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Mai 2017
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Plagiarism is a serious offence and severe penalties will be imposed. I confirm that this work
is my own and that I have properly acknowledged all work reference.
Irimia Bianca-Cosmina
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARGUMENT ...................................................................................... 4
CHAPTER I: Broad Overview ........................................................... 5
CHAPTER II: Childhood And Early Life .......................................... 7
CHAPTER III: Photographic Career .................................................. 8
CHAPTER IV: Movie Career ........................................................... 10
Foray Into Filmmaking (19511953) ............................................... 10
Hollywood Success (19561964) ..................................................... 12
Ground-Breaking Cinema (19651971) ........................................... 16
Horror Filming And Later Work ...................................................... 19
Last Films .......................................................................................... 21
CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 23
BIBLIOGRAPGHY.24
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ARGUMENT
I have chosen this subject due to my love for films. It is fair to say that I am a film fanatic. I have
watched about 500 films, in all genres, and from all over the world. And as a fanatic, I follow directors
rather than actors. Casual fans, those who gush over movies like Avatar and Forrest Gump, may
not understand that the director is the individual who makes or breaks a film. Unfortunately, truly
exceptional directors are not as prevalent today as they were in the past.
Kubrick is notorious for taking books and transforming them into his own masterpieces. I admire
Stanley Kubrick so much because he takes a work of art and reads it, regardless of what the author
deems as the intended meaning. Many people will take something at face value. Kubrick refuses.
Even though A Clockwork Orange is my favourite book of all time and is completely flawless in
my eyes, I still regard the film adaptation as a masterpiece. He completely captures Burgess vision of
ultra-violence and the Ludovico Technique. The wonderful thing about Kubrick is his ability to create
a polymerization of original and own vision, to create something extraordinary.
Kubrick never fails to mesmerise with his cinematography. 2001: A Space Odyssey remains as the
most beautifully shot film I have ever seen. All of his films contain amazing camera shots. He is
notorious for his use of one-point perspective; but it works beautifully. His amazing movies span across
many genres. Want an action film? Full Metal Jacket. Want a romance film? Lolita. Want a
comedy? Dr. Strangelove.
Ive always been interested in film and directing as I have mentioned before. Kubrick was probably
the first person to inspire me to get into directing. He has been criticised for his number of takes in films.
It took 97 takes before he was satisfied with Tom Cruise walking through a door in Eyes Wide Shut. It
reportedly took 125 takes of Shelley Duvall climbing the stairs in The Overlook Hotel.
But for such a finicky, determined director, we are left with masterpieces. Films which have not been
celebrated among those of my age as much as they should be. Kubrick is one of my heroes, and always
will be.
Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a
camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
Stanley Kubrick
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CHAPTER I: BROAD OVERVIEW
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 March 7, 1999) was an American film director,
screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and photographer. He is frequently cited as
one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinematic history. His films, which are
mostly adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres, and are noted for
their realism, dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of
music.
Kubrick was born and raised in the Bronx, New York City, and attended William Howard
Taft High School from 1941 to 1945. Although he only received average grades, Kubrick
displayed a keen interest in literature, photography, and film from a young age, and taught
himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school. After
working as a photographer for Look magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he began
making short films on a shoestring budget, and made his first major Hollywood film, The
Killing, for United Artists in 1956. This was followed by two collaborations with Kirk Douglas,
the war picture Paths of Glory (1957) and the historical epic Spartacus (1960). His reputation
as a filmmaker in Hollywood grew, and he was approached by Marlon Brando to film what
would become One-Eyed Jacks (1961), though Brando eventually decided to direct it himself.
Creative differences arising from his work with Douglas and the film studios, a dislike of
Hollywood, and a growing concern about crime in America prompted Kubrick to move to the
United Kingdom in 1961, where he spent most of the remainder of his life and career. His home
at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his wife Christiane, became
his workplace, where he did his writing, research, editing, and management of production
details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control over his films, but with the
rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood studios. His first British
productions were two films with Peter Sellers, Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964).
A demanding perfectionist, Kubrick assumed control over most aspects of the filmmaking
process, from direction and writing to editing, and took painstaking care with researching his
films and staging scenes, working in close coordination with his actors and other collaborators.
He often asked for several dozen retakes of the same scene in a movie, which resulted in many
conflicts with his casts. Despite the resulting notoriety among actors, many of Kubrick's films
broke new ground in cinematography. The scientific realism and innovative special effects of
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were without precedent in the history of cinema, and the film
earned him his only personal Oscar, for Best Visual Effects. Steven Spielberg has referred to
the film as his generation's "big bang", and it is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.
