Mention the name Stanley Kubrick and it opens up my mind to a library of powerful imagery engrained from years of viewing his films. Images of silhouetted droogs in darkened subways; of orbiting space stations gliding to Strauss; of a menacing head-tilted eyes-forward glare in close up; of roaming shots through paths and passages – trenches, mazes, spaceships, hotels and mansions; of Major Kong riding an atom bomb in free-fall; stunningly composed portraits of 18th century landscapes; a dazzling psychedelic star gate; mysterious dreamscapes of terror and beauty, fear and desire.

A Stanley Kubrick film is predominantly about the visual impact. Meticulously designed images edited together with authoritative precision, often set against an expertly selected choice of music. It is pure cinema, deriving meaning through visual composition and arrangement. Through hard work and skill, Kubrick moved himself in to the unique position where he could assert the same authorship over an entire film as he could to one of his photographs. His passion and determination as a director gave him the reputation of a master auteur, to the point where he controlled everything from the first stages to the final cut, all within the Hollywood studio system. In just 13 films Kubrick gave us a body of work to rival the best of any artist in any medium, with arguably the highest percentage of widely recognised masterpieces of any director in the world.

Born in the Bronx in 1928, as a student his passions were tournament-level chess and photography. At the age of 17 he landed a prestigious job as a photographer for Look magazine, which he quit after 4 years to make his first film – Day Of The Fight (1950), a documentary about the middleweight boxer Walter Cartier. After a second documentary, Flying Padre (1951), Kubrick borrowed $10,000 from relatives to make Fear And Desire (1953), an arty film which he later described as “embarrassing”. Kubrick, his first wife and two friends were the entire crew. By necessity, Kubrick was director, cameraman, lighting engineer, makeup man, administrator, propman and unit chauffeur. Later in his career, he would take on some of these duties again, for reasons other than necessity.

In retrospect, Fear and Desire is a highly appropriate name for Kubrick’s first feature film, since the theme of such contrasting emotions ran through his entire career. The duality between good and evil, love and hate, sex and violence, truth and deceit, all manifest themselves in Kubrick’s films by way of characters wrestling with their own internal struggle between light and dark. As Kubrick put it: “We are capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil, and the problem is we often can’t distinguish between them when it suits our purpose”. The dark urges that compel Humbert Humbert in Lolita, General Ripper in Dr Strangelove, Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Jack Torrance in The Shining; the pivotal choices made by Colonel Dax in Paths Of Glory, Redmond Barry in Barry Lyndon, Dr William Hardford in Eyes Wide Shut; and the struggle between man and machine, between free will and an uncontrollable natural or supernatural force in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In all his films, Kubrick is examining the very complex nature of human existence, but doing so within the very accessible framework of film genres.

Kubrick’s approach to theme and genre may explain the reason for the broad appeal of his films, offering something to both mass movie audiences and critics/film theorists (although equally his approach often displeased both!) He successfully handled the dichotomy between cinema as mass entertainment and cinema as art form by making solid genre films with wide appeal but layering them with acres of subtext and meaning conveyed through intricately designed visuals and analogical narratives. Every scene, every shot, every frame was subject to the most intense scrutiny and intelligent rigour, the kind of precision Kubrick was grounded in through his background in photography. His attitude to genre films was to embrace their conventions rather than reject their constraints, so long as they worked for the film’s objectives.

Speaking of his use of genre, Kubrick explained: “One of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual or our contemporary society with a solid framework or accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation.” Kubrick may have embraced genre conventions, but his films are far from conventional. They stood far apart from their contemporaries, offering something bold and transgressive to generic cinema. When taking on science-fiction for example, Kubrick’s aim was to make the science-fiction film – a definitive statement for the genre. He carried the same determined agenda with him throughout his career.

But Kubrick fought hard to gain his unique artistic independence which allowed him to make films with such a personal and perfectionism. His experience of making Spartacus (1960) – clearly his least authored work – strengthened his resolve that he would never again relinquish control over any aspect of his films. Kubrick realised that “the director is merely the highest paid member of the crew”, but this need for control was not down to pure ego or arrogance, but more a serious artist determined to express his themes and concerns without compromise – something rarely possible within the studio system. And after Spartacus he certainly took some extraordinary and audacious chances with his chosen projects. Kubrick and producer James B. Harris rejected a restrictive contract with Warner Brothers when planning to adapt Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, instead opting for an interference-free deal with Associated Artists. The importance of Lolita (1961) in Kubrick’s career is too easily neglected, given his later achievements, but the film’s success showed that Kubrick could make a profitable film with no provisos, quickly and cheaply. It set the pattern for the rest of Kubrick’s career, making profitable films exactly as he wished whilst courting controversy.

