Stanley Kubrick

Film Director

• Born: July 26, 1928
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 7, 1999
• Place of death: Childwickbury Manor, near Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England

Filmmaker and photographer

Known for producing, screenwriting, supervision of photography, sound editing, and his attention to minute details, Kubrick directed a cluster of films that stand among the most memorable in American cinema.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; photography

Early Life

Just a year before Stanley Kubrick (KEW-brihk) was born, his father, a homeopathic physician, changed the family name from Kubrik to Kubrick and his given name from Jacob to Jacques/Jack. The child of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Romania, Jacob married Gertrude Perveler (whose family had also emigrated from Austria) in a Jewish ceremony in 1927 in New York City, but the Kubricks raised their son and daughter in a secular home.

An indifferent student, Stanley Kubrick attended neighborhood public schools in the Bronx. When he was twelve, his father taught Kubrick to play chess, which became a lifelong fascination (and a source of income, when he played for quarters in Washington Square Park as a teenager). The following year, his father introduced his son to another lifetime interest when he bought the boy a Graflex camera. Bright and talented, the teenager soon became the official photographer for his high school. Photography and jazz occupied Kubrick’s attention far more than his studies. When he graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1945, his grade average was too low to qualify for admission to a good college.

While still in high school, Kubrick had sold some of his photographs to Look magazine, including a series of photographs of a teacher instructing an English class in the works of William Shakespeare. After high school graduation, Kubrick continued with Look, first as an apprentice in 1946, then as a staff photographer in the late 1940’s. Postwar New York City brimmed with opportunities to see international cinema, and Kubrick became an avid filmgoer. As a young man, Kubrick had two brief marriages, each time to a Jewish woman: American Toba Metz (1948-1951) and Austrian-born dancer and designer Ruth Sobotka (1954-1957).

Life’s Work

Kubrick moved from still photography to filmmaking in the early 1950’s, first directing documentary shorts, then two short narrative features, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955), both financed by Kubrick’s family and friends. Kubrick later prevented his first feature from inclusion in retrospectives. However, its story of soldiers caught behind enemy lines signaled crucial interests. Although never in the armed services himself, Kubrick harbored an enduring fascination with the military and its effects on male aggression.

The young director’s breakthrough came with The Killing (1956), a crime film with a nonlinear story line, which marked Kubrick, who cowrote the screenplay, as an innovator. Although not financially successful, the black-and-white feature attracted the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which financed Kubrick’s next film, Paths of Glory (1957). Set in World War I and filmed in Germany, Paths of Glory would later join the ranks of classic antiwar films. Christine Harlan, a member of a famous German theatrical family, played the only female speaking part (as Susanne Christian). Kubrick and Harlan married in 1957 and had an affectionate relationship that lasted until Kubrick’s death. They raised Harlan’s daughter by a former marriage and two daughters of their own.

At MGM, Kubrick replaced director Anthony Mann shortly after production had begun on the historical epic Spartacus (1960). More a star vehicle for Kirk Douglas than a Kubrick project, Spartacus was an experience that soured Kubrick on Hollywood. Kubrick moved to England to film his adaptation of the infamous novel Lolita (1955). Although less provocative than Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Kubrick’s version of the story of a professor obsessed with a young girl nevertheless gained attention mostly for its salacious subject matter. Continuing to film in England, Kubrick created a dark satire of the military mind: the comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Both Lolita and Dr. Strangelove are animated by the genius of actor Peter Sellers, playing multiple parts.

Kubrick spent five years developing the iconic2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Confused by its oblique narrative, many viewers enjoyed the film, shot in Super Panavision 70, as pure visual spectacle. The expensively produced science-fiction film engendered a cult following and an ongoing debate regarding its meanings. In the 1970’s, Kubrick released A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975), once again with Kubrick adapting well-known novels, as was his habit throughout his career. Each film had a striking visual design, a disreputable protagonist, and an ironic attitude. The violence of A Clockwork Orange first earned it an X rating in the United states; copycat violence in England led Kubrick to withdraw the film from circulation in Britain, and it was not rereleased until after his death.

Kubrick’s two films from the 1980’s—The Shining (1980), a domestic horror film starring an unforgettable Jack Nicholson, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), a critique of military training and its results in the Vietnam War—were both commercially successful and, like many Kubrick films, grew in stature with critics as time passed. One of several never-produced projects from the 1980’s was a screenplay entitled Aryan Papers, based on a novel, Wartime Lies (1991) by Louis Begley, about a young Polish Jew who poses as a Catholic during the Nazi occupation. Although this was Kubrick’s only project with an explicit Holocaust setting, critic Geoffrey Cocks argues that all Kubrick’s films, and especially The Shining, reflect the director’s ambivalent, and continuing, preoccupation with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

One of the most anticipated films in film history, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring the then-married superstars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was released after a Kubrick hiatus of more than a decade. Expectations were high, perhaps unreasonably so, and the film about a contemporary married couple confronting their sexual fantasies had a lukewarm reception. Kubrick unexpectedly died in his sleep only four days after screening the final edit of Eyes Wide Shut. Although Kaddish was read at his funeral, it was not a Jewish ceremony.

Significance

Despite being honored with only one Academy Award (for Special Effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey), Kubrick is widely admired as one of the great American filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. Working across many film genres, with a rare independence and an even more rare perfectionism, Kubrick brought a skeptical, questioning sensibility and a technically adroit professionalism to every film project. His early interest in photography continued for a lifetime, as he produced visually driven narratives that became increasingly expressionistic and increasingly infrequent. Born a New Yorker, Kubrick remained a U.S. citizen in contact with American friends throughout his life; however, he lived and worked in England from 1962 until his unexpected death in 1999.

Bibliography

Cocks, Geoffrey. The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. A unique approach to Kubrick’s films, concentrating on his unconscious; a rigorous examination of the filmmaker’s Jewish roots and fascination with Germany; extensive bibliography; color stills from films.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1997. Based on numerous interviews (but not with Kubrick) and extensive archival research; includes black-and-white photographs, including some from Kubrick’s youth.

Naremore, James. On Kubrick. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Thoughtful analyses of all of Kubrick’s films, published after his death; black-and-white photographs; filmography; index.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. New and expanded ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Argues that Kubrick’s films are united in an “aesthetic of contingency”; black-and-white photographs; bibliography organized by film.

Phillips, Gene D., ed. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001. A collection of sixteen interviews conducted with Kubrick between 1959 and 1987.