Tag: Stanley Kubrick

A Clockwork Orange

Posted on by victorfraga

Violence in cinema has always been the source of endless debate. When depictions go past the fairly anodyne — such as a climactic shootout in an action movie — and into the realm of the genuinely provocative, such as the horrific world of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) or Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002), they can provide a genuine shock to the system, provoking outcry and even calls to be banned. Such was the fate of A Clockwork Orange, adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, in which its protagonist Alex DeLarge wreaks ultra-violent havoc upon London with his fellow “droogs” without a single care in the world.

Now enjoying the status of a classic movie, it was met with fury upon its release in 1971. The Catholic Church rated it Condemned, meaning the faithful were forbidden from seeing it. Roger Ebert called it “an ideological mess” and “a paranoid right-wing fantasy” which only exists to “celebrate the nastiness of its hero” while Pauline Kael called it “an abhorrent viewing experience.” It was even blamed for copycat violence, including the murder of an elderly man and a rape where the accused sang Singin’ in the Rain as “Singing in the Rape”. Kubrick himself withdrew the film from public ownership, making it difficult to see in his native UK until after his death in 1999.

Balancing obsessive production design, kooky frames and a generous wide-angle lens, Kubrick drops us into a world that feels both alien and still contemporary. The boys talk in a strange dialect known as Nadsat — a mixture of cockney slang and mispronounced Slavic words —and roam around raping girls and getting into fights. Crucially, the root of Alex’s problems are never explained, Kubrick initially treating it all as a lark. He is never meant to be a psychological character, instead a case study for Kubrick to show off his unique and abundantly self-satisfied style. Additionally, the soundtrack, courtesy of huge classical hits such as Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie and Moog Synthesiser compositions by Wendy Carlos, gives it a sheen of the sublime, making Alex’s actions feel rather seductive.

If A Clockwork Orange only consisted of its first half, it could easily be dismissed as Kubrick depicting violence only for the mere sake of the thing in itself, pushing the limit of what can be seen on screen. Yet the second half takes us into deeper philosophical territory, with Alex, now a convicted felon, treated to a brutal bout of reprogramming. He is forced to watch horrific acts, including endless rape scenes and even clips of Nazi Germany, all scored to his favourite songs. Once he is let free into society, he shows no interest in violence or sex or even music, eventually becoming a similar victim to the violence he once released.

These two halves of the film, almost perfectly centring around the iconic cinema scene, are in direct contradistinction with each other, showing Kubrick’s fondness for bifurcating films between two distinct parts (most clearly seen in 1987’s Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket). In its second half, A Clockwork Orange becomes a commentary upon violence in cinema itself — its meta quality stressed by those horrific film clips Alex is forced to endure — and how context can change the meaning of violent acts completely. The violence in the second half is nearly just as shocking and brutal as the first, only this time, we’ve finally identified — despite his numerous faults — with the former monster. He may be a terrible person, yet the way he is treated — unable to fight back due to his reprogramming — makes us pity him, like a once violent dog that’s been completely neutered and drugged into a shadow of its former self.

Of all Kubrick’s major films, A Clockwork Orange is easily his less subtle — with a broad (and perhaps simplistic) philosophical point about the horror of the state being worse than any one individual — but its more interesting for the ways he can so easily manipulate the audience’s sense of empathy. It seems he was only too aware of the easily-drawn message of Anthony Burgess’ original novel, Dostoyevskian in the way it starts with horror before moving towards a classic Christian message of redemption. Instead Kubrick famously lets Alex off, ending with a fantasy of him raping yet another naked woman, totally surrounded by adoring spectators in bizarre Edwardian gear. It’s as if to remind us of the artifice of his creation and cinema in general. Sandwiched between the sublime 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the beautiful Barry Lyndon (1975) – films that both end on more purposeful and enigmatic notes – it can feel like somewhat like a relative low-point. But the lessons it teaches us about violence in cinema seem to have come to the fore the last year, especially when it comes to the world of violent arthouse film.