For the 18th-century period film Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick obtained lenses developed by
Zeiss for NASA, to film scenes under natural candlelight. With The Shining (1980), he became
one of the first directors to make use of a Steadicam for stabilized and fluid tracking shots.
While many of Kubrick's films were controversial and initially received mixed reviews upon
releaseparticularly A Clockwork Orange (1971), which Kubrick pulled from circulation in
the UK following a mass media frenzymost were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or
BAFTA Awards, and underwent critical reevaluations. His last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was
completed shortly before his death in 1999.
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CHAPTER II: CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE
Born in New York City in 1928, Stanley Kubrick grew up in one of the more prosperous
families of his Bronx neighborhood. Yet his childhood was rather bleak and unhappy. His
father, a doctor, tried his best to stimulate his son's interest in learning. He made books from
his library readily available, for example, and also
taught the boy to play chess. But Kubrick was a poor
student throughout his school years; nothing his
teachers presented in class seemed to be able to hold
his attention. "I never learned anything at all in school
and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years
old" he is quoted as saying in The Making of
Kubrick's 2001. When he turned 13, however, his
father bought him a still camera as a birthday present. As time would tell, it was probably the
most significant gift he ever received.
Although young Kubrick took a dim view of school, he was an avid moviegoer with a keen
sense of what worked and what didn't. "One of the important things about seeing run-of-the-
mill Hollywood films eight times a week was that many of them were so bad, " biographer
Vincent LoBrutto reports Kubrick told a writer for the New York Times. "Without even
beginning to understand what the problems of making films were, I was taken with the
impression that I could not do a film any worse than the ones I was seeing. I also felt I could,
in fact, do them a lot better."
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CHAPTER III: PHOTOGRAPHIC CAREER
While still in high school, Kubrick was chosen as an official school photographer for a year.
In the mid-1940s, since he was not able to gain admission to day session classes at colleges, he
briefly attended evening classes at the City College of New York.Eventually, he sold a
photographic series to Look magazine, having taken a photo to Helen O'Brian, head of the
photographic department, who purchased it without hesitation for 25 on the spot.It was printed
on June 26, 1945. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in
Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs.
In 1946, he became an apprentice photographer for Look and later a full-time staff
photographer. G. Warren Schloat, Jr., another new photographer for the magazine at the time,
recalled that he thought Kubrick lacked the personality to make it as a director in Hollywood,
remarking, "Stanley was a quiet fellow. He didn't say much. He was thin, skinny, and kind of
poorlike we all were". Kubrick quickly became known, however, for his story-telling in
photographs.
His first, published on April 16, 1946, was entitled "A Short Story from a Movie Balcony"
and staged a fracas between a man and a woman, during which the man is slapped in the face,
caught genuinely by surprise. In another assignment, 18 pictures were taken of various people
waiting in a dental office. It has been said retrospectively that this project demonstrated an early
interest of Kubrick in capturing individuals and their feelings in mundane environments.In
1948, he was sent to Portugal to document a travel piece, and covered the Ringling Bros. and
Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida. Kubrick, a boxing enthusiast, eventually began
photographing boxing matches for the magazine.
His earliest, "Prizefighter", was published on January 18, 1949, and captured a boxing match
and the events leading up to it, featuring Walter Cartier.On April 2, 1949, he published a photo
essay, named "Chicago-City of Extremes" in Look, which displayed his talent early on for
creating atmosphere with imagery, including a photograph taken above a congested Chicago
street at night. The following year, on July 18, 1950, the magazine published his photo essay,
"Working Debutante - Betsy von Furstenberg", which featured a Pablo Picasso portrait of Angel
F. de Soto in the background. Kubrick was also assigned to photograph numerous jazz
musicians, from Frank Sinatra and Erroll Garner to George Lewis, Eddie Condon, Phil
Napoleon, Papa Celestin, Alphonse Picou, Muggsy Spanier, Sharkey Bonano, and others.
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Kubrick married his high-school sweetheart Toba Metz on May 28, 1948. They lived
together in a small apartment at 36 West 16th Street, off 6th Avenue just north of Greenwich
Village. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern
Art and the cinemas of New York City. He was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of
the director Max Ophls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style, and by the director
Elia Kazan, whom he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of
"performing miracles" with his actors.Friends began to notice that Kubrick had become
obsessed with the art of filmmakingone friend, David Vaughn, observed that Kubrick would
scrutinize the film at the cinema when it went silent, and would go back to reading his paper
when people started talking.He also spent many hours reading books on film theory and writing
down notes. Sergei Eisenstein's theoretical writings had a profound impact on Kubrick, and he
took a great number of notes from books in the library of Arthur Rothstein, the photographic
technical director of Look magazine.
