Table Of ContentKubrick’s Total Cinema
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Kubrick’s Total Cinema
Philosophical Th emes and Formal Qualities
Philip Kuberski
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© Philip Kuberski, 2012
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
E ISBN: 978-1-4411-4956-5
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the United States of America
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For my wife Eileen Cahill
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Contents
Preface v iii
1 Th inking 1
2 Corporeality 1 4
3 Time 4 2
4 War 5 2
5 Light 7 1
6 Eros 8 5
7 Music 1 03
8 Technology 1 14
9 Speech 1 31
10 Poiesis 1 41
11 Transcendence 1 55
Feature fi lms directed by Stanley Kubrick 1 74
Notes 175
Bibliography 1 81
Index 185
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Preface
S tanley Kubrick (1928–99) was one of the greatest fi lmmakers of the second-
half of the twentieth century and a worthy descendant of the great modernists
of the fi rst half of the century. Th e director of 13 fi lms over the course of nearly
50 years, Kubrick continues to reveal himself to us in his depth, subtlety, beauty,
humor, and surprise. Th ere is something distinctive, even unique, about the best
fi lms he made: an intellectual edginess, a Dionysian explosiveness, an apocalyptic
inventiveness, an intractable ambiguity, and an undeniable originality. But there
is something else.
Kubrick’s fi lms think. His work is not simply a celluloid or digital canon,
a collection of fi lms: It is a cinema, more properly, a kinetics, an energy, that
thinks through forms and themes. Th e audience is the necessary complement
to this thinking cinema: We are carried along and into this kinetic expression of
embodied thought.
Th e making of a fi lm, in this sense, is a widely distributed event including
many people over a course of several years. Th e fi lm that emerges is not simply
the record of a lot of beard-scratching, rewrites, and takes: It continues with
each of its showings in the minds of millions of viewers. So the thinking is
not something that precedes the fi lm—it is not a concept, a shooting script, a
storyboard, a series of sets and actors. Th e thinking never really stops and it is
always available and present.
By thinking we usually mean cognition, calculation, and abstract reasoning.
But in truth, most of our thinking is embodied by our senses. We think through
forms, images, sounds, and motion. In this respect, all of the arts think in
and through their media: If a painter thinks in images, a composer thinks
in sounds, and a poet thinks in words, so a fi lm director thinks in all three.
Th e greatest directors exploit these forms in ways that sustain potentials over
time. Th is is one way of recognizing a classic fi lm: Its cinematic thinking never
comes to an end.
S o, all fi lms think, some more and more thoroughly than others. Kubrick’s
fi lms are distinguished by their conceptual consistency, intellectual coolness,
and formal inventiveness. But by “thinking,” I do not mean that his fi lms present
“arguments” or “philosophies.” Rather, they work as visual, verbal, musical,
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Preface ix
and intellectual provocations to the mind and emotions. Th ey work against
expectations, “thinking” through cinematic conventions to address fundamental
questions: What is human nature? Are human beings fundamentally violent? Is
war intrinsic to civilization? Is “love” really possible? Where do we come from?
But of course Kubrick’s fi lms are not philosophical discourses. Like any major
artist, his concerns are rooted in the facts of human experience, in characters,
stories, confl icts, and—oft entimes—enigmatic or provocative resolutions. Some
see his fi lms as antihuman or cynical. I see them as tearing away the bogus and
artifi cial and pointing ahead to something else, diff erent, and frighteningly
authentic.
I f cinema is a thinking carried on via diff erent but synchronized media—
speech, image, music—its meaning is a matter for a similarly ongoing
process of interpretation. In the other arts, intention is oft en determined by
the biographical and historical record and qualifi ed by psychological and
philosophical suppositions. In the end, though, a single artist, composer, or poet
would appear to be the source of a work’s ambition, intention, and meaning. But
a fi lm director is not in a comparable situation, even if he writes, lights, fi lms,
and edits the work. His art is inevitably one of delegation and appropriation.
Individual contributions from the crew are easily absorbed by the director. More
than the other arts, the intentions, origins, and meanings of a fi lm are widely
distributed among a corps of artists, craft smen, and businesspeople. Th e fi lm
director can only be an auteur in a highly qualifi ed way. He signs the work, but
it is countersigned by the work of others.
So Kubrick’s ways of thinking are likewise a distributed event and not confi ned
to anything so neat as a philosophy of life or a single style of fi lmmaking. In
order to present my own thinking about this thinking cinema, this book treats
Kubrick’s fi lms to a conceptual and formal analysis rather than a biographical
and chronological survey. My approach is to study his philosophical themes and
cinematic qualities and suggest the ways in which the fi rst are related to the
second.
Th e formal qualities I have chosen are Kubrick’s embodiments of time,
light, speech, music, and fi nally what I call poiesis —the fi nal synchronization
and mixing of media into the fi lm itself. Other qualities could have been
used—Kubrick’s predilection for symmetrical and geometric uses of space,
for instance—but these are his most distinctive. Th e conceptual themes I have
chosen are corporeality, war, eros, technology, and transcendence. Th ese choices
highlight the dominant confl ict in Kubrick’s fi lms between instinctual drives and
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