Take Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2018) and The House That Jack Built (Lars Von Trier, 2018), both films made to provoke and push buttons by indulgent auteurs relentlessly plundering from their own filmography. Two similar yet crucially different scenes stand out for me. In the former a child is locked away and left to die, while in the latter the eponymous Jack shoots a child in the head and uses the body for taxidermy. Both feature a young and helpless child dying, yet I laughed at the former and nearly left the cinema in protest at the latter. Pitting the two cases side by side makes one reflect that its not the act itself that has any meaning. It is the way it’s presented — brutally funny in Gasper Noé’s case (presented off-screen) and unrelentingly awful from Lars von Trier (shown in all its horror)— that makes us view it in a particular way.

Likewise, I thought I was done with serial killer narratives after The House That Jack Built, but found Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019) – a film some referred to upon its Berlinale premiere as a complete abomination – to be an utter delight, showing how complicated the relationship we have with violence can be. Watching A Clockwork Orange – a moral quagmire or a mess depending on how you look at it – once again reminds me that context is everything. Whether its style, personal feeling and experience or how much we are or aren’t shown, the way an act is presented or the way we look at an act can change its meaning entirely. Forty-eight years later, A Clockwork Orange still remains the ultimate case in point.

A Clockwork Orange is back in UK cinemas on Friday, April 5th, almost five decades after its original release, thanks to the BFI. Watch the film’s brand new trailer below:

The Favourite has Barry Lyndon written all over it

Posted on by victorfraga

Asking somebody to pick their favourite Kubrick film is like asking a parent to name their favourite child. The Kubrickian genetic code means you possess a strong affection for all of them but – let’s be honest – there are some films that give you more satisfaction than others. Barry Lyndon (1975) is the neglected child. The one most fans shove aside. In the playground line-up, Barry Lyndon is the thin, bespectacled kid who is only ever chosen when everyone else has already been picked.

Yet, Barry Lyndon‘s legacy is momentous, and not limited to its technical wizardry. Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film is an epic story, a profound character study and a razor-sharp satire of the British aristocracy. It has influenced many period dramas since. For example, the ornate, Carnivalesque atmosphere of Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1985; pictured below) echoes Barry Lyndon. Katherine (Florence Pugh) of Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2017) has a predicament very similar to Barry’s, of a social climber entering the aristocracy. Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995) shares costume and locations that consistently remind me of the beautiful tableaux of the 1975 film. Martin Scorsese and David Chase (writer of television series The Sopranos) both single it out as a major inspiration.

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Lanthimos’s favourites

Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek auteur and figurehead of the weird wave of Greek cinema, has made a welcome addition to the list. The Favourite (which is out in cinemas right now) portrays a triadic power struggle in 18th Century England between Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) and sycophantic Abigail and Sarah (Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, respectively). And it has Barry Lyndon written all over it, at least in my opinion. Even if Lanthimos doesn’t recognise it.

In a short YouTube video, the Greek director talks about some of the films that inspired The Favourite. They include Peter Greenway’s The Draughtman’s Contract (1982), Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) and the aforementioned Amadeus. Lanthimos’s omission of Barry Lyndon is blatant and conspicuous. For starters, both films take place in 18th century Britain. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of similarities. Perhaps Lanthimos wanted to avoid the comparisons because the similarities are so glaring, and he could be branded unoriginal.

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Fish-eyes wide open

The boldest visual choice in The Favourite is Lanthimos’s liberal use of the fish-eye lens. The film is dotted with warped shots, giving the it a feeling of deformity and eccentricity. One such example is pictured above: Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) tries to convince Sarah to grant him an audience with the Queen. The whole sequence has a humorous quality – including a duck in the middle of the table – that counters the sly political manoeuvring.

