EDP 380, Fall 1998

Jonathan Johnson

December 3^rd, 1998

The line between art and entertainment has become malleable in the last century. Critics of fine art define its quality by its message, innovation and complexity. Both are founded on intent to communicate. Art seeks to engage the viewer and generally attempts to tap into more complicated and rarer emotions. (Krush Web Site) Stanley Kubrick uses the medium of film to convey an understanding of the world around him. I see his work as art rather than entertainment and I propose his inclusion in Howard Gardner’s model of Multiple Intelligences. The basis of my argument lies in analysis of his work ethic, complexities, innovations and communication skills.

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26^th, 1928. The Bronx New York was both his birthplace and childhood home. While there he had a relatively uneventful adolescence. His typical nuclear family was of Jewish faith and consisted of a sister, Barbara, six years his younger, a mother, Gertrude, and a father, Jakob. His father was a doctor and instrumental in building the path Kubrick would later follow.

His performance in academics was far from spectacular. Kubrick left high school without graduating at 17. His cumulative average was a 67. While in school, Physics was the only subject in which he excelled (his love of machines and movement are apparent in his later endeavors). But the time he spent in William Howard Taft High School was far from fruitless. On his 13^th birthday he received a camera from his father. This led to a love of photography – he was the official photographer for the school and was even exhibited. At an early age Stanley had an eye for composition, subjects and themes. It was on a walk to school that he shot a tired newspaper vendor beside the headlines announcing President Roosevelt’s death. He subsequently sold this photo to Look magazine and his life as a photojournalist had begun. It was a great career move for the dropout, since the end of the second world war in 1945 brought thousands of GIs back to the states, it was impossible for Stanley to gain acceptance into a university.

While at Look magazine Kubrick’s curiosity, stamina and suggestions led to world travel and prestige as the magazine’s best photographer. In his spare time he read on an extremely wide range of literature (this exploring nature is inherent in Kubrick, from his childhood through his later years). He had a very analytical mind – facts and ideas interested him and could broaden his understanding of the world around him. This was evident in the pictures he took – from the choice of camera angle, to the subject, to the themes he chose to explore. The world eclectic is perfect for Stanley Kubrick.

At 18 he married a high school acquaintance – Toba Metz. She would be the first of 3 wives he would encounter. They moved to Grenwich Village in 1949. It was there that Kubrick could further use his talents to hone a lifestyle that stressed independence and perfection. At nights he would play chess for money at Washington Square and in the day he could study film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Still, he was not comfortable in the structure of a school – his nature was to observe and explore. Informal screenings and conversations provided the information he was searching for. It was also in Grenwich Village that he encountered former school friend Alexander Singer. Singer was an office worker at March of Time, a well known news reel company. It was he who offered Kubrick his first real break into the avenue of film with a chance to create a short documentary.

In an attempt to save his boss money, Alexander Singer took a chance at hiring Kubrick to film a short documentary on boxer Walter Cartier. Kubrick had already completed a photo shoot for Look magazine on the boxer and jumped at the chance to work with cinema. To complete Day of the Fight Kubrick worked as director, cinematographer, editor and soundman. While not making any money on the project (he sold it to Singer for only 100 dollars above production costs) Kubrick gained connections and a forward of 1500 dollars to do a second documentary for March of Time. At this point he resigned from Look magazine and made plans to begin his own production company.

Funded from loans by his friends and family Kubrick created his first independent film, Fear and Desire, in 1953. Although it was refused by all the major studios, Fear and Desire was released by Joseph Burstyn through an "art house cinema" in Grenwich Village. The profits of the film didn’t cover production costs but it did get some critical attention. With this encouragement Kubrick again amassed funds from relatives in the sum of 40,000 dollars. He put together a film called Killer’s Kiss, which, like the last film, didn’t break even. Filmed on the streets of New York, it details a young man’s search for love and substance in an ugly society. Again Stanley Kubrick received attention from the critics.

