The Kubrick Legacy

Mick Broderick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367788094
• eBook ISBN: 9780429594908
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The six chapters assembled in The Kubrick Legacy showcase important trends in the evolution of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's artistic legacy.

In the 20 years since his death an enormous range of information and scholarship has surfaced, in part from the Kubrick estate's public preservation, archiving, exhibition and promulgation of the auteur's staggering collection of research materials and film artefacts. These essays from international scholars chart incarnations of the official Kubrick exhibition of extensive artifacts touring the globe for the past decade; the filmmaker's lasting impact on established authors with whom he collaborated; the profound influence of Kubrick's use of existing music in film scores; the exponential rise of conspiracy theories and (mis)interpretation of his work since his death; the repeated imitation of and homage to his oeuvre across decades of international television advertising; and the (re)discovery of Kubrick on screen in both documentary form and dramatic characterization.

The Kubrick Legacy provides a tantalizing, critical snapshot of the enduring impact and influence of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic and consummate screen artists.

1 The Kubrick legacy

An introduction

Mick Broderick

2018 was an auspicious year for the Kubrick legacy and one that bodes well for the future. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the past 12 months have witnessed multiple events and celebrations, alongside other cultural and artistic manifestations, to honor Kubrick’s landmark production. In May of that year filmmaker Christopher Nolan presented an analogue, “unrestored” 70mm print of the movie during the Cannes Film Festival and has promoted its exhibition at select U.S. theaters still equipped with 70mm projectors (Sopan 2018). In the U.K. a set of commemorative stamps were stuck by the Isle of Man post office to honor the movie’s production and release. Showcasing key artifacts from the Kubrick estate, the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt presented Kubrick’s 2001: 50 Years A Space Odyssey exhibition. Reprising a previous Los Angeles exhibition, British artist Simon Birch installed his large immersive work “The Barmecide Feast” at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum as the centerpiece of a display celebrating the anniversary of 2001’s release. The massive artwork reconstructs the faux Louis XIV-era bedroom that houses David Bowman’s rapid evolutionary transformation at the conclusion of 2001.¹

The vast 1,000m² official Stanley Kubrick traveling exhibition continues to roll out across the globe with shows in Copenhagen and Mexico City during 2017, and next on display in Barcelona from October 2018 to March 2019 and London from April to September 2019 (Deutsches Filmmuseum 2018). Since it premiered in Germany in 2004, to date, well over a million attendees have visited the exhibit in Europe, Australia, Central America, Asia, North America, and South America.

Corresponding with this public outreach of artifacts and memorabilia, a number of key publications on the film and Kubrick’s other artistry have appeared this anniversary year. Michael Benson’s adroit and comprehensive history, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster), and James Fenwick’s scholarly collection Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (Intellect), provide fascinating and compelling insights into the filmmaker and his creative approach. Anthony Frewin’s compendium of 2001’s excised prologue, Are We Alone: The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestrial-Intelligence Interviews (Ashgrove), is fortunately now back in print with an updated introduction. There’s even an adult coloring book: Stanley Kubrick Universe Inspired Coloring Book: The Greatest and the Most Influential Director, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove Mastermind (CreateSpace).

Other recently published contributions to the burgeoning field of Kubrick studies range from Nathan Abrams’s deeply researched study, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers U.P.), and self-published fan appraisals such as Todd Alcott’s marginal Kubrick: Five Films: an Analysis (2018), through to Luc Sante’s largely pictorial book Stanley Kubrick Photographs: Through a Different Lens (Taschen America). The latter further renews interest in the filmmaker’s pre-cinematic visual work as a staff photographer for Look magazine and serves to catalogue the recent exhibition of Kubrick’s pictures at the Museum of the City of New York (Lang 2018; MTCNY 2018).

The past few years have been equally fecund, demonstrating that Kubrick’s legacy remains ripe for research and scholarship, including books by principal (new history) Kubrick scholar Peter Krämer on Dr. Strangelove, among others; the art publisher Black Books’ collection of essays edited by Krämer, Tatjana Ljujic, and Richard Daniels, Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, largely informed by holdings at the Stanley Kubrick Archive; my own revisionist archival history, Reconstructing Strangelove; and the informative and sometimes moving (auto)biography Stanley Kubrick and Me: Thirty Years at His Side by one of Kubrick’s trusted assistants, Emilio D’Alessandro (with Filippo Ulivieri). The latter book inspired the documentary S is for Stanley (Dir: Alex Infascelli, 2015) featuring D’Alessandro. A similar biographical documentary, Filmworker (Dir: Tony Zierra 2018), highlighted the vicissitudes of Leon Vitali, long-time Kubrick assistant, collaborator, and Barry Lyndon actor (Lord Bullingdon). Kubrick’s legacy can thus be understood as additionally influencing and impacting his contemporary worker-collaborators (and their loved ones) in both demanding and stimulating ways. One wonders when other staunch and steadfast Kubrick aides—such as Anthony Frewin, Margaret Adams, and Andros Epaminondas—will have their significant contributions similarly heralded.