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CHAPTER IV: MOVIE CAREER
Foray into filmmaking (19511953)
Kubrick began to explore the art of filmmaking in the 1950s.After directing a pair of
documentaries, he persuaded his father and uncle to help finance the production of his first
fiction feature, an ultralow-budget war film, Fear and Desire
(1953). Kubrick's uncle, Martin Perveler, a Los Angeles
businessman, invested a further $9000 on condition that he be
credited as executive producer of the film.Kubrick assembled
several actors and a small crew totaling 14 people and flew to
the San Gabriel Mountains in California for a five-week, low-
budget shoot.
Fear and Desire garnered several positive reviews upon release, but was nonetheless a
commercial failure. Critics such as the reviewer from The New York Times believed that
Kubrick's professionalism as a photographer shone through in the picture, and that he
"artistically caught glimpses of the grotesque attitudes of death, the wolfishness of hungry men,
as well as their bestiality, and in one scene, the wracking effect of lust on a pitifully juvenile
soldier and the pinioned girl he is guarding".
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Killer's Kiss(1955)
Kubrick then scraped together the financing for another low-budget effort, a boxing-related
film noir romance, Killers Kiss (1955). Originally under the title Kiss Me, Kill Me, and then
The Nymph and the Maniac, Killer's Kiss is a 67-minute film noir about a young heavyweight
boxer's involvement with a woman being abused by her criminal boss.
Like Fear and Desire, it was privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends, with some
$40,000 put forward from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousse. Kubrick began shooting footage
in Times Square, and frequently explored during the filming process, experimenting with
cinematography and considering the use of unconventional angles and imagery. He initially
chose to record the sound on location, but encountered difficulties with shadows from the
microphone booms, restricting camera movement. Actress Irene Kane, the star of the film,
observed: "Stanley's a fascinating character. He thinks movies should move, with a minimum
of dialogue ".
Killer's Kiss met with limited commercial success and made very little money in comparison
with its production budget of $75,000.Although critics have praised the film's camerawork, its
acting and story are generally considered mediocre.
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HOLLYWOOD SUCCESS (19561964)
Paths of Glory (1957)
Continuing his progression up the Hollywood ladder, Kubrick was given a healthy budget
($850,000) by United Artists to shoot the antiwar drama Paths of Glory (1957) in West
Germany.
In 1957, Kubrick directed Paths of Glory (1957), an adaptation that he, Calder Willingham,
and Jim Thompson wrote of the best-selling Humphrey Cobb novel of the same name. No studio
had been willing to take on this particular project until Kirk Douglas agreed to star. Filmed in
Germany, Paths of Glory is about three soldiers tried for cowardice; it is regarded as one of the
best films ever made about the insanity of war.
Set during World War I, it focused on the suicidal attack by French troops on a German
position and the repercussions in its aftermath. Because of its damning portrayal of the French
officer corps, the film was not shown in France until 1975. Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou,
and Ralph Meeker gave commanding performances. Paths of Glory also featured a fine
screenplay by Calder Willingham, cult novelist Jim
Thompson, and Kubrick, who nearly always did the lions
share of the writing on his films scripts regardless of his
collaborators. Throughout his career, Kubrick took a hands-
on approach to the details of all aspects of his films, not
least production design, editing, and cinematography.
Indeed, he was personally responsible for the bravura
handheld tracking shots in Paths of Glory. Unfortunately,
Kubrick had waived his salary for profit participation in the
film, which, despite its excellence, did not fare well at the
box office.
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Spartacus (1960)
Despite the kudos he received for Paths of Glory, Kubrick ran into some difficulties with his
next few projects, which never even reached the production stage.
In February 1959, Kubrick received a phone call from Kirk Douglas asking him to direct
Spartacus (1960), based on the true life story of the historical figure Spartacus and the events
of the Third Servile War. Douglas had acquired the rights to the novel by Howard Fast and
blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo began penning the script.It was produced by Douglas,
who also starred as rebellious slave Spartacus, and cast Laurence Olivier as his foe, the Roman
general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus.It took 167 days to shoot, employed some 10,
000 people, and cost more than $12 million, an astronomical sum in those days. Although
Spartacus was a hit upon its release in 1960 and attracted some Academy Award attention, it
left Kubrick feeling as if he had had too little creative control. As a result, he later sought to
dis-associate himself from the film.
