The director who called Stanley Kubrick a mutant: “He has no human feeling”
Stanley Kubrick had visions that most of us would be lucky enough to dream up, let alone actually transform into real pieces of cinema. The filmmaker brought some of the most groundbreaking images to the silver screen, his ruthless ambition spurring him to utter greatness.
With 2001: A Space Odyssey, he crafted a powerful meditation on evolution and technology for audiences, many of whom just weren’t ready for this epic depiction of space, with its retro-futuristic design and hallucinatory light tunnel sequence, and that opening scene with the monolith coming to Earth, causing the hominins to develop a sense of survival and intelligence, must have been unlike anything anyone had ever seen before in 1968. It truly was ahead of its time.
The filmmaker never compromised his vision, resulting in the lengthy period drama Barry Lyndon, a stunning depiction of one man’s rise and fall, while The Shining saw him push his actors to their limits in the quest for performances that reflected the true derangement that the Overlook Hotel encouraged within them.
Few directors have had such a consistent run – and even in Kubrick’s so-called weaker films, like Full Metal Jacket, we’re still presented with some truly unforgettable moments, like that death scene, and insane performances (we learn never to mess with R Lee Ermey).
Kubrick just seemed to possess an innate understanding of what audiences needed to see, even if his ideas seemed a little far out. The violence of A Clockwork Orange, for example, was enough to cause widespread outrage, but decades on, it’s hard not to commend Kubrick for such a fearless vision of morality, his depiction of Alex DeLarge one that reminds us just how complex the fight between good and evil really is.
Many filmmakers have long praised Kubrick, from Christopher Nolan to Gaspar Noé, but not everyone has adored him so plainly. A certain French filmmaker, in fact, called Kubrick a “mutant” with “no human feeling”, although he found that this came in handy when making his masterwork, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was Jacques Rivette who delivered these rather scathing words, the director behind the religious drama The Nun, the experimental epic Out 1 (which comes to near 13 hours), and arguably his magnum opus, Celine and Julie Go Boating. The director emerged during the French New Wave, but his work stands apart from his contemporaries, maintaining a preference for long takes and often rather complex narratives, and while you certainly won’t get a full grasp on Celine and Julie Go Boating the first, or even second, time that you watch it.
He didn’t do things by halves, that’s for certain – forcing his audiences to sit through lengthy runtimes that sometimes take a while to feel genuinely rewarding – but he knew how to use cinema as mirror into our subconscious, exploring the act of performance and deeply psychological themes that brought art and magic into a very real sphere.
Rivette seemed to have mixed opinions on Kubrick, having been quoted as saying, “Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it’s great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001.”
Perhaps it was Kubrick’s strict perfectionism, which saw him force his actors into endless takes, opposed to Rivette’s penchant for improvisation, that caused the French filmmaker to accuse him of lacking in human feeling.
But, like most legendary filmmakers, Rivette can’t fault 2001: A Space Odyssey, because it simply treaded new ground, presenting a cinematic world that had never been executed in such a way before.