Evidence of the Kubrick legacy also includes regular live performances of the classical music used to accompany screenings of 2001 and Barry Lyndon. Memorabilia from the filmmaker’s productions is in constant demand via online auctions, such as those on eBay, where at any given time a search on “Kubrick” will reveal tens of thousands of items—from authentic studio marketing materials (stills, lobbycards, posters, press kits) and their reproduction, to many thousands of fan-based artworks, including t-shirts, socks and jackets displaying motifs, phrases or key images from every film, and portraits of the director himself. Other eBay items replicate props with great precision, including masks for sale in 2018 by a Venetian craftsman, duplicating those worn in Eyes Wide Shut.

Premium Kubrick memorabilia occasionally features at Sotheby’s auctions. In July 2017 a hand-corrected set of page proofs for the heavily illustrated Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange: Based on the Novel by Anthony Burgess (New York: Ballantine Books) fetched £9,000 at nearly twice the estimate.² A single 8 ¾ × 8 ¼ inch (22.2 × 21 cm) black and white ferrotyped photo titled “Mickey, the Shoeshine Boy,” taken by Kubrick for Look magazine, was sold in April 2010 by Sotheby’s for US$18,750. Five letters from Kubrick to the Boulting Brothers, written during the pre-production of Dr. Strangelove, were recently sold for £1,875 by Bonhams auctioneers.

The Kubrick legacy also abounds via global fandom, especially with the advent of social media and crowd-sourced research to complement existing websites dedicated to the memory of the filmmaker and his oeuvre. Such enthusiasm almost daily unearths gems of detail and information, often ‘correcting’ or re-interpreting existing orthodoxies. One such example is the recent upload and circulation of a previously unknown interview for Japanese television from 1980, where Kubrick’s voice over the telephone is recorded, on camera, answering questions about the “meaning” of the ending of 2001 and The Shining, something the writer-director-producer assiduously refused to summarize or otherwise interpret in public for decades (Yaoi 1980).

Tapping into this reappraisal and renaissance, The Kubrick Legacy is a modest attempt to showcase a variety of scholarly approaches to the lasting cultural resonances of the renowned filmmaker. As such, it deliberately seeks to complement and advance my 2017 edited dossier “Post-Kubrick” (Broderick 2017), drawn from a range of papers delivered at the 2016 Stanley Kubrick: Cult Auteur conference and exhibition in Leicester—a lively gathering that has spawned subsequent collections (Fenwick, Hunter, and Pezzotta 2017a, 2017b).

The six essays collected here each present representative samples of the Kubrick legacy as discreet case studies. Naturally, these examples are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Future work will be better paced to provide more comprehensive evaluations as to Kubrick’s intellectual, emotional, industrial, and artistic endowment. The contribution by Dru Jeffries, “Kubrick and curation: inside TIFF’s Stanley Kubrick: the exhibition,” cogently interrogates how the processes of curation and organization involved in the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) staging of the Kubrick estate-sanctioned exhibition contribute to the management of the filmmaker’s official legacy. Deploying interviews with TIFF staff and careful analysis of the exhibition itself, Jeffries explores how Stanley Kubrick is represented as a curatorial ‘presence’ throughout the exhibition. The author demonstrates how the TIFF exhibition (especially in combination with its gift shop) embodies a larger trend within film culture whereby auteurs are increasingly understood through paratexts, both official and fan-made, that can circulate more freely than films.

Kubrick’s influence on the writers who worked in collaboration with him is exemplified in Graham Allen’s “The rise of Doctor Strangelove: Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, Herman Kahn, and a New World morality.” Allen maintains that one of the purposes of studying adaptation is to allow, periodically, for a reassessment of the dominant assumptions concerning the relation between films and their non-filmic, largely literary, intertexts. The essay considers the impact of Peter George’s intense collaboration with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and the writer’s follow-up, post-holocaust novel, Commander-1, explicitly dedicated to Kubrick, and crafted specifically as an historical response to the rapidly evolving global nuclear threat.

In “Looking back, looking ahead: Kubrick and music,” Christine Gengaro considers the ways in which Kubrick’s musical choices have influenced other filmmakers (e.g. Terrence Malick as an obvious ‘inheritor’) and the greater role Kubrick’s style and choices have played in the manner films are scored post-2001: A Space Odyssey. According to Gengaro, studying Kubrick’s films makes one aware of pre-existent music in film scores across film history, and she skillfully demonstrates that Kubrick is a major part of this legacy, asserting there is perhaps no other director so responsible for such a significant shift in film scoring techniques.

