THE CONTORTED FACE
A fascinating thread that runs through Kubrick's output is that in
EVERY film of his there is a character(s) who at one point become the
focus of the camera's attention while there face is most mangled
position:
Full Metal Jacket - Leonard when he is crazy in the head
The Shining - Jack Nicholson's face obviously, in several
scenes: Heeere's Johnny; looking out the window
at the snow; banging on the door or the pantry etc.
Barry Lyndon - Captain Quinn's face during his duel with Barry when
he goes to raise his pistol.
A Clockwork Orange - Alex obviously - the scene when he gets home
from the milk bar and after having set upon Billy Boy and the
residents of HOME. And the end of course.
2001 - When Bowman is going "beyond the infinite" there are several
scenes of his face being contorted.
Dr. Strangelove - The characters Gen. Buck Turgidson, Gen. Ripper
and Strangelove himself all exhibit the contorted face at
one time or another.
Lolita - Lolita herself makes a few of them, but James Mason doesn't
really make any of those severe face contortions that charac-
terize the others.
Paths of Glory - Kirk Douglas during the failed attack on the
anthill - his face gets twisted while blowing his whistle.
The Killing - Elisha Cook (George Petey) makes the weirdest of faces
when he kills his wife, her boyfriend and his hoodlum friend.
(R.P.)
THE USE OF SPACE
[The following was a dialogue on Kubrick's use of space which appeared
in the Kubrick newsgroup]
MG:
Frances Yates was an British scholar who specialized in hermetic
philosophy. She wrote a book called THE ART OF MEMORY (Two of her other
books are GIORDANO BRUNO & THE HERMETIC TRADITION AND THE ROSICRUCIAN
ENLIGHTENMENT.) The books can be tough going, but are well worth the
repeated readings.
THE ART OF MEMORY was about a mnemonic technique developed by classical
orators as a way of remembering a speech. They would form in their
minds an image of an architectural space (someplace large and open,
usually a place they were familiar with), and then they would place
within that space striking images and objects that reminded them of
various parts of the speech. When it came time to speak, they would
imagine themselves entering the architectural space and would proceed
through it, room by room, seeing the icons that would then jog their
memories. The space represented the structure of the speech, the icons
represented the content. One of the rules was that the icons should be
as striking as possible, even bizarre and grotesque. (To me, this
sounds like the Overlook, with its stillframe horrors, and its endless
snapshots of its history hanging on the walls. Also consider the
sealed-off spaces of the WWI trenches, the War Room and Burpleson Air
Force Base, Discovery, and Parris Island. And consider, of course,
Kubrick's penchant for bizarre iconic imagery.)
Later, during the Middle Ages, hermetic philosophers used the Art of
Memory for their own purposes, weaving it into their philosophy of a
pantheistic universe (for instance, seeing the icons as talismans that
would draw down the influence of the stars). (Sorry if I've only
confused the matter. Yates does a much better job at exposition.)
For me, the most important point is that these fictional internal
memory-scapes were used to catalog the contents of a person's mind, not
unlike the function of a personal computer or, eventually, virtual
reality, which will make objective and shareable the metaphor of a
personal architectural space. (All of which suggests that Kubrick is
much farther ahead of his time than most people realize.)
GA:
Wonderful; very much like what a friend of mine, and anthropologist
(and a friend & student of Jerome Rothenberg's) who said much the same
thing about the though patterns of meso-american peoples -- they too
used systems of architectural mnemonics.
Reading this I recall at once all the tracking shots of K's, most if
not all of which center a character walking through a maze or set of
hallways -- THE SHINING of course but remember all those similar shots
in CLOCKWORK; and even the handheld shots following Bowman & Poole
around the ship in 2001. Even in STRANGELOVE, the camera following the
crew up and down the fuselage of the plane, and in FMJ, the final
scenes through the burned-out maze of buildings (or the camera
following Bowman as he wanders about the alien's hotel suite . . . )
. . . describing just as much the topology of the place as carrying
forward the narrative of the characters actions; as though the place,
its shape, its look & feel itself held the Message, and not the
action . . .