Barry Lyndon uses similar tricks. The best example is in a fist fight between Barry and a soldier. The camera rests above Barry’s shoulder but remains wide enough to make his opponent look at once imposing and ridiculous. This happens again during Lady Lyndon’s suicide attempt. Her grief-stricken convulsions are disturbing yet there is pitch-black humour to be found in her failing to take enough poison. We watch her flail about frantically, like a fish out of water. When Barry’s father is killed in a duel, the death is so distant that it’s almost insignificant. Kubrick starts small, and zooms out until the subject becomes a little detail on the silver screen (pictured below).

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Period laughs

Both The Favourite and Barry Lyndon are brimming with comedic elements, with ample opportunities to mock aristocratic rituals and sense of grandeur. In Barry Lyndon, John Quin makes faces to the camera as he marches. In The Favourite, Abigail (Stone) dances with her soon-to-be lover (pictured above). Both sequences are so absurd they border on parody.

Kubrick often mocks the perceived sense of superiority of the British aristocracy by placing people in the background, standing gallantly despite being completely redundant to the action. Lanthimos peppers his film with bizarre events such as duck racing and oranges being thrown at a naked, obese man. Both directors seek to criticise the aristocracy by parodying their inflated sense of self-righteousness. And both are equally successful.

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No mountain high enough

Perhaps more significantly, both films portray “common opportunists” who use their charms and wit in order to climb to the top of the aristocracy.

In Kubrik’s film, Barry is the sole social climber. He successfully climbs to the top of the aristocracy in the first half of the film, only to crash in the second part. In The Favourite, two characters split the social climbing functions. Abigail is equivalent to Barry during his rise, while Sarah is tantamount to Barry during his fall.

Both Barry and Abigail (pictured above) are underdogs in the beginning of the movies. Both of their fathers perished in a freak incident and both of them have our sympathy. Both have a large potential to cause harm and gradually lose our allegiance as they climb up the social ladder. Sarah’s eventual demise mirrors Barry. And they both meet a hapless ending.

Despite the Kubrickian influences, The Favourite remains a very original film. It adds new twists and flavours to many of the techniques Kubrick created, and the outcome is something entirely novel.

The Favourite

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The maverick Greek director of Dogtooth (2009) makes his third English language film and his first period costume drama. The Favourite is loosely based on early 18th century historical record. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts who was beset by health issues, had some 17 pregnancies including many miscarriages and no heir surviving beyond the age of 11.

Her smart and shrewd childhood companion and friend Lady Sarah Churchill did much of Anne’s thinking for her, pushing her to support the merchant class political party the Whigs rather than the landed gentry party the Tories. The Whigs demanded support for a war against the French, while the Tories were resistant to the heavily increased taxes which funded the war effort at their expense. The relationship of Lady Sarah to the Queen was undermined by the arrival of maidservant Abigail Hill, a ruthless member of the gentry whose family had fallen on hard times and who was determined to fight her way back up the social ladder at any cost.

If that outline is true to the facts, the screenplay fashioned upon their foundation by Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara seek to explore less the historic detail of what actually happened and more the power dynamics of the three women involved. Olivia Colman is magnificent as the shy and vulnerable Anne who nevertheless wields absolute power as monarch. Rachel Weisz makes a fearsome Lady Sarah, whether the powerful manipulator seen at the start or the hideously disfigured victim of a riding accident she becomes towards the end as events turn against her. Emma Stone as the social climber Abigail however seems to be playing the same empowered woman character she always plays.

There’s a strong if historically contentious sexual element, with Lady Sarah the Queen’s clandestine lover until Abigail, who initially ingratiates herself with both Anne and Sarah by using a herbal paste to relieve burning sensations in the bedridden Anne’s legs, replaces Sarah in Anne’s affections. Further intrigues involve the English two party Parliament in the story’s background. Foppish opposition Tory leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, the memorable psychotic from George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road almost unrecognisable under a lengthy, light coloured wig) senses Abigail working her way into the Queen’s favour and wants to recruit her to spy on Lady Sarah and Anne. Although a fringe character, he is more pivotal to the action than his rival the government’s Whig PM Lord Godolphin (James Smith) who the Queen, under Sarah’s influence, supports.