One curious and confounding legacy of Kubrick’s films, and his mutable public persona, is the perpetuation of spurious claims surrounding his life and artistic praxis. In “Dramatizing Kubrick: Room 237 and other conspiracies,” Manca Perko examines the phenomenon by studying some of the more extreme readings of Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), as presented in Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (2012) and other ‘conspiracy’ theories circulating in popular culture, such as YouTube videos of Kubrick’s alleged ‘confession’ to filming the moon landing, and in-depth explanations of it as seen in Dark Side of the Moon: Stanley Kubrick and the Fake Moon Landings (2014). Perko argues that these dubious representations and evaluations of screen art in popular culture affect readings, not only of Kubrick’s films, but the wider perception of his legacy in social and cultural contexts.

Traditional television advertising has arguably been the most influential and possibly invasive form of audio-visual exposure in Western culture. James Marinaccio’s chapter, “Kubrick: tropes in advertising,” pivots to those commercials (over 100) from the early 1980s onwards that draw from Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. Marinaccio identifies aspects of Kubrickian homage (or influence) in TV advertising, especially 2001 and The Shining, while noting creative gestures towards Spartacus, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket and Clockwork Orange. The chapter further notes, typologically, that several advertisements present multiple expressions of Kubrick’s films in a single commercial.

Finally, my own essay, “Kubrick on screen,” examines the evolution of the filmmaker’s public mythology and its alignment with his few official screen appearances, in newsreels and behind-the-scenes videos as conscious acts of public documentation, as opposed to his absent-presence in “non-fiction” screen works such Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001), and Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2008). I also contrast the quasi-fictional, dramatic representations of Kubrick as a screen character and chart their changing artistic rendering. These include actors Peter Coyote in the low-budget production Stranger’s Kiss (1983); John Malkovich as Kubrick-impersonator, Alan Conway, in Color Me Kubrick (2005); Stanley Tucci as the director opposite Geoffrey Rush in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2008); alongside evocations in the post-millennial conspiracy-comedies, Moonwalkers (2015) and Operation Avalanche (2016).

Notes

1Despite some commentators arguing about the precise art period of the room, Kubrick noted that the space was essentially an extraterrestrial “human zoo,” inaccurately rendered. In a 1980 interview for Japanese television, Kubrick reluctantly described the scene: “the idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities; creatures of pure, er, energy and intelligence with no shape or form and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo, to study him. He spends his whole life from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen, as it does in the film. And they choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture, deliberately so. Inaccurate because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty but weren’t quite sure, just as we aren’t quite sure about what to do in zoos with animals, to give them what we think is their natural environment” (Kubrick 1980/2018).

2An earlier auction in 2008 for Kubrick’s extensively hand-written revisions to Jeremy Bernstein’s 1966 New Yorker article “How about a little game” was not sold (estimate: US$5–7,000). See: www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/fine-books-and-manuscripts-including-americana-n08501/lot.185.html?locale=en

Works cited

Broderick, Mick. 2017. “Post-Kubrick: On the Filmmaker’s Influence and Legacy.” Post-Kubrick Dossier. Screening the Past, no. 42. www.screeningthepast.com/2017/09/post-kubrick-on-the-filmmakers-influence-and-legacy/.

Deutsches Filmmuseum. 2018. “Stanley Kubrick: Exhibition Tour.” www.stanleykubrick.de/en/ausstellungstour-exhibition-on-tour/.

Fenwick, J., I. Q. Hunter, and E. Pezzotta. 2017a. “The Stanley Kubrick Archive: A Dossier of New Research: Introduction.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37, no. 3: 367–72.

———. 2017b. “Stanley Kubrick: A Retrospective. Introduction.” Cinergie, no. 12. https://cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/7341/7291.

Kubrick, Stanley. 1980/2018. “Interview Transcript Between Jun’ichi Yao and Stanley Kubrick.” Transcribed by Rod Munday. The Kubrick Site. www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0122.html.

Lang, Brent. 2018. “Stanley Kubrick’s Stunning Early Photographs on Display at Museum of the City of New York.” Variety, April 2. https://variety.com/2018/film/news/stanley-kubrick-museum-of-the-city-of-new-york-photos-1202741533/.

MTCNY. 2018. “Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs.” May 1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=otJ6VCS4abw.

Sopan, Deb. 2018. “Christopher Nolan’s Version of Vinyl: Unr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Kubrick legacy: an introduction
• 2 Kubrick and curation: inside TIFF’s Stanley Kubrick: the exhibition
• 3 The rise of Doctor Strangelove: Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, Herman Kahn, and a new world morality
• 4 Looking back, looking ahead: Kubrick and music
• 5 Dramatizing Kubrick: Room 237 and other conspiracies
• 6 Kubrick: tropes in advertising
• 7 Kubrick on screen
• 8 Conclusion
• Index