MG: The tracking shots are definitely part of it. So are the faces. But
as with everything in Kubrick, these elements work on so many levels,
and play off from each other in so many complex ways, that it's very
hard to hold a good representation of it in your mind. (For example,
remember that Kubrick first used the corridor tracking shot, in
KILLER'S KISS, to represent a dream. And faces are used, in all the
films, as an alienation effect. As far as faces representing an
emotional index, see below.) That might be one reason why there's been
so little good writing on Kubrick -- Any attempt to articulate the
experience becomes a parody, because it does so little justice to the
original experience. The best writing has come from people, like
Annette Michelson and Gene Youngblood, who have staked claims on small
pieces of territory and then mined them for all they're worth,
fractally hoping that the part would somehow stand in for the whole.
But I digress . . .
THE SHINING might be the best example of the (hypothetical) use of the
Art of Memory. It's an isolated space that stands-in for an historical
whole (the history of America). (What's really spooky is that it
anticipated the whole direction of the 80s -- but that's another
digression.) The movie revolves around memory (shining), especially
subjective or fractured memory. Subjective: Wendy experiences the hotel
as a series of horror movie cliches; Jack sees it as a vice den; Danny,
the innocent, sees it for what it is. They create the space as
projections of themselves. Fractured: The disorienting intersection of
Jack's real-time experience and Danny's memory (his shining to
Halloran) when Jack encounters the naked woman in the bathroom. Also,
paper memory, in the form of the scrapbook containing the hotel's
history that sits on Jack's writing table (which could be seen as the
document that sends Jack over the edge). The icons: the Indian motifs
dominate the architecture (and the site, a burial ground) while the
official history populates the walls in staid black & white photos, all
the same size. (And this is a dead giveaway, but Kubrick quotes Diane
Arbus' Identical Twins, and Kubrick and Arbus were friends. He quotes
Jim Thompson, from THE KILLER INSIDE ME, and he and Thompson were
friends.) . . .
OBJECTIVITY: THE ARTIST PARING HIS FINGERNAILS (THE "COLD")
Kubrick's "coldness" has always been a point of critics. Even
Ray Bradbury, criticizing 2001, said that the "freezing touch of
Antonioni" hovers over Kubrick in this film. And Harlan Ellison
described Kubrick's view as so remote that it's almost alien -- this,
while praising Kubrick as one of the few authentic artists in film.
The coldness we see in Kubrick's work is there, but I think
it's a result of Kubrick trying to look at the human condition as
rationally as he can. After all, in DR. STRANGELOVE, we were willing
to destroy the world over economic and political differences that,
five hundred years from now, will seem meaningless. (Anyone remember
15th century ecclesiastical debates?) _2001_ wasn't about the human
characters at all, and the central character of _A Clockwork Orange_
was the subject of a very cold medical experiment. _Barry Lyndon_
forced this same distance on us as well -- these were people long dead,
whose goals were as ephemeral as the paper their eternal bills and
checks were written on.
Is Kubrick really this cold? I doubt it; there are scenes in
his films of genuine human pain and caring, but presented in an
observational, we're-watching-people-with-hidden-cameras style. The
death of Barry's son, and the horror of the final duel. That awful
scene between Jack and Danny, where Jack tells Danny he wants to stay
in the hotel "forever and ever." The exchage between Joker and Cowboy,
where they both 'agree" not to discuss Pyle's collapse, and Pyle's own
mental implosion.
But I think that the coldness people see in Kubrick's films is
mainly his observational stance. It's one of the things I like about
his films.
(B.S.)
USE OF PARALLEL MISE-EN-SCENE
According to the Russian theorists, Kubrick's point in 2001 that Man had
not evolved emotionally since the missing link should have been made by
crosscutting between the apes and the humans. Instead, Kubrick stages
and shoots the sequence where the astronauts discover the Monolith
exactly the same way that he stages and shoots the scene where the apes
discover the Monolith. By the same token, the scene around the coffee
table with Dr. Floyd and the Russians, involving mounting tension as the
discussion progresses, is shot and staged in a way similar to the scene
in which the opposing groups of apes congregate around the water hole.