Kubrick’s fascination with the darker side of humanity made such regular controversy inevitable, given the often inflammatory nature of the stories he wanted to tell. This inclination to explore the darker side of man resulted in a common criticism levelled at his films – that they are excessively pessimistic, even misanthropic. But Kubrick argued that the examination of both light and shade were essential and something cinema could achieve with great capacity. Talking of The Shining, he explained “There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly”.

The recurring motifs of duality weave themselves through much of Kubrick life and work. He was depicted as a man of contradictions: an independent-minded filmmaker making big commercial movies for major studios; an apparently monstrous control freak and eccentric recluse, yet a devoted and caring family man with a passion for literature, music and chess. An endlessly curious media liked to portray Kubrick as the strange recluse, since they had little else to go on. He was often presented as an obsessively self-absorbed filmmaker, taking ever longer researching projects and supposedly demanding upwards of 70 takes for actors to give the right performance – a reputation he dismissed: “It happens when actors are unprepared. You cannot act without knowing dialogue. If actors have to think about the words, they can’t work on the emotion. So you end up doing thirty takes of something. If I did a hundred takes on every scene, I’d never finish a film”. And in 1974 he even took it upon himself to bury one of his own films (A Clockwork Orange) from public circulation in the UK for 25 years after threats were made against his family – something few artists would be prepared to do, or indeed have the power to, demonstrating that some things were clearly more important to him than his art.

Twelve years since his death, the cinematic legacy of Stanley Kubrick continues to grow in stature with each passing year. Numerous theorists and critics have cited Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining as the finest films of their respective genres and critical reappraisal of his films has been dramatic. The re-release of A Clockwork Orange in 2000 saw critics in the UK have the first chance to re-evaluate the film in 30 years, and resoundingly hailed it as a misunderstood masterpiece. Even Barry Lyndon, which opened to mixed reviews, generally more favourably in Europe, is now emerging as the critics choice for his greatest work – the perfect example of a Kubrick film that has taken 30 years to be fully appreciated. It was listed amongst the 50 greatest film of all time in the renowned 2002 Sight & Sound critics poll (only 2001: A Space Odyssey was the higher-placed Kubrick film, at number 6).

With so many Kubrick films now generally accepted as canonical classics, it’s as well to remember the mixed reception many of them received from audiences and critics on first release (and downright negative reviews for The Shining). Although Kubrick acknowledged changing trends and waves within cinema and society – the far out trip of 2001 made during the counter-culture era; the freedom from relaxed censorship of sex and violence at the time of A Clockwork Orange; the rise of new popular horror circa The Shining – he consistently ploughed a very different path to any other contemporary cinema. In a 1987 Rolling Stone interview, Kubrick wryly noted “critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion. Which is why I think audiences are more reliable than critics, at least initially. Audiences tend not to bring all that critical baggage with them to each film. And I really think that a few critics come to my films expecting to see the last film. They’re waiting to see something that never happens. I imagine it must be something like standing in the batter’s box waiting for a fast ball, and the pitcher throws a change-up. The batter swings and misses. He thinks, “Shit, he threw me the wrong pitch.” I think this accounts for some of the initial hostility.”

The landscape of cinema is poorer for the absence of any new Stanley Kubrick production. Every 5 years or more, one of his films would arrive like a bizarre grand offering from another world, delighting some, confusing many, but always offering a visual and intellectual thrill to those who were willing to engage. My favourite description of Stanley Kubrick was made by critic David Denby, who compared him to the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey: “a force of supernatural intelligence, appearing at great intervals amid high-pitch shrieks, who gives the world a violent kick up the next rung of the evolutionary ladder”. The comparison could not be more appropriate – every Stanley Kubrick film is a towering monument to the possibilities of cinema, influential and innovative within their own eras and genres, and each representing a high water mark of cinema as an art form.

Glyn Jones is a writer with a BA (Hons) in Scriptwriting For Film and Television and a love of classic and cult cinema, often found extolling the virtues of film on twitter or on his website Fantastic Voyages. 

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