5 lessons from Stanley Kubrick
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 6:00AMI have been recently compiling a new lecture on Stanley Kubrick as part of a screen histories course Im teaching this semester. Of course there is much to say about Kubrick and indeed it has all been said many times by many people over many years. I confess to not, ostensibly, being a Kubrick fan and yet as I research, write and compile my lecture I find myself entranced by his films. His narratives don’t overtly interest me and his subject matter often bores me; but on a scene by scene level, moment by cinematic moment, he is intoxicating.
What i find particularly interesting - and which is perhaps obvious in this context - is that his early photography from his time as staff photographer for Look magazine, is just as compelling as his films. His portraits remind me of a New York incarnation of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
As I tech not in a university context but within the very different demands of a national film school (which is to say NOT teaching ‘cultural studies’ pretending to be Screen Studies, but actually teaching the Study of the Screen) i am aware of being sure to contact thick and tangible threads between ideas, concepts and screen production practice. And as I look to Kubrick with this frame I can see profoundly 5 core tenets aspiring and developing screen practitioners can take from the story of Stanley Kubrick.
The power of Genre - Kubrick may be a definitive auteur artist filmmaker but he was absolutely a genre filmmaker - war, horror, thriller, noir, slapstick. And he understand the power of genre to elevate stories, rather than (as they are too often perceived) a constraint to weight them down.
The power of Knowledge and Research. Kubrick proves a notion i often struggle to drive ohm to students; that there is no such thing as knowing too much. That there has never been a consistently greta filmmaker who wasn’t also a deep thinking and astute researcher. intuition is worthless if its not informed by knowledge, ideas, research and articulate considerations. Kubrick himself once observed about himself and his love of Chess is that it “teaches you that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas”
The power of Technology. Cinema IS technology and no other art-form so wholly relies on technology for both its construction and reception. Kubrick certainly understood this and the precision, artistry and visual richness of his films can be seen as stemming directly from his deep knowledge of cinema as a technical process. Kubrick was a director never at the mercy of the technology or ignorance of it. And the results are on the screen, camera movement by gloriously exposed and lit camera movement.
The importance of Development. Kubrick may have taken many years between films but this was not down time chilling by the pool with a margarita. Kubrick understood that great films come from long and rich processes of development. he was a filmmaker always and perpetually in Development. And this drives home the notion for emerging filmmakers to always been engaged with the process of making. Filmmaking does not begin with a camera and a set, it begins with a book and a notepad.
The importance of Adaptation. There is unfortunately a modern phenomena that inextricably links the director Auteur with the moniker of Writer-Director in popular young filmmaker perception; and moreover as the Writer-Director of original narratives. Yet Kubrick’s great skill was that of adaptation with virtually all of his films being adaptations novels and short-stories. In the digital ago of cross-platform, immersive, interactive and episodic storyworlds the fundamental skills of adaptation, I would argue, is the Single Most Important skill a creative screen media producer can possess. The ability to see a property, understand it, extract form it it’s essence and articulate that essence into new mediums and constructs is the basis of almost all modern screen production. As movies become games and games become websites and websites become mobile apps and apps become augmented reality games and ARGS become episodic series and graphic novels and…. Adaptation is the core skill we must all possess.
He may be dead and many may think his films dead boring but Kubrick still has much to teach us.
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