Apart from Stone’s arrival where she’s literally pushed out of the carriage into the shit on the ground, her excursions into the forest to collect ingredients for a herbal paste to ease a painful condition on her arm and scenes of Lady Sarah outside shooting and riding, the proceedings play out within the confines of Anne’s vast palace – kitchens staffed with cooks and maids, lengthy corridors with footmen, the Queen’s vast bedchamber which is also a well-stocked library.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan frequently shoots from bravura angles although his slavish use of Kubrickian reverse tracking shots is less than original and while the overall look and feel of the piece echoes Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975), it lacks that film’s rigorous discipline and doesn’t similarly immerse the viewer in its eighteenth century world.

Lanthimos still hasn’t bettered his earlier, homegrown Greek films like Kinetta (2005) and Dogtooth (2009) both of which not only present strange and unfamiliar worlds to the viewer but also completely immerse him/her in them. Those promised a maverick artist on a par with the likes of Lynch and Cronenberg, on which promise his bigger budget, English language movies (The Lobster, 2015, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, 2017) haven’t to date delivered. As with those films, while there’s much to admire in The Favourite, it still fails to achieve those qualities of Lanthimos’ early films that marked him out as destined for greatness.

The Favourite is out in the UK from Saturday, December 29th. Watch the film trailer below:

2001: A Space Odyssey (50th anniversary, 70mm)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is back in a brand new 70mm print struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative. Like known champion of physical celluloid over digital print Christopher Nolan who was involved in the process, I saw the film in a cinema as a boy with my father, although in my case I saw one of its many reruns in the seventies. Nevertheless, I relish the chance to go back and see this brand new ‘unrestored’ 70mm print because it recreates what audiences saw on release, no remastering, re-edits or redone effects.

The film absolutely holds up against present day efforts (one of the few remotely like it is Nolan’s Interstellar/2014). In its day, 2001’s visual effects were far superior to anything previously seen in science fiction and although cinema effects technology has moved on considerably, this aspect of the film remains convincing.

However, the visual effects are far from being the strongest aspect of the film which was conceived by director Kubrick with SF author Arthur C.Clarke. The plot is deceptively simple. (Skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid spoilers if you’ve never seen the film.) A monolith (sides ratio: 1:4:9) appears on Earth and inspires primitive apes to make weapons, it reappears thousands of years later in the Tycho crater on the Moon and after being excavated unexpectedly sends a one-off transmission to Jupiter. So mankind sends a space mission to Jupiter, but the ship’s on board computer malfunctions and attempts to kill the crew. The one surviving astronaut undergoes a journey which culminates in his going through the door of the monolith and emerging as a gigantic star child.

Considering the magnitude of the themes involved here, it’s surprising how dull or banal much of the movie is. If this sounds like negative criticism, I don’t mean it in that sense. The film’s execution is never dull or banal, rather much of its subject matter is dullness or banality. Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out”; Kubrick’s genius in 2001 is that he forces us to watch these dull bits. And they make for compelling viewing.

Thus there are scenes of apes gathering at a watering hole or huddling underneath rock ledges at night against the cold. There are scenes of a flight to the moon via an intermediary space station when a jump cut could have taken us straight there in terms of plot. There’s a briefing in a conference room at Tycho where Dr Haywood Floyd (William Sylvester) addresses fellow scientists about cover stories and the need for secrecy from which the film cuts away just before telling us (a scene we never see) what he knows about the object excavated in the crater. There are hours of the two man crew Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) – there are actually five crew, but three are in hibernation – and the HAL 9000 computer (voice: Douglas Rain) going about their daily routines aboard the Discovery One spaceship to Jupiter. There is the weird interstellar journey which plays out like an incomprehensible drug trip and, finally, the surviving astronaut’s emergence into a world of rooms in which eighteenth century furniture sits upon a grid of white squares lit up from below. It’s hard to find anything like any of this elsewhere in cinema, science fiction or otherwise.