At 26 Kubrick met James B. Harris. A friend of Alexander Singer, this aspiring director saw promise in Kubrick. Together they produced The Killing, and formed Harris-Kubrick Pictures with support from Harris’s father – the owner of Flamingo Films (a cinema and television distribution company). With connections to major studios, the two producers had a budget of over 200,000 dollars and the help of United Artists to release film. Soon afterwards, MGM took notice of the team and offered them a library of novels to scour hoping for a film adaptation. This partnership resulted in Paths of Glory (1957).

His next film, Lolita (1962) again found him working with James B. Harris. It is the last film the two have collaborated on. But the success of Lolita provided Kubrick with sufficient capital to independently produce the rest of his works. Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released two years later and so began the string of critically acclaimed films with which he has become recognized.

Never has one person successfully integrated the roles of producer, director, cinematographer, editor and soundman to produce a film transcending the publics understanding of social complexities like war, technology and love as thoroughly as Stanley Kubrick. But it is not only the work he has produced that earns significance, it is the way he has produced it. In a domain dominated by Hollywood – traditionally a city of side deals and exploitation – and a society dominated by corporations, Kubrick has attained success and has remained utterly devoted to his movies:

…with the power that Stanley Kubrick has acquired in the film

Kubrick has successfully delegated power and kept control over the elements of his work that make it personal – through success he has not lost touch with what he was originally striving to achieve. It is also for that reason that he is not completely accepted by the film industry.

Kubrick is a film renaissance man. He learns through doing, not watching. Upon a movie’s release he is involved with the entire process – has been known to review each location where the film will be shown (Ciment 225). His intensity is well known throughout the industry. Actors who work with Kubrick can expect to shoot the same scene up to 50 times before getting it just right. To say that he is a perfectionist would not do him justice. Lasting from his years as a photojournalist, he is in touch with the patterns of society. Consider the relationship between television and cinema. With the advance of technology, TV and cable have taken precedent over cinema as a form of entertainment. Kubrick recognized the competition posed by TV early on and vowed to make each movie an "event, displayed to advantage in technically perfect conditions." (Ciment 42) His intensity is an effort to effect and control all that he touches.

In Dr. Strangelove creativity lies in the way it is written. Through analysis, one can see the intentions of a man obsessed with telling a truth. That truth is the ugliness of war and the capacity for man to create it. His method is seen through portraying the underlying tensions of a time period (1960’s – cold war & USA) combined with his ability to tap into an audience’s collective unconscious. Kubrick does not simply hand the message to the viewer; rather he wraps it in satiric irony describing a moral dilemma. The setting is an airforce base where the man in charge, General Jack D. Ripper (a play on words hinting at the fabled British serial killer), has ordered a nuclear strike against the Russians. The general knows full well that retaliation is inevitable and means an end to most of civilization. The rest of the film describes the siege of the airforce base and the war room where our leaders attempt to resolve the matter. All events occur in a serious context, yet are completely bizarre. By setting up the delivery of scenes in this manner, Kubrick creates an imaginary space between the movie and the viewer where information is seen, understood, then placed into context and reevaluated. Kubrick calls it the use of everyday human behavior within nightmarish situations:

