Stanley Kubrick’s least favourite movie genre: “Slowpoke and ponderous”
You might hear vague terms like ‘visionary’ and ‘revolutionary’ used to describe Stanley Kubrick – words that are used so commonly to describe filmmakers that they lose all meaning, but if anyone deserves to be classified as such, it really is him.
When he directed his first feature, Fear and Desire, in 1952, Kubrick took on the role of producer, cinematographer, and editor, doing all he could to bring his vision to life despite working with such a small budget.
You could see his own desire to become a unique filmmaker within the threads of the grainy film, but he wouldn’t fully realise his talents for another few years, spawning controversy with his staunch anti-war film, Paths of Glory and his Oscar-winning Spartacus.
By the end of the ‘60s, however, he was an undisputed cinematic icon, making 2001: A Space Odyssey with such strikingly realistic sets that he was accused of faking the moon landing with the same materials. However, while the space epic explores very real questions of technology and evolution, Kubrick opts for an approach that is much more lyrical.
The light tunnel sequence, completely bathed in psychedelic colours, is one of the most mesmerising cinematic experiences you can possibly experience; it’s a poetic journey through both fear and beauty that takes you into another dimension, quite literally.
The filmmaker was primarily concerned with human issues, whether that be madness and violence or the absurdity of war and infidelity, but he wasn’t sold on raw, realistic filmmaking. He believed in the utilisation of unusual editing techniques and bizarre set design that looked untethered from time and space, rejecting straight-out realism as a “slowpoke” way of communicating ideas.
Talking to Paul D Zimmerman, Kubrick explained his views on a realistic approach to filmmaking, which he considered one of his least favourite forms of cinema: “Telling a story realistically is such a slowpoke and ponderous way to proceed, and it doesn’t fulfil the psychic needs that people have, we sense that there’s more to life and to the universe than realism can possibly deal with.”
For instance, in filming A Clockwork Orange, with its intense brutality and sex, Kubrick didn’t want to just show these events as they were, and instead, he opted for techniques that would wrap the audience up in these events, whether that be through speeding up shots or making his actors move in certain ways.
“I wanted to find a way to stylise all this violence and also to make it as balletic as possible,” he said. “The attempted rape on stage has the overtones of a ballet. They move around the stage. The speeded-up orgy sequence is a joke. That scene took about 28 minutes to shoot at two frames a second. It lasts on screen about 40 seconds. Alex’s fight with his droogs would have lasted about 14 seconds, if it wasn’t in slow motion. I wanted to slow it to a lovely floating movement”.
By playing with form and editing, Kubrick was able to present a vision of reality elevated above what we, in real life, experience. He saw it as a duty for cinema to give us something more, in turn admonishing the kinds of filmmaking that stick to a strictly realist approach.
