sinds years now to be independent and by keeping a distance he arrived to fuck the system of the cinema who arrive to control what the cineasts do in the studios. In balance to his other films the big financial got to come from Holywood and Cannes to be the first to watch the movie. Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. In the United States and Canada, digitally manufactured silhouette figures were strategically placed to mask explicit copulation scenes.

  

Filmography

1953 Fear and desire.

1954 Killer’s Kiss.

1956 The Killing.

1957 Paths of Glory.

1960 Spartacus.

1962 lolita.

1963 Dr Strangelove.

1968 2001: Space Odyssey.

1971 A Clockwork Orange.

1975 Barry lyndon.

1980 Shining.

1987 Full Metal Jacket.

1998 Eyes Wide Shut.

Links:
Cinematheque Francaise:http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/expositions-cinema/kubrick/

Kubrick on the Web: http://www.cinematheque.fr/expositions-virtuelles/kubrick_web/index.php

http://www.arts.ac.uk/kubrick-gallery.htm

Related Links
http://www.clarkefoundation.org/
http://www.anthonyburgess.org/
http://kubrickfilms.warnerbros.com/