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Lolita(1962)
Kubrick moved his family to England, where he took advantage of the so-called Eady plan,
which provided considerable tax incentives for foreign film producers who used at least 80
percent British labour. His first project there was Lolita (1962), a film version of Vladimir
Nabokovs controversial examination of love and lechery. Nabokov was credited as a
coscenarist, but Kubrick wrote the bulk of the screenplay for that darkest of dark comedies,
which most critics believed never fully solved the problem of transposing Nabokovs difficult
novel to the screen. Many agreed, however, that James Mason was superb as Humbert Humbert,
the professor who becomes obsessed with a 13-year-old girl (Sue Lyon), and Peter Sellers and
Shelley Winters also submitted striking performances. Despite stirring up plenty of controversy
of its own with its subject matter (particularly with the Catholic League of Decency), Lolita
was a box-office hit.
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Dr. Strangelove; Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
(1964).
Notwithstanding the success of Lolita, Kubricks big breakthrough came with the inimitable
Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). This
wickedly nihilistic comedy about the Cold War arms race was written by Kubrick, Terry
Southern, and Peter George (on whose novel Red Alert it was based). In the planning stages,
Kubrick sought to treat the material seriously, but he kept finding himself gravitating toward
farce and eventually gave in to that impulse while still managing to powerfully convey the
horrible prospect of nuclear annihilation. He made the most of wonderfully inventive
performances by George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and especially Sellers, who plays three very
different but equally memorable characters. Dr. Strangelove earned Kubrick his first Academy
Award nomination for best direction and also garnered nominations for best picture, best actor
(Sellers), and best screenplay.
Dr. Strangelove is widely regarded as one of cinema's greatest comedies. In 1989, the United
States Library of Congress included it in the first group of films selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry. It was listed as number three on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list.
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GROUND-BREAKING CINEMA (19651971)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Kubrick next hired science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke to develop a story about man's
encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. The result was the landmark 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968).
2001: A Space Odyssey is a landmark, science fiction classic - and probably the best science-
fiction film of all time about exploration of the unknown. It was released, coincidentally, at the
height of the space race between the USSR and the US. It appeared at the same time as NASA's
exploratory Apollo Project with manned Earth orbiting missions - a prelude to orbiting and
landing on the Moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. And it prophetically showed the enduring
influence that computers would have in our daily lives.
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A Clockwork Orange (1971)
After completing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick searched for a project that he could film
quickly on a small budget. He settled on A Clockwork Orange (1971) at the end of 1969, an
exploration of violence and experimental rehabilitation by
law enforcement authorities, based around the character of
Alex (portrayed by Malcolm McDowell).
A Clockwork Orange was shot over the winter of 1970-1 on a budget of 2 million.Kubrick
abandoned his use of CinemaScope in the filming, deciding that the 1.66:1 widescreen format
was, in the words of Baxter, an "acceptable compromise between spectacle and intimacy", and
favored his "rigorously symmetrical framing", which "increased the beauty of his
compositions". McDowell's role in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968) was crucial to his casting
as Alex, and Kubrick professed that he probably would not have made the film if McDowell
had been unavailable.
Alex, the main character, is a charismatic, antisocial delinquent whose interests include
classical music (especially Beethoven), rape, and what is termed "ultra-violence". He leads a
small gang of thugs (Pete, Georgie, and Dim), whom he calls his droogs (from the Russian word
, "friend", "buddy"). Alex narrates most of the film in Nadsat, a fractured adolescent slang
composed of Slavic (especially Russian), English, and Cockney rhyming slang.
Because of its depiction of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange became one of the most
controversial films of the decade, and part of an ongoing debate about violence and its
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glorification in cinema. It received an X-rated certificate upon release, just before Christmas in
1971, though many critics saw much of the violence depicted in the film as satirical, and less
violent than Straw Dogs, which had been released a month earlier.
Kubrick nevertheless wound up with three Academy Award nominations (for writer,
producer, and director) as well as the New York Film Critics' Best Picture and Best Director
honors.
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HORROR FILMING AND LATER WORK
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Another four years passed in the preparation of Barry Lyndon (1975), which Kubrick
adapted himself from William Makepeace Thackerays novel of the same name. Ryan ONeal
starred as the title character, an 18th-century Irish rogue who narrates his story in voiceover.
Kubricks obsessive insistence on filming with natural lighting of the period (including scenes
illuminated only by candles) necessitated the construction of a special camera. He was equally
meticulous in his demands regarding the production design and in the costumes, and the result
was arguably one of the handsomest period films ever made and one which evocatively mirrors
the 18th-century paintings that he had used as his models.
