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I'd left it late to get down to the Design Museum's Stanley Kubrick exhibition and when I got there it was super crowded. As there was a lot to see and some of the signage was located in tight corners and close to the ground it meant there was a lot of bumping into people, a lot of 'excuse me's, and a lot of cricking of the neck.
One thing it wasn't though was underwhelming as one friend of mine had claimed. Overwhelming if anything. A brief recce on arrival had me wondering if the two and a half hours I had until the museum closed would be sufficient. It certainly wouldn't have been if I'd stopped and watched every film clip, if I'd read every script draft, and if I'd taken in every single bit of tech that was on show.
Not being technically minded and being aware that if I want to watch the films then the cinema, or television, would probably be a better, and more comfortable, bet I decided instead, to take a more broad brush approach to the exhibition and my experience was all the better for doing so. The show began with a brief introductory section before being divided up into several sections devoted to each of Kubrick's major movies, complete with outfits, photographs, anecdotes, and architectural models from the film in question.
Hardy Amies - Honeywell mobile office briefcase modelled by Chelsea Matthison
Full disclosure. I have not seen all of Stanley Kubrick's films. I have not even seen all of the Kubrick films that were included in this exhibition. I haven't seen Barry Lyndon or Eyes Wide Shut but I have seen A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. I'm not going to do a list of all the films I have or have not seen but the ones I have seen have been uniformly excellent so perhaps I should pull my finger out and watch the rest.
Certainly that level of research would have been beneficial before attempting to write a blog about the show but time is finite so it didn't happen. Even though Kubrick didn't even make that many films really. Partly due to the painstaking levels of preparation behind each one. He'd spend months, even years, researching details so his films would have the air of authenticity.
For Paths of Glory he oversaw a four week trench dig, for The Shining he had the facade of an Oregon ski lodge recreated in Elstree, and for 2001 he trawled the 1964 New York's World's Fair looking for products to inspire his vision of the future. One that he was determined would look fantastic but also plausible. Design went right down to the coffee tables and cutlery used.
Certainly that level of research would have been beneficial before attempting to write a blog about the show but time is finite so it didn't happen. Even though Kubrick didn't even make that many films really. Partly due to the painstaking levels of preparation behind each one. He'd spend months, even years, researching details so his films would have the air of authenticity.
For Paths of Glory he oversaw a four week trench dig, for The Shining he had the facade of an Oregon ski lodge recreated in Elstree, and for 2001 he trawled the 1964 New York's World's Fair looking for products to inspire his vision of the future. One that he was determined would look fantastic but also plausible. Design went right down to the coffee tables and cutlery used.
Kubrick with extras during the filming of Spartacus in Spain
This attention to detail spanned all his films and his entire career as well as all the many different genres he worked across. It didn't seem to matter to Kubrick if a film was a war film, a horror, science fiction, or a period drama they'd all be approached with the same level of meticulousness. If they shocked the audience too then that didn't matter either. It could be argued he even relished the notoriety provided by the violence of A Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove.
Born in New York, Kubrick spent most of his working life in the UK and, remarkably, found locations in his adopted country that managed to serve as the battlefields of Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket), the Rocky Mountains (The Shining), and even the moon (2001:A Space Odyssey).
His films were almost always based on pre-existing books. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray, and Dr Strangelove by Peter George to name but three. A Clockwork Orange, of course, was adapted from Anthony Burgess' 1971 dystopian black comedy. Kubrick was quoted as saying "what I like about not writing original material - which I'm not even certain I could do - is that you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time. You have a reaction to it. It's a kind of falling-in-love reaction".
So the stories were already there but it took Kubrick to realise them, to flesh them out. He did it so well that when the likes of A Clockwork Orange or Lolita are mentioned most people will think first of the films and many others only of them. As a child, Kubrick enjoyed chess, photography, and visiting the cinema. The directors that most inspired him were Erich von Stroheim, DW Griffith, and Sergei Eisenstein. Other films left a different impression.
Kubrick again:- "I remember thinking at the time that I didn't know anything about movies, but I'd seen so many movies that were bad, I thought 'Even though I don't know anything, I can't believe I can't make a movie at least as good as this". Time has proved that to be something of an understatement! After a brief spell working as a photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick directed his first film, Fear and Desire in 1953. He was still in his mid-twenties.
His films were almost always based on pre-existing books. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray, and Dr Strangelove by Peter George to name but three. A Clockwork Orange, of course, was adapted from Anthony Burgess' 1971 dystopian black comedy. Kubrick was quoted as saying "what I like about not writing original material - which I'm not even certain I could do - is that you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time. You have a reaction to it. It's a kind of falling-in-love reaction".
