Beyond The Infinite

I forget where I first heard the word "Kubrickologist", but for a time in college, I was definitely one of them. After seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove multiple times, I was hooked, and ransacked my college's library looking for books and back issues of film magazines on the man and his work, and ended up purchasing his films on videotape (and eventually laser disc, and eventually DVD, and I'm sure eventually HD-DVD as well when that format debuts).

Back then, I would have killed for a book such as Taschen's new Stanley Kubrick Archives, which contains 544 pages worth of thousands of photographs--many never before seen-along with interviews, essays, a six inch long 70mm clip of frames from 2001, and more interesting, a DVD-ROM with an audio recording of Kubrick done for a 1966 New Yorker interviewer (portions of which were excerpted in Jerome Agel's McLuhanesque The Making of 2001 from 1968).

"Art Films With Blockbuster Pretensions"

Kubrick's films radically experimented with structure, dialogue and even acting techniques, to create Brechtian worlds that were like no other. And yet despite all of this, from Paths of Glory on, his films made money-some of them a lot of money. "Art films with blockbuster pretensions", as Michael Herr called Stanley's oeuvre in his great profile of Kubrick for Vanity Fair, which was later adapted into a book of its own.

Kubrick died in 1999. It's tempting to use the mythological prose of many of the articles written while he was still alive and dub him, "most famous recluse since Howard Hughes", especially with the memory of Leonardo DiCaprio's turn as The Avaitor so fresh in the collective consciousness, but as Herr wrote, Kubrick was an absolute failure as a recluse: on the day he died, he had just finished Eyes Wide Shut, with its 65-million dollar budget and then-husband and wife duo of superstar leads, and was on the phone endlessly with industry colleagues. But after the release of 1968's 2001, Kubrick defiantly controlled what photos and contact the world had with him, and guarded his privacy jealously. Interviews and books analyzing his films appeared from time to time, but a backstage look such as this would have been unthinkable prior to Stanley's death. As I wrote in 2002 about an earlier, and much thinner collection of photographs of Kubrick by his wife:

In the 1920s, if you were making a Hollywood movie and needed an actor to play the role of a film director, you called Central Casting, and you asked for a dozen Erich von Stroheim look-alikes, and then you'd choose which one you liked best. In the 1950s, you called for Alfred Hitchcock look-alikes.

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Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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