Kubrick's methodology here is subtle and ambiguous; had he shot it using
cross-cutting, more people may have "gotten" his point, but it would not
have had nearly as much power as it does.
(F.B.26)
INTERTEXTUALITY
There is a degree of `intertextuality' to Kubrick's films which goes far
beyond that in any other director of whose work I have any knowledge.
I am not referring here to certain directorial `trademarks', for example
Kubrick's recurrent distorted facial close-ups, or even his love of
eighteenth-century settings. What I have in mind are certain recurrent
elements in the films of which I have experienced. A few examples off
the top of my head:
1. The colour scheme for the scene on board the space station between
Dr. Floyd and the Russians in _2001_. The walls are dazzling white; the
chairs are red. This same colour scheme recurs in the washroom scene
between Jack and Delbert Grady in _The Shining_.
2. When Lord Bullingdon enters Barry's club in London to challenge Barry
to a duel near the end of _Barry Lyndon_, his dress and the motion of
the camera recalls Alex's progress through the record bar in _A
Clockwork Orange_.
3. The record bar shot in _A Clockwork Orange_ ends with a copy of the
_2001_ soundtrack in view.
4. In _Full Metal Jacket_, the composition of the shots for Joker's
discovery of the bodies in the pit recollects the scene in _2001_ where
Dr. Floyd discovers the Tycho Monolith.
5. Various scenes in _Full Metal Jacket_ recollect scenes from Barry's
short-lived military career in _Barry Lyndon_.
I am sure there are many more such echoes in Kubrick's work. . . . these
serve to me as signposts that there is a unity of themes between
Kubrick's films.
This is not to say that Kubrick is ever guilty of repeating himself, but
rather that he is always re-examining those themes from different
angles, shaped by the nature of the project he is undertaking.
(C.C.)
SUBTLETY
Traditional films tend to tell you what to think and feel every step of
the way. There is a kind of fear that pervades the classical cinema,
part of it a reflection of the culture and its fear of disruption and
outsiders, part of it a reflection of the rigid assembly-line structure
put in place by the never-benign studio patriarchs. (THIS, more than
storytelling and characters, which were already pretty moribund
concepts, is what hyper-moguls like Spielberg and Lucas have brought
back to cinema.)
Kubrick uses a more open-ended, less authoritarian approach. He places
the pieces out there in the way that pleases him most and then says, in
effect, "see what you can make of this." This allows the viewers the
option of investing their emotions in the work, unguided by the
characters. It also offers the viewers the option of rejecting the work
if they want to (as many have). Rather than approach the films through
the predetermined gateway of the hero (which, for instance, forces most
women to either stand outside the film or see it from a, usually,
hostile viewpoint), Kubrick encourages the viewer to approach the film
directly, with as little mediation as possible.
(M.G.)
After showing a film short I had produced to a few close friends, I was
fascinated to see how their "mistaken" readings were so rich and
detailed in comparison to the general feeling I had tried to convey.
They weren't outside the theme of the film, but were rather more
exegetical than I would have expected. They saw things that weren't
there, but when I reviewed my own work, I could see them too. I decided
I'd clam up about my "intent" from then on. Viewers must have more fun
than directors, and I'd rather not spoil it.
After the personal experience of this phenomenon, my approach to
criticism changed. I now sometimes saw those obscure objects of
subtextual suggestion as words in the filmic poem, in which the author
may have intended nothing more than what you immediately apprehend --
and maybe to tease your imagination a little. If I wrote eerie verse of
ghosts and murders and little boys fleeing their slavering bloodthirsty
dads, penned it in red white and blue ink, and arranged the stanzas in
the shape of the US flag, what would you "read" in it? Seems a bit
sophomoric and heavyhanded to me, actually. Kubrick is so much better,
his hints at themes so subtly intertwined in the fine braided thread of
the story that they are at the edge of perception. They are the
flickering shapes behind closed eyelids whose meaning is only directed
by subjective forces, set and setting. Then he provides the immediate
visual and aural set, and the novel psychic setting, and lets you do the
rest. A little hint here and a little hint there . . . and lookit!
they're seeing murdered Indians and profound social commentary. By god
that's good. That's very good. Glad I didn't use Arm & Hammer!
