Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick died in 1999.
I love his work, cold though it is.
I love his crowd scene in Spartacus. They're hard. How do you use all those people? How do you photograph them? What do you have them do that they can do?
The 60's were the era of "A Cast of Thousands"— full of vagrant extras hanging out in Europe. I met some of them—waiters, deck hands, Roman soldiers.
Kubrick covered a hillside with a hundred of these hoboes dressed as rebel gladiators. Long shot. Olivier promises they'll go free if they tell him which one is Spartacus. So Kirk Douglas stands up and says, "I'm Spartacus." Pause. Another dude stands up and says, "I'm Spartacus." Third guy stands up: "I'm Spartacus." A fourth. A fifth. Then all rise as one and shout, "I AM SPARTACUS!" Brings tears to your eyes.
I know better, of course. It wasn't really his film. The voices were recorded at a Michigan State football game. But it's nice to associate Kubrick with that scrap of warmth. It's the only one we get.
And they were all Spartacus, those heroes, trapped in what Full Metal Jacket's soldier calls this "world of shit." Kubrick burned to be gone from it as hotly as Beckett did.
Like me (and this is the only possible comparison) Kubrick didn't buy Darwin's myth of evolution. People look at me like I'm from Mars when I say that (and perhaps I am). Nor do I have anything to replace it with. (See The Accidental Monkey.)
Kubrick was one of my few co-religionists on it. In 2001 David Bowman (half giant-slayer, half Odysseus—the one man who can string that bow) takes on the computer HAL (read IBM) who, if being the fittest were a matter of incremental brain circuitry, would win.
In a gesture of victory a monkey throws his bone-club, the first tool, into the air and, leaping the longest gap ever in a piece of editing, it becomes a space module. No explanation needed: our myth, and therefore invisible.
Kubrick had an allergy to this kind of b.s. Always in his films we are kept in the dark by an insidious paste of socio-corporate kaka. An executive arrives on the moon to inspect the monolith and gives his people a speech that is a model of this kind of thing, a speech we already know; then they all go out and have their pictures taken with it. (He was a funny man.) When the American president tries to get General Turgidson on the phone his mistress gives him the he's-in-a-meeting line and we hear the toilet flush. In Eyes Wide Shut young Bill must wade through this stuff even to get near the truth.
Close-up of the distress in the eyes of the prison guard who tyrannizes over Alex in A Clockwork Orange, when he must turn the kid over to the behaviorists. You never know who your enemies are in Kubrick till it's too late. He had more than his share of paranoia—but that in itself was an indictment of this existence: why should we be subject to paranoia?
That awful drill instructor in Full-Metal Jacket gave those marines what they needed to survive in the w.o.s., and was murdered for his trouble. I think the most crap-cutting remark I've heard on war was in Kubrick's Paths of Glory: "It's not death I fear—it’s mutilation."
You have your home thoughts, and then you have the ones you add on. And then you don't know which are yours any more. It's "strenuous" (to use a word Kubrick highlighted in Barry Lyndon) to rethink yourself. He had the look of a man who strained.
Kubrick on sex? The w.o.s. is sustained by sex. Sex gets us born into it and sex keeps us playing its game. From Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut he never stopped railing against the beauty of women—the demiurge's trick for keeping us trapped here. (And this from a father of daughters!)
For him it was automatism, mechanism—"the old in-out in-out" as Alex calls it, "the sperm bank upstairs" Jack calls his wife in The Shining. The docking of the space craft to waltz music is a coupling that will produce a star child. The mid-air refueling in Dr. Strangelove inseminates the plane that will give birth to the bomb.
General Jack D. Ripper knows the way out: "I deny women my essence." Then he just blows the world up!
And oh, how Kubrick wanted the world blown up! Did you think that was a protest movie? How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—did you think he was kidding? He wants us set free! We'll meet again.
Didn't work though. Dr. Strangelove stepped in and restarted the whole catastrophe.
Only David Bowman is shot out past it and the mean little god who rules it ("Jupiter and Beyond") to where he himself is what sees but is not seen. He watches an older Bowman eat, drop a glass on a glass floor, turn: is someone there?
To T.S. Eliot's question, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" Kubrick had an answer: you.
Coda: Speaking of "cold," here is Roger Avary telling Joe Rogan that Eyes Wide Shut is really about a pedophilia ring to which the Cruise and Kidman characters hand over their daughter in the last scene, which Avary shows us. Over Kubrick's strenuous objections the producers took it out of his hands and reedited it, and Kubrick died four days later.
Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
Like all that is best in life, I am quite useless.
The Light Touch on Amazon Prime
A Farewell to Hollywood
"Alas, poor Hollywood! I knew it, Horatio: a source of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. And now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it."
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are face to face with the remarkable fact that Hollywood
doesn’t exist anymore. Like so many of our institutions, it’s gone.
But the market for movies and streaming series is starving.
Here in Athens there is robust activity—production companies,
studio space, talent, crew, and a 40% cash rebate on everything shot here.
My own circle includes Andreas Tsilifonis,
head of Central Athens Film Productions;
Anglo-Greek Chiltern Media; and my
crew:
Cinematographer: Panos Golfis
AD: Stella Manola
Line Producer: Andreas Tsilifonis
Camera: Yiannis Lascaris
Camera: Peter Salapatas
Camera: Adam Petritsis
Steadicam: Michael Tsimperopoulos
Sound recordist: Nikos Bougioukos
Film editor: Kant Pan
Hair/makeup: Maro Kokkoni
Sound design: Valia Tserou
Sound mixer: Kostas Varympopiotis
CGI: Harold Herbert
We can do anything. For example, entirely in Athens, we can make tiny-budget—
Faust: the movie
Woody Allen’s audience—older, educated, sophisticated—has been abandoned.
They need us.
In the tiny Balkan country of Panurgia, wedged between Italy and Slovenia—
(See it? You really have to zoom.)
—German hacker Heinrich Faust, under contract to the Kremlin, has removed Pentagon files and is waiting in a bar he won in a card game for his money to be delivered digitally.
In the same game he lost his soul to Mephistopheles—and won it back again, and now the two are dueling over who exists and who doesn't.
Sister St. Helen, vivacious, callow, naïve, a Candide of a girl, believes anything. The other sisters are so in love with her that they think she's an instrument of the Devil, and subject her to a cruel exorcism.
Faust's mistress, Sasha the Assassin, is also a mistress of disguise. You never know who's coming for you.
CIA asset Priapo Smegman’s foot fetish leads him into Faust’s bar, into the clutches of the CIA, and into abducting Sister St. Helen—
—with whom Father Rosario is also in love, and he must witness the sadistic casting out of the Devil, until Sasha takes a hand. He finds his sense of direction in Faust, who teaches him about life, not to say murder.
A radiant angel has Mephisto in her cross hairs, but he refuses to be drawn in.
Panurgia’s Queen Delicia, much to the king’s distress, is having an affair with Faust, and in her official capacity is able to help him with the disposal of the bodies. She can get anything done.
Question: When you rescue a kidnapped nun
and she falls in love with you, what
do you tell your mistresses?
Pretentious Pictures Presents
Faust: the movie
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains but an intellectual snob.
The Light Touch on Amazon Prime
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