A rhetorical question — can one have too much of Stanley Kubrick? The question was not in my mind when I immersed myself in ‘Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick’, an exhibition of art inspired by the master filmmaker at London’s Somerset House in 2016. Come 2019, London’s Design Museum is hosting Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition , an exhaustive walkthrough of his career from a design point of view, from his early work as a photographer in New York through to his last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
, and the shorts are on YouTube. The shorts are an early reminder that the man had a terrific eye, and
Re-watching the early features was a revelation, as I’d seen most of them only once before, as opposed to multiple viewings of his later work, beginning with Dr Strangelove (1964). I was struck by the elegance of slim noir Killer’s Kiss (1955), shot guerrilla-style in New York with Kubrick also handling the cinematography and editing, and it was a thrill to see the boxing shots from the documentary short, Day of the Fight (1951), echoed in the film, the evolution of an artist as it were. While the stunning recreation of WWI trenches in Paths of Glory (1957) is justly celebrated, the court martial sequence, shot at Schloss Schleissheim in Bavaria, remains a riveting courtroom drama. The sadder of you may recall that Schloss Schleissheim was also a location for Alain Resnais’ magisterial Alain Robbe-Grillet adaptation, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). And, as for the adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita (1962), made in a far more conservative era than today, it is amazing how much Kubrick manages to say by implication without saying anything at all.
It was pleasing to see long queues snaking out of the Design Museum into what passes for a summer in the UK at Holland Park. The Kubrick assault begins from the foyer where the Durango 95 car, featured in A Clockwork Orange (1971), is parked. Kubrick was a meticulous man, preserving all his records, sketches, notes and references in boxes, more than a 1,000 of them (do watch Jon Ronson’s excellent 2008 documentary, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes ), and the exhibition is as meticulous as the man himself. It is not strictly chronological, the anti-war films are grouped together, with each film getting its own space, and it concludes with arguably his best known work, the pioneering space epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The exhibition also showcases the meticulous preparation Kubrick did for a film that never got made — Napoleon . Steven Spielberg directed another unmade Kubrick film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and he is producing a reinvigorated version of Napoleon as a series, to be directed by Cary Fukunaga.
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition is on till September 15.
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography , and tweets @namanrs