Many critics in Britain and the United States dismissed Barry
Lyndon as tedious or boring, and it was a major
disappointment commercially. In continental Europe,
however, it was effusively praised. Moreover, Kubrick
received his fourth consecutive nomination for an Academy
Award for best director, and the film was nominated for best
picture. Perhaps not surprisingly, John Alcott won the award
for best cinematography.
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The Shining(1980)
The Shining, released in 1980, was adapted from the novel of the same name by bestselling
horror writer Stephen King. The Shining was not the only horror film to which Kubrick had
been linked; he had turned down the directing of both The Exorcist (1973) and Exorcist II: The
Heretic (1977), despite once saying in 1966 to a friend that he had long desired to "make the
world's scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears
of the audience".
The film stars Jack Nicholson as a writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of a large and
isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains. He spends the winter there with his wife, played by
Shelley Duvall, and their young son, who displays paranormal abilities. During their stay, they
confront both Jack's descent into madness and apparent supernatural horrors lurking in the
hotel. Kubrick gave his actors freedom to extend the script, and even improvise on occasion,
and as a result, Nicholson was responsible for the 'Here's Johnny!' line and scene in which he's
sitting at the typewriter and unleashes his anger upon his wife.
The aerial shots of the Overlook Hotel were shot at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in
Oregon, while the interiors of the hotel were shot at Elstree Studios in England between May
1978 and April 1979. Cardboard models were made of all of the sets of the film, and the lighting
of them was a massive undertaking, which took four months of electrical wiring. Kubrick made
extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which
allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track
was impractical. According to Garrett Brown, Steadicam's inventor, it was the first picture to
use its full potential.
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The Shining (1980) earned what had come to be the usual mixed critical reception for a
Kubrick film, with some reviewers arguing that it was among his finest work. Similarly,
opinions varied widely regarding the effectiveness of Nicholsons intense (in the eyes of many
critics, over-the-top) performance. Ultimately, the film was a commercial success and became
a cult favourite.
LAST FILMS
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In the mid-1990s Kubrick began working on a script that Steven Spielberg would eventually
direct as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Deciding that Spielbergs sensibility was better
suited to the material than was his own, Kubrick had
turned over the directorial reins to Spielberg and
decided to act as producer. However, ever the
perfectionist, Kubrick delayed filming because the
special-effects technology that he required was not
yet available. Instead, he turned his attention to
another project, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which
would be his final film, released only a few months
after his death. Based on Arthur Schnitzlers 1926
novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story), it became
yet another controversial entry in Kubricks oeuvre.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, then married to
each other offscreen, played a modern-day New York City couple whose marriage is tested by
a sequence of intense, erotically charged encounters with others.
Although his career extended over nearly half a century, Kubrick made only 13 feature films.
Nevertheless, he is remembered as a master filmmaker and supreme visual stylist. Arguably, he
is even more admired by other filmmakers than he is by critics and cineastes. The releases of
his films were events. Kubrick was a perfectionist whose passionate involvement with his art
meant that he could often be very difficult to work with (occasionally harsh or cruel to his
collaborators, though also very warm). For all of the planning that went into his projects, he
often discovered the structure of his films as he made them, and he was extremely open to
experimentation and the ideas of others. Kubricks meticulous involvement with seemingly
every detail that went into his films earned him a reputation as a control freak, but it also
guaranteed that his signature was indelibly imprinted on every film that he made.
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CONCLUSION
True genius is always met with a combination of acclaim and criticism. Elements of the
fringe, eager for the latest and greatest, pounce on the innovative. Meanwhile, critics used to
the tried and true will fail to see what will become great with hindsight.
This is certainly true for the films of Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick always road the fence
between profundity and profanity. As a result, his legacy will be with us for great while.
Kubrick had a talent for creating unparalleled moods in his work, a highly underrated talent.
While most directors are struggling to tie together plotlines for our entertainment, Kubrick
excelled at actually placing audiences in the setting. He could create a world so real that it was
impossible to not get lost in it.
I consider that movies are a reflection of not only our society but also those universal human
traits which transcend time and place: love, ambition, fear. And the best ones are those which
we recall fondly, which have a profound effect on us, and which even change our lives.
From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them
wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always
resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. In one instance, the same critic who originally
rapped the film, has several years later put it on an all-time best list. But of course, the lasting and
ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people
say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.
Stanley Kubrick
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SITOGRAPHY
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