So the stories were already there but it took Kubrick to realise them, to flesh them out. He did it so well that when the likes of A Clockwork Orange or Lolita are mentioned most people will think first of the films and many others only of them. As a child, Kubrick enjoyed chess, photography, and visiting the cinema. The directors that most inspired him were Erich von Stroheim, DW Griffith, and Sergei Eisenstein. Other films left a different impression.
Kubrick again:- "I remember thinking at the time that I didn't know anything about movies, but I'd seen so many movies that were bad, I thought 'Even though I don't know anything, I can't believe I can't make a movie at least as good as this". Time has proved that to be something of an understatement! After a brief spell working as a photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick directed his first film, Fear and Desire in 1953. He was still in his mid-twenties.
Kubrick's director's chair
Kubrick applied his love for, and skill at - he made money, chess to film making. Methodical, thoughtful, tactical, always thinking several steps ahead and refusing to make hasty moves when under pressure to do so. Chess even cropped up in his films. In 2001 astronaut Frank Poole plays the computer HAL 9000 and resigns when HAL claims to have Poole in inevitable checkmate. Chess experts have studied the board and claim HAL does not have Poole in checkmate and this has been read as the first sign in the film that HAL has gone rogue.
As with chess, Kubrick realised that the pieces that were on the table affected the result of the game and Kubrick, with what appears a steely cold detachment, seems to have seen his actors as his chess pieces. He craved actors who could understand the psychology, the motivations, and the emotions of the characters they were tasked with portraying. The actors wanted him too. Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, and even Laurence Oliver all expressed a desire to work with him.
Even though Kubrick, an advocate of the Stanislavski Technique, did not go easy on his cast. In Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise was made to walk through the same door ninety times and, in The Shining, Jack Nicholson had to repeat a scene in which he attempts to attack his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) with a baseball bat one hundred and twenty five times. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, sure, but an effective one.
As with chess, Kubrick realised that the pieces that were on the table affected the result of the game and Kubrick, with what appears a steely cold detachment, seems to have seen his actors as his chess pieces. He craved actors who could understand the psychology, the motivations, and the emotions of the characters they were tasked with portraying. The actors wanted him too. Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, and even Laurence Oliver all expressed a desire to work with him.
Even though Kubrick, an advocate of the Stanislavski Technique, did not go easy on his cast. In Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise was made to walk through the same door ninety times and, in The Shining, Jack Nicholson had to repeat a scene in which he attempts to attack his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) with a baseball bat one hundred and twenty five times. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, sure, but an effective one.
Steenbeck, 6-plate 35mm editing table
Kubrick worked himself as hard as he worked Nicholson and Cruise. For him the editing room was where the magic happened and he'd squirrel himself away for days, hours, weeks on end cutting films to the bone, judiciously extracting even expensively shot scenes if they distracted from the overall picture and making sure everything was just how he wanted it. For him it was the apogee of the creative process.
It's a creative process that seems to have been honed during Kubrick's career but the bare bones of it were there from the start. The exhibition briefly touches on short films like Day of the Flight (1951) and Flying Padre (also 1951) which, in turn, focused on boxer Walter Cartier and Father Fred Stadtmueller, an airborne priest based in New Mexico, before we get to the actual feature films. 1953's Paths of Desire, 1955's Killer's Kiss, and 1956's The Killing are skimmed over quickly. I can only assume they have been dismissed as minor works or juvenilia. The curators have deemed 1957's Paths of Glory to be when Kubrick stopped being a film maker and became an auteur.
We're informed by one of the many large banners that introduce each film that Paths of Glory is "considered Kubrick's first masterpiece". It tells the story of French soldiers facing execution after being accused of cowardice. It infuriated French authorities during the colonial war in Algeria and, as such, was banned in France for the best part of two decades.
We're informed by one of the many large banners that introduce each film that Paths of Glory is "considered Kubrick's first masterpiece". It tells the story of French soldiers facing execution after being accused of cowardice. It infuriated French authorities during the colonial war in Algeria and, as such, was banned in France for the best part of two decades.
The story, famously, told of a slave rebellion against Rome but screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who'd recently undergone a period of blacklisting for being a Communist sympathiser) also saw it as a parable about the class struggle in America at that time. Such subtleties were probably lost on most of the film's huge audience. Spartacus went on to win four Oscars (though not for Kubrick or Trumbo, neither received so much as a nomination) and remained Universal's biggest moneyspinner for a decade until it was beaten by, somewhat surprisingly, the disaster movie Airport. A film most famous now for being parodied in Airplane.