Like the Russian premier on the hotline who forgets the telephone

number of the general staff headquarters and suggests the American

President try Omsk information, or the reluctance of a U.S. officer

to let a British officer smash open a Coca-Cola machine for change

It is this way that a seemingly silly story transforms into an ominously realistic understanding of human interactions involving a poignant national dilemma.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey Kubrick tackles the concept of man’s evolution and a future tinged with a reliance on technology. Here, Kubrick’s genius lies in his execution of the film. This 2 1/2 hour epic is more a work of art than entertainment. Where most contemporary films are told through dialog, the screenplay writer/director reverted to the visual emphasis of silent films to tell a story through images, colors and sounds. It is a movie made for the senses. On a journey first through time and then through space, the viewer is brought into the film via creative uses of visual images coupled with sound. One theory posed for Kubrick’s choice in minimizing words deals with the story he is telling. Beginning from the dawn of man apes are our characters, then humans, and finally, when the story concludes, the starchild. Dialog would have proved counter-productive at times as we see both the birth of language and it’s evolution to a symbol of primitive life. (Nelson 106) Kubrick’s sound decisions precisely mirror the message he is conveying through the plot. It is this tightly constructed theme that has become Kubrick’s trademark. There is nothing is in a scene that does not support the idea, concept or feeling he is trying to convey. Most memorable is the adaptation of Herbert von Kerajan’s "The Blue Danube" to the scene of a spaceship docking at an orbiting space station. The beauty and grace of man’s creation (space travel) is celebrated in this sexually overtoned 2-minute interlude. Another breakthrough was his use of silence in space. Kubrick’s cinematography and sound sense take naturalism to an extreme. There is no wind noise. There are no distractions, but for 3 minutes during a space walk, the only sound is the heavy breathing of the protagonist, Dave Bowman. We understand how he feels and what he sees through his breathing.

Kubrick has been acknowledged, but not completely accepted by his peers and critics. He is an outsider in the specialized game of filmmaking. After moving to Britain to film Lolita in 1962 he chose to keep residence there, thusly alienating himself from the glamour, stars and distractions of Hollywood. He dismisses the lifestyle and benefits received by other filmmakers sharing his status. He refusal to become one of the "family" has resulted in a wary acceptance of his talent. Although he has been nominated 12 times, he has yet to receive an Academy Award:

(AFI Web Site)

In May of 1990 Kubrick joined with directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack, and George Lucas in forming the Film Foundation, an organization meant to promote the restoration and preservation of films.

Father – By the age of 13, Jakob Kubrick had introduced his son to 2 aspects of life that would help shape Stanley’s life: chess and photography. Photography was a natural stepping stone to the cinema and chess would teach him other life lessons:

Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is

(Ciment 196)

Joseph Burstyn – A New York film distributor. He helped introduce "Art House Cinemas" to the United States. Art House Cinemas showed independent and foreign films not likely to be seen outside of museums. Displayed Kubrick’s first film, Fear and Desire.

Wives – As of the early 1990’s Kubrick was married to his 3^rd wife, Christine Harlan (who incidentally was the only woman to star in his 1957 film Paths of Glory. His second wife, Ruth Sobotka was also a star in his 1955 film Killer’s Kiss. Toba Metz was Kubrick’s first wife, whom he knew since high school.

Alexander Singer – A friend of Kubrick’s from high school who set him up with his first paying job producing short films.

James B. Harris – A friend of Singer’s who helped Kubrick produce The Killing and formed Harris-Kubrick Pictures. Also helped produce Lotita.

I found very little information concerning people outside of Stanley Kubrick’s working life. Even his relationships with his wives mix his work and private life. His work ethic leads one to believe that he is continually focused on his films: "The ideal way to make a movie would be to wrap it up after every scene and go away for a month to think." -Stanley Kubrick (as reported in The (Irish) Sunday Independent during the making of Barry Lyndon). In interviews Kubrick will not talk extensively about his private life. He is an artist and his art is his life. This has obviously taken a toll on his intimate relationships as he is currently on his 3^rd wife.

The requirements of Kubrick’s job entail his significant intelligence in a Visual-Spatial domain, Interpersonal domain, and a Verbal-Linguistic domain.

Visual-Spatial – Every scene that makes it to the final cut of a film has passed Kubrick’s eyes. He has an outstanding sense of composition (seen in the use of symmetry in A Clockwork Orange) and color (noted for capturing ultra-realistic colors in his war movies)(DeVires). He worked closely with Ken Adams, the set designer for Dr. Strangelove.

Interpersonal – If Kubrick is thought of as an artist, he conveys his ideas through the use of actors. They are his paint. To reach an actor and translate his vision in terms that they can understand he needs to accept the role of a teacher. Over the years he has adopted some techniques that have helped garner awards for the actors to work with him. (Ciment 38) He has been described as difficult, intense and neurotic. He excludes himself from most of society, yet has the depth of understanding to make intelligent social commentary – at best striking a note in the viewer enough to disturb them.