(J.D.)
SYMMETRY
In 2001, the scenery, the setting, is as much one of the 'actors' as the
humans are. The malevolent hotel [in THE SHINING] isn't just an
assemblage of rooms and passages: it's a character in its own right,
swallowing up Nicholson and his family. 2001's spaceships, corridors and
control panels perform a similar function, swallowing up humanity into
their disinfected, air-conditioned machinery, so that the people emerge
as disinfected machines. THE SHINING's monstrous hotel spits its human
victims out as monsters. And the killing field of FULL METAL JACKET's
Vietnam churns out killers. Humanity is a victim of such environments.
But these environments are man-made. The puzzle loops in on itself.
. . .
People shape the world around them, and are then shaped in turn by the
worlds they have created. Kubrick charts the manmade landscapes of human
experience truthfully. On his canvas, the people are indivisible from
the background. The gaming board becomes indivisible from the people who
sit down to play on it. . . .
[W]atch also for the extreme symmetries (the oh-so-neat squares on the
board) which presage disaster in so many of Kubrick's films. BARRY
LYNDON is awash with sumptuous architectural elegance. The war room of
DR. STRANGELOVE is geometric to an extreme. 2001 is chock-full of
symmetrical cabins and corridors. In FULL METAL JACKET, a crucial scene,
the training sergeant's murder, takes place in a sterile white latrine.
US army training barracks have latrines from a standard-issue pattern, a
tidy row going along one wall. Abandoning his usual hyperaccuracy in
favour of slight artistic license, Kubrick specially created a set with
two rows, on opposing walls. Why? So that the bloodspattered slaughter
could take place among symmetry. The icy white of the washroom opposes
the mess of spilled blood. Hal's brain room in 2001 is just like those
latrines: a symmetrical chamber of execution. . . .
Time and again, human plans are drawn up, hatched, in offices and
conference rooms of hypnotic, even stupefying, geometric regularity;
2001's square moonbase conference room; a manager's office in THE
SHINING's hotel; the generals' palatial headquarters in Paths of Glory.
The hotel in THE SHINING is a mass of corridors and stainless steel
kitchen storerooms. (There are aural symmetries too. Remember the young
boy's tricycle on the parquet flooring, whizzing onto a rug, off the
rug, onto the next rug, back onto the floor: whirrr, clump, whirrr,
clump . . . ?) Kubrick uses symmetry to achieve two very specific
effects: firstly, to lull an audience into a sense of false security,
and secondly, to parody or counterpoint the ensuing chaos, the asym-
metrical destruction. Danny's extravagant tricycle-rides around the
hotel are repeated several times as joyride, rollercoaster, guided tour.
Just when we think we've seen the ride, he sets off on another one, a
tricycle trip too many (yawn . . .) and WHUMP! The wheels stop, the
little feet falter on the pedals. Suddenly we have a spooky pair of twin
girls, a liftshaft full of blood, a man wearing a sinister rabbit mask -
- just when we thought we were getting a bit bored with all this
tricycle riding.
In 2001 Kubrick jets Poole into the abyss on a similar -- no, an exact
replica -- of Bowman's previous and more or less uneventful spacewalk.
The doors slide apart, the pod emerges, the hatch opens, the spacesuited
figure is birthed into the immense vacuum like an insect emerging from
an egg. Yes, we've seen this bit already, thank you. Ah, but we haven't
. . . As our eyes begin to wander, the routine is broken. A pod hurtles
towards us, its claws grappling for murder. We, the audience, have our
own little plan, and that's to sit there in the dark, imagining (what
fools we are) that we know what's going on, what we've seen and what we
haven't. Kubrick dashes our plans too, by introducing major dramatic
moments, major plot calamities, just at the point where we are drifting
off to sleep. His use of dramatic tension is seldom highlighted by
warning wails or ta-dums in the soundtrack. He tricks us just as the
gods do -- when we least expect it, when we are half-asleep with
complacency. Kubrick's screen people set out their pieces in neat rows
and start to play, only to find that the very chessboard itself reaches
out and turns them into pawns in some other, some deeper and less
tangible game. . . .
(P.B., pp. 148-9)
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