Tunic and toga of a Roman senator
The show's not in strict chronological order so the jump forward twenty-seven years to Full Metal Jacket is a little confusing at first (for someone like me, anyway). I can remember watching, and loving, Full Metal Jacket at the Cannon (formerly ABC) cinema in Basingstoke so it was good to be reacquainted with Private Joker's Born to Kill helmet and be reminded of stories of how Beckton Gas Works in the East End of London filled in for Vietnam during filming. It sent me right back (to Basingstoke, not Vietnam) to see clips of drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (played by real life marine R Lee Emey) brutalise and humiliate his young recruits.
I'd never wanted to be in the Army anyway and those scenes certainly put me off even more. These things I knew, and remembered, from the film but at the Design Museum I learnt that locations in Enfield were used for the training camp, that Beckton Gas Works specifically stood in for Hue, and that the inestimable Don McCullin's photographs were the starting point from which Kubrick, and designer Anton Furst, built up the imagery of the film
I'd never wanted to be in the Army anyway and those scenes certainly put me off even more. These things I knew, and remembered, from the film but at the Design Museum I learnt that locations in Enfield were used for the training camp, that Beckton Gas Works specifically stood in for Hue, and that the inestimable Don McCullin's photographs were the starting point from which Kubrick, and designer Anton Furst, built up the imagery of the film
Ruins of Beckton Gas Works with conceptual set design drawings
Born to kill helmet worn by Private Joker
There'd been much less killing, thirty years earlier, in Lolita (though there was some) but it proved far more scandalous. Paedophilia tends to be. As James Mason's Humbert Humbert attempts to bed (or, strictly speaking, rape) the underage title character (played by Sue Lyon whose later career would see her cast as Evel Knievel's wife), Peter Sellers gets to mug it up as Clare Quilty in a variety of guises as some sort of comedic counterpoint to all the kiddy fiddling.
Er, right! To ensure the film wasn't banned Kubrick made the unusual (for him) decision to go easy on 'overt depictions of sexual desire' and replace them with ironic pop songs and slapstick. As we so often hear they were different times and while there's nothing wrong with making a film about paedophila (Todd Solondz's 1998 Happiness is a darkly comedic and troubling masterpiece) it seems unlikely that, outside of Brass Eye, anybody would have the chutzpah or cojones to use ironic pop music and slapstick as vehicles to do so now.
Or maybe I'm wrong. There are apologists for child pornography like Claire Fox serving as MEP for the Brexit party right now. Kubrick was to face controversy again in 1971 with the release of A Clockwork Orange. There'd been outrage in the wake of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Ken Russell's The Devils already that year and Kubrick's film divided the critics. Some claiming it normalised an atmosphere of violence, others taking a more nuanced view and seeing the film as an artful consideration of how important freedom of choice is in free societies.
Labour MP Maurice Edelman declared the film would "lead to a Clockwork cult" which would magnify teenage violence and the tabloids reported the murder of a tramp by a sixteen year old boy as being inspired by the film even though the murderer had never seen A Clockwork Orange. Many local authorities refused to allow it be shown in cinemas under their jurisdiction.
Kubrick, again - and this time the feeling seems more reluctant, toned the film down. It wasn't enough for groups like Christian Action who called for a national boycott. The video was banned (after Kubrick received threats to his family - that's how much those who complained about it were really against violence) when I was a teenager beginning to take an interest in cult cinema and VHS copies would be exchanged amongst friends down the pub. I was eager to see what all the fuss was about but I got more than I expected. It wasn't, as I'd probably hoped, a load of meaningless and random 'ultraviolence' - even if that was how it began - but a brilliant piece of film making telling a fascinating story about the young male tendency towards violent behaviour, frustration at society's protocols, and the need for a sense of belonging.
Malcolm McDowell played Alex, leader of a violent youth gang called the Droogs who speak in their own language (Nadsat) and drink at the Korova milk bar while celebrating both mindless violence and sexual abuse. A particularly unpleasant scene involving a wealthy 'cat-lady' being bludgeoned with a phallic sculpture was, I was saddened to learn, possibly inspired by Burgess' wife, Lynne being robbed, assaulted, and violated by US Army deserters in London during the WWII blackout.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this nastiness references from A Clockwork Orange peppered 'alternative' youth culture for years afterwards. The name Korova was adopted by a record label that put out sides by Echo and the Bunnymen, Tenpole Tudor, and Strawberry Switchblade, Heaven 17 took their name from a fictional band in the film, New Order recorded a song called Ultraviolence for their second album Power, Corruption & Lies, and Gnarls Barkley dressed as Droogs for a video shoot.