Verbal-Linguistic – Nominated three times at the Academy Awards for writing screenplays, Kubrick is extremely well versed in the English language. He also created a new dialect of English to accompany his film A Clockwork Orange.

Stanley Kubrick is far from a perfect fit to Howard Gardner’s model of Multiple Intelligences. As a child he was not a prodigy. Until the age of 18 he was an underachiever, never quite comfortable within the confines of school. Like many of the examples chosen by Gardner, Kubrick possesses a one-track mind. His goal is perfectly recreating a world constructed first with language and then with visual and audio stimulus. His ability to understand and portray a given social climate, like cold-war United States (Dr. Strangelove) or the governments oppression of will in England (A Clockwork Orange) involves a mastery of the Interpersonal, Visual-Spatial, and Verbal-Linguistic domains. He succeeds in visually transporting the viewer into a world where he has total control.

His meticulous recreations require the utmost attention – "For Kubrick to maintain such autocratic control over the work an hand, he needs total isolation." (Ciment 41) He is a victim of a Faustian Bargain, as posed by Gardner. His work infiltrates his personal life and has left him with an amazing library of works, yet a tattered personal life. The Hollywood spotlight tries it’s best to put his life on display – and when he denies interviews and only travels to the US for movie premieres he is unjustly labeled a recluse. Kubrick is constantly battling for his privacy. His display of creativity does not come in the fashioning of a novel object (in his case, a story or screenplay). Rather, Kubrick begins with an existing work, usually a novel or short story. He then proceeds to research the facts involved with the plot. Once he understands the physical limits in turning this story into a film, he creates an outline of a personal, yet objective viewpoint.

The creativity lies in the varied formulas he uses to translate a message, feeling or world to the viewer. The sense of "truth" that comes through in a Kubrick film has been formulated through first, an aesthetic and philosophical detachment, and then the appropriate dramatic content and perspective. This leads an audience to new discoveries and an intrinsic connection with the film. Consider the following explanation by Kubrick:

Confront a man in his office with a nuclear alarm, and you

(Nelson 89)

An interesting belief of Kubrick’s that lends itself to creativity is the fluidity of his working environment. He has no theories about film and does not try to build a structured environment to work in. A film changes a thousand times from the script to the final cut. He sees the process as active, adaptive and explorative. This also rubs off on the actors he works with:

This is why Stanley is such a great director. He can create an

-Malcolm McDowell (Ciment 38)

For the sake of his book, Gardner’s working definition of creativity is as follows:

The creative individual is a person who regularly solves problems,

(Gardner 35)

On March 8th, 1997, the Director's Guild of America awarded Stanley Kubrick their highest honor, the D.W. Griffith award (AFI Web Site). This proves his acceptance within his domain, combined with the many homages other filmmakers have made in his honor.

Stanley Kubrick has been described by those who know him as difficult, obsessive, anal and among other things, brilliant. He is a man who values his privacy and loves his work. He has become defined by the films he creates. Their expressive qualities shed a little light on the mind that has so meticulously created them. At age 60 he is still at work with three films due for release in the next 7 years. He has created as close a living history as possible of some the last 4 decades social turmoil. His films document a life’s work, ever changing and evolving. Kubrick’s ability to conceptualize and translate his ideas, to both an audience and those luck enough to work with him, is hidden in the complexities of his work. Although he has touched some of the established genres of film, his style is all his own. His movies continually arouse critical analysis and raise questions about the state of humankind. Stanley Kubrick’s gifts to society will be remembered as frighteningly truthful and creative.

DeVries, Daniel. Film of Stanley Kubrick. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids. 1973.

Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds. Basic Books: A Division of Harber Collins Publishers, New York. 1993.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film ArtistUs Maze. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. 1982.

Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick Directs. Harcourt Brace Jovanovick, Inc, New York. 1971.

• AFIUs 100 Years 100 Movies Homepage
• - ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK.FAQ
• - The Just Guide to Kubrick
• - Stanley Kubrick: The Master Filmmaker
• - Various Kubrick Links