Let’s try to set the record straight. More has been written about Kubrick – on his films, about his person, extracting his methods – than any other motion picture director in history. The Shining has in fact sparked a fervent cottage industry of books, blogs, and documentary films all to its own. There are dozens […]
Everyone has to start somewhere. Geniuses are not born with knowledge, but come to it by their ability to absorb, retain, and apply that which they learned. We all know Kubrick was the typical ne’er-do-well who did poorly in school. His loathing for institutionalized learning was legendary. Home movies show he was affable — even […]
“But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.” From Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making […]
For at least fifty years, the work of Stanley Kubrick has constituted an ideal object of study for serious cinephiles. Now that the technological democratization of the past decade has allowed some of the most serious cinephiles to become video essayists, that study has flowered into a host of mini-documentaries closely examining the techniques of all […]
Yesterday we ran a list of 93 films beloved by Stanley Kubrick, which includes two by Andrei Tarkovsky: 1972’s Solaris and 1986’s The Sacrifice. You expect one auteur to appreciate the work of another — “game recognize game,” to use the modern parlance — but the selection of Solaris makes special sense. Just four years before it, Kubrick had, […]