The list of those who've taken from the film goes on to include David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Guns'n'Roses, U2, Blur, Moloko, Kylie Minogue, Sepultura, Lana Del Rey, Marilyn Manson, My Chemical Romance, and, lest we forget, indie hopefuls Campag Velocet. All quite strange when you consider that the film's soundtrack is provided by electronic composer Wendy Carlos and Alex likes nothing more than to relax to a bit of Ludwig Van as he calls Beethoven.
Malcolm McDowell played Alex, leader of a violent youth gang called the Droogs who speak in their own language (Nadsat) and drink at the Korova milk bar while celebrating both mindless violence and sexual abuse. A particularly unpleasant scene involving a wealthy 'cat-lady' being bludgeoned with a phallic sculpture was, I was saddened to learn, possibly inspired by Burgess' wife, Lynne being robbed, assaulted, and violated by US Army deserters in London during the WWII blackout.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this nastiness references from A Clockwork Orange peppered 'alternative' youth culture for years afterwards. The name Korova was adopted by a record label that put out sides by Echo and the Bunnymen, Tenpole Tudor, and Strawberry Switchblade, Heaven 17 took their name from a fictional band in the film, New Order recorded a song called Ultraviolence for their second album Power, Corruption & Lies, and Gnarls Barkley dressed as Droogs for a video shoot.
The list of those who've taken from the film goes on to include David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Guns'n'Roses, U2, Blur, Moloko, Kylie Minogue, Sepultura, Lana Del Rey, Marilyn Manson, My Chemical Romance, and, lest we forget, indie hopefuls Campag Velocet. All quite strange when you consider that the film's soundtrack is provided by electronic composer Wendy Carlos and Alex likes nothing more than to relax to a bit of Ludwig Van as he calls Beethoven.
Kubrick's Droogs
Okay, he likes ultraviolence, milk, and a bit of the ol' in-out even more but when it comes to music it's Ludwig Van all the way. Kubrick's films made great use of music. He saw it as "one of the most effective ways of preparing an audience and reinforcing points that you wish to impose". Sixties Billboard hits like Surfin' Bird and Wooly Bully gave Full Metal Jacket a sense of time and place, Schubert crops up in Barry Lyndon (even though Schubert wasn't born until three decades after the end of the Seven Years' War in which it's set), and, in Lolita, Shelley Winters is brought to tears by West Side Story.
Architecture, too, has a pivotal role to play. Not least in A Clockwork Orange where Brutalist edifices from Thamesmead to Uxbridge are used as locations. Signifying the souring of the dreams of modernism at the time, many of these buildings now are being reassessed and have attracted a new breed of admirers. I've arranged walks to look at such buildings so you can count me in that group.
Thamesmead, London
Brunel University, Uxbridge, West London
Venetian masks
Cape and Venetian mask worn by Tom Cruise as Dr Harford
Eyes Wide Shut (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story) wasn't a film that particularly interested me on its release in 1999, the year of Kubrick's death (this exhibition has been scheduled to mark the twentieth anniversary of his passing). It's a project Kubrick had kept on the backburner for nearly three decades as other priorities kept taking over. As themes of jealousy and maintaining desire within marriage were key to the film the casting of then married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman seemed like a masterstroke, although one that, due to their public perception as 'film stars' rather than actors, was always likely to alienate Kubrick purists.
Kubrick fans are observably less divided over 1980's The Shining (taken from a Stephen King book that came out just three years ago) and it's good to see a model of the Overlook maze, the Adler typewriter that carries that legendary message and clue to how unhinged Jack has become, and, best of all the dresses and shoes worn by The Grady Twins. It was instructive to learn that the twins were inspired by a 1966 Diane Arbus photograph that cropped up in one of my blogs earlier this year!
Kubrick fans raved, and continue to rave, about the film while Kubrick himself praised King's book:- "one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural". When working on the script with novelist Diane Johnson, he also drew on other literary sources from Sigmund Freud to JD Salinger. Architecture, again, was studied and the red toilet in the film was based on one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.
Adam Savage - Maze of the Overlook Hotel
Adler Typewriter
Dresses and shoes worn by Lisa and Louise Burns as Grady's daughters
Thirteen years earlier, Dr Strangelove:Or How I Leaned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb also made great use of architectural whimsies and set design. There's a 1:20 model of Ken Adam's War Room from the film in the show that's an absolute delight. It certainly delighted Adam. When Steven Spielberg told him "Ken, that war room set for Strangelove is the best set you ever designed" Ken responded with "no, it's the best set that's ever been designed".
