It is with great pleasure that we can today announce the commencement of the Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Stanley Kubrick project.

The project, simply entitled “Kubrick” kicks off tomorrow, with a piece on Kubrick’s early United Artists double-bill of Killer’s Kiss and The Killing from Joe Gastineau at The Wooden Kimono. It’s something of a happy coincidence that Joe was enlisted to cover the pair of films together, an act decided upon several months ago, in the light of last weeks announcement from Criterion that the pair are set to be released together in September.

Continuing on, each film from Kubrick’s oeuvre will be covered in chronological order, with essays appearing on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Once the main section of the project is completed (aka the feature films) a series of works that form an appendix of sorts will be published. Unrealised projects such as The Aryan Papers, A.I: Artificial Intelligence and Napoleon will be covered in this section, alongside the documentaries A Life In Pictures and Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. Kubrick’s “lost” debut, Fear And Desire will also feature in the appendix section too. Unravelling over a number of months, Kubrick aims to provide as definitive a study of the filmmaker as is possible within the framework of a website.

When commissioning the works a manifesto of sorts was requested from each of the writers, although I must admit that going in to this project there was no real agenda. We aren’t celebrating any particular anniversary of the filmmaker, nor are there any temporal reasons to explore the filmmakers’ work, and that’s kind of the point; we didn’t feel it particularly necessary to have a reason to do this. The time just felt right to reevaluate one of the worlds most intriguing, most provocative and most interesting filmmakers, from whatever angle the author deemed most essential.

A lot has gone in to Kubrick; it’s by far the most ambitious project we’ve ever embarked upon here at Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second, featuring an array of writers from all walks of film theory and discussion, and it ought to go without saying that we hope that you enjoy reading it as much as we have done putting it together. And please feel free to take part; discussion on each of the works is wholly encouraged.