Set against these scenes are moments of great import: an ape trying out as a club a bone found on the ground, a group of spacesuited astronauts on the moon overcome by sudden, unbearable noise from the monolith, a spacewalking Jupiter Mission astronaut struggling frantically after his breathing line has been cut and the heartbreaking disconnection of HAL one memory terminal at a time.

The wider panorama here contains unforgettable moments predicting the minutiae of space travel which may not have come true in the year 2001 but still feel like they could be just around the corner in 2018, the date of the film’s title notwithstanding. Take the celebrated sequence travelling to the space station. A sleeping Pan Am passenger’s pen floats in zero gravity, an air-hostess (or space-hostess) enters shot right way up and walks in a circle until her feet are above and her head below to walk out of shot upside-down, a rotating space ship slowly docks with a space station with which its rotation is in sync – all to the strains of Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz. And as testament to the incredible detail in the notoriously obsessive Kubrick’s intensive research, widescreen TVs on the backs of the seats inside the passenger cabin. Unremarkable today, but possibly little more than an idea on a drawing board somewhere in the TV manufacturing industry when the director built them into his film as something of a major coup.

If 2001 remains unchallenged as the greatest SF film of all time, there is however one aspect in which it has aged badly overall. Aside from the group of four Russian scientists with whom Dr. Floyd has a conversation, three of whom are women, it’s notable that women aren’t given any real position of prominence in 2001 – hostesses and receptionists plus a handful of minor/secondary scientists characters – and that’s it. If Kubrick and Clarke were alive and writing the film today, I’d like to think that’s something they might change. Otherwise, though, 2001 could have been made yesterday and seeing it in this brand new 70mm print is a real treat.

2001: A Space Odyssey (70mm) is back out in the UK on Friday, May 18th. Watch the film trailer below:

Filmworker

Posted on by victorfraga

Would you give up your career in order to become someone else’s shadow? What about your own life? Well, Leon Vitali did. He surrendered his job as an actor in British TV in favour of working as an assistant for the legendary American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (who moved to the UK at the age of 19). In a way, he also gave up his own family life. He did marry and have children, but these seemed to be secondary in his life. Filmworker reveals that Vitali worked 16-hour-shifts nearly every single day for much of the time comprised between 1975, when he first met the director, until 1999, when the filmmaker passed away.

Vitali was described not only as Kubrick’s shadow; someone also called him Igor (in a reference to Doctor Frankenstein’s assistant). It wasn’t easy dealing with the seemingly avuncular man, who in reality had an explosive temperament, Kubrick often screamed, bullied and humiliated his workers, delivering expletive-laden rants of all sorts. Vitali (pictured below at present, looking a lot like Ozzy Osbourne) reveals that the closest you could Stanley Kubrick nowadays was Gordon Ramsey (that’s F**KING insane!!!).

A filmworker is not a filmmaker, but it’s not that bad at all, either. Vitali wasn’t a mere grovelling pawn without a say. He was an enabler; and he deserves a lot of respect for that. It’s widely recognised that Kubrick wouldn’t function without his assistant. Vitali was in charge of virtually everything: from direction assistance to casting, coaching of the actors, post-production and even marketing and publicity (he allegedly vetted every single international poster and trailer of his films). His stamina, loyalty and efficiency were undeniable, and we must credit him for warranting the excellence of Stanley Kubrick.

Vitali’s job did not end after Kubrick’s untimely death at the age of just 70. Quite the opposite. At that stage, the shadow had to step forward and replace his master. He had to finish Eyes Wide Shut to his best knowledge of Kubrick would have wanted the film to look like. He was also in charge of the restoration of his entire collection. If you are a fan of Kubrick, this doc will feel like a candy shop to you: there are loads of film extracts, plenty of behind-the-scenes and interviews with Vitali and his family. If you are not a fan, however, you might want to give it a miss, or at least familiarise yourself with Kubrick’s work first.

Filmworker showed the 70th Cannes International Film Festival in May 2017, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas Friday, May 18th (2018). On VoD on Monday, April 22nd (2019).