DEATH | Mar. 7–Stanley Kubrick (Comment)

Stanley Kubrick.

This day in 1999, American film director  Stanley Kubrick died in Hertfordshire, England, at 70.

Born in New York City in 1928, Kubrick became interested in photography in high school and at 17 got a job as a staff photographer for Look magazine.

An assignment to cover a boxing match inspired him to make The Day of the Fight, a documentary short (1951) that was bought by a news service, and he was launched. He directed his first five feature films he was living in the United States. The next eight were produced when he was living in Britain. These 13 feature films explore the Dark Side of human existence–war, murder, horror, pederasty, cults.

1. Fear and Desire (1953) was his first feature-length movie, dealing with war. An indie movie, it got little attention outside New York City, where it was praised.
2. Killer’s Kiss (1955) and
3. The Killing (1956) brought him Hollywood interest.
4. Paths of Glory (1957) starred Kirk Douglas. It was about military injustice in the French army during World War I. 
5. Spartacus (1960) was another Douglas movie, about the slave rebellion led by the Roman slave Spartacus in 73 B.C. The film was a hit and won four Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography, which was attributed to Russell Metty but was largely Kubrick’s work.
6. Lolita (1962) was based on the  novel by Vladimir Nabokov. By this time Kubrick had moved to the UK and lived in Hertfordshire near his studio.
7. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was another success. Starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, it made fun of the nuclear arms race. It earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor.
8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was co-written with English writer Arthur C. Clarke.It is considered by many to be the greatest sci-fi film ever made. It won a Best Visual Effects Academy Award. 
9. A Clockwork Orange (1971) was a social commentary set in the near future. The U.S. rating was X and the UK banned it. However, it collected four Oscar nominations including Best Picture.
10. Barry Lyndon (1975) was a picturesque movie based on the 19th-century novel by William Thackeray. Kubrick took a record 300 days to shoot the film. 
11. The Shining (1980), starring Jack Nicholson as the caretaker of a mountain resort who goes insane, was a horror masterpiece. Jack Nicholson said in an interview that his acting for this movie was helped by his having taken experimental drugs.
12. Full Metal Jacket (1987) covered the Vietnam War and had an anti-war theme. It was popular with cinemagoers and critics.
13. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was a puzzling thriller about a monkish sex cult, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick died at 70 after turning in his final cut of the film.

Comment

I met Stanley Kubrick in England in the 1980s.  I remember him looking like he does in the photo at top. His wife was a member of a group of painters in Hertfordshire that included my sister Brigid and I attended a party that he was at. Kubrick was extremely intense and seemed to be looking for intensity in return. I was surely a disappointment.

July 26 - Birthdays of Utopian-Dystopian Writers Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick, Bernard Shaw

Aldous Huxley

Garrison Keillor in The Writer's Almanac gives us some poetry every day and then lists birthdays of authors (and sometimes other people) he thinks we might be interested in. Today he has three Time Travelers on his list of four authors and I could not resist commenting here, because all three have written about Utopias and Dystopias.

Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England in 1894. After reading some H.G. Wells (The Time Machine?) he decided to write about the future in Brave New World (1932), summarized by Keillor as:

...a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called "soma." 

George Orwell's 1984 came out a few years later, and Huxley argued his own imagined dystopian future was more likely than Orwell's, because "it would be easier to control people by keeping them happy than it would be by threatening them with violence."

I would say that Huxley predicted several paths in the evolution of capitalist countries and Orwell predicted paths in the futures of totalitarian countries. Between them they offer equal-opportunity gloom for those not spaced out on "soma".

Stanley Kubrick was born today in New York City in 1928. Many of his movies, like "The Shining" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" have a time-traveling theme. His adaptation of Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" provides a scenario for a dystopian outcome of a capitalist attempt at utopia.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, the most ancient of the three. Of his 60+ plays, he wrote three plays with the theme of looking forward to the working of a benign force to create an eventual Utopia. Back to Methuselah (1920) as the name suggests, goes back to world origins and forward to a distant future. He was very proud of this long play but critics were not so favorable. His next play, Saint Joan, was widely applauded.

Two other plays had a similar theme - The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) and Farfetched Fables (1950, shortly before he died). He wanted to believe that Karl Marx was in some way going to be right, but he favored the Fabian Socialist route rather than revolution. He wrote tracts and articles in favor of Fabian Socialism.

Such great minds wrestling with the same topic! Born on the same day! Makes you wonder...