Clearly not a modest man, Adam designed the sets for the first six James Bond films and later worked on The Madness of King George. Strangelove's War Room struck just the right tone for a film that aimed to satirise the insanity of the nuclear arm races between the USA and the USSR. With Peter Sellers as the titular character, Kubrick also employed photographer Arthur 'Weegee' Fellig to document the making of the film, and, at one point, cut a scene involving a pie fight between the representatives of the two superpowers as it detracted from the serious message that underpinned the movie.
Workshop Jorg Kollmeyer, Frankfurt am Main - War Room
Uniform worn by a French soldier during the seven years's war (1756-63)
Uniform worn by a British soldier during the seven years's war (1756-63)
Barry Lyndon was another film in which architecture played a key role. Art too. Shot using, for the most part, daylight and candlelight for authenticity, many of the scenes in the film directly reference historical artworks. Kubrick's archive from the time (which provides a great deal of the paraphernalia for this show) reveals pages torn out of art books featuring paintings by Joshua Reynolds, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and George Stubbs. The design of clothes for Barry Lyndon were all copied from period artwork.
Locations for filming included, in Blenheim Palace and Petworth House, a couple familiar to me - which, for some reason, pleased me. The joy of hyperlinks. Borehamwood is also an area I became vaguely familiar with during the recently completed London LOOP and it's there, as well as Shepperton, where much of the filming was done for 2001:A Space Odyssey. The film that completes our journey through the world of all things Kubrick.
As befits such an epic film it's been given quite a lot of space. Alongside instructions for use of zero gravity toilets and sketch ideas for the Dawn of Man sequence in which the mysterious monolith first appears and an ape realises for the first time that bones can be used as weapons, there are models and sketches used in, or for, the film by the likes of Stephen Dymazo, Roy Frederick Canon, and Finnish neo-futurist industrial designer Eero Saarinen.
I found out the lead ape was known as the Moonwatcher, that choreographer Dan Richter spent hours at both London Zoo and the Natural History Museum observing the movements of chimps and gorillas, and that Arthur C Clarke had been invited by Kubrick to collaborate on the script. It advanced Clarke's career as much as it did Kubrick's and the next year he was called on to report on the moon landings. Joy Cuff enjoyed an even greater career jump when he worked as a matte artist on 2001. He'd previously been working on Thunderbirds.
When I watched 2001:A Space Odyssey as a teenager I was completely fucking baffled by it. Apes banging bones together, rogue computers, the monolith, and those bizarre scenes in a baroque bedroom. It fairly blew my tiny mind. I was actually glad to see a pre-Rising Damp Leonard Rossiter as a recognisable, and thus grounding, face.
Of course, I'm older now and I understand ambiguity a bit better. I'd definitely appreciate it more now - though I'd still not entirely get it. The fact there's a reasonably lengthy Wikipedia page titled Interpretations of 2001:A Space Odyssey suggests I'm far from the only one. Although 2001 proved, initially, unpopular with cinema audiences it went on to pave the way for blockbusters like Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, and, most of all, Star Wars. Many of those films employed Douglas Trumbull whose big breakthrough had been with 2001.
Of course, I'm older now and I understand ambiguity a bit better. I'd definitely appreciate it more now - though I'd still not entirely get it. The fact there's a reasonably lengthy Wikipedia page titled Interpretations of 2001:A Space Odyssey suggests I'm far from the only one. Although 2001 proved, initially, unpopular with cinema audiences it went on to pave the way for blockbusters like Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, and, most of all, Star Wars. Many of those films employed Douglas Trumbull whose big breakthrough had been with 2001.
Kubrick's sketch of a design for the waterhole in the Dawn of Man sequence
Roy Frederick Canon - Original film artwork Discovery over Saturn
Stephen Dymazo (SD studios) with contributions by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist at Space.com - Pan American Orion III space plane
Oliver Mourgue for Airborne International - Djinn chair and sofa (1965)
Eero Saarinen - Saarinen Tulip low table (1957)
A future edition of the magazine Paris Match
Poster for travel destination by Pan American
The story of 2001 was a neat way to close out an exhibition that was stuffed to the rafters with photographs, film clips, camera equipment, and props and one that, for the most part, had been fun and informative. Diversions into projects that Kubrick never did get round to completing (a film about Napoleon Bonaparte and another about the Holocaust) and how A.I. Artificial Intelligence had to be completed by Steven Spielberg following Kubrick's death were just that, diverting. But, ultimately, the takeaway message you should leave the Design Museum with is to watch the films. If you've never seen them - watch them. If you've already seen them - watch them again. Viddy well, little brother, viddy well.
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