You know you’re watching Stanley Kubrick IF…
The pictures speak.
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words,
but a Kubrick image speaks its own language
that can’t be translated.
To say Kubrick is a great photographer
doesn’t just mean that he's given us a lot of pretty pictures.
It means he can say things with a picture.
And not just simple, literal things,
but primal, emotional, unwordable things.
His pictures speak to us about philosophy and complex ideas.
Take Barry Lyndon --
Kubrick zooms out from the action to make his characters
look like they’re trapped in a period-appropriate
18th century painting --
he’s not moving the camera deliberately,
he's zooming rather than dynamically tracking
so the proportions of the image don't change.
So he’s visually expressing
that Barry is stuck in a static society.
His attempts to strive for a better life are ultimately futile.
The opening credits of Lolita present the image of Lolita’s foot
for Humbert to adoringly adorn with polish.
So this initial image sets up something unexpected in the power dynamic
of their relationship we’re about to see.
In The Shining, when Wendy locks Jack in the pantry,
the camera looks up at him from the floor,
and the radical image communicates several things to us at once --
it expresses Jack’s mounting insanity,
it's as if his demonic POV is looking up from hell itself;
it disorients us -- we feel like everything’s upside down --
and it shows us that even though he’s the one locked up.
Jack still towers over Wendy.
He makes her feel small and beaten down in the frame.
Then there's one of the most famous cuts in history,
from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This moment is iconic not only because it looks cool,
but also because there’s a philosophy articulated
through this cut --
the idea that for all our progress,
our technology is still basically the same
as that first tool, which was a weapon
that our ape ancestors used to kill.
Before we go on, we want to tell you a little bit
about this video's sponsor, Skillshare,
which is a really great online learning community.
They've got classes on everything we love,
video production, writing, photography.
If you're the first 500 people to sign up with our link
in the description below,
You get 2 months access to all their classes
for just 99 cents.
Now, back to Kubrick.
Kubrick sort of keeps his lips sealed as to
what message the movie’s trying to express --
it’s pretty far from, say, an Aaron Sorkin movie
where the message is eloquently articulated for us,
maybe multiple times.
"...bacause you're an asshole."
Kubrick said that he found it very difficult
when interviewers asked the question,
“what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?'
In his words, "If I could have said it any differently,
I would have."
By refusing to tell us
what to think about his movies,
by speaking to us directly through the language of film,
Kubrick creates a pure -- cinematic -- experience.
And he’s forcing us to discover
what we think the meaning is for ourselves.
I think he was one of the most not just sophisticated technically
but he was one of the greatest thinkers to ever make a movie.
His films are intellectually really profound
and you have to work to make them mean something...
He allows you to interpret for yourself
and that’s a dangerous thing because we might misinterpret
what he intended.
But that’s the security of this very talented artist
that he’s going to allow us to have that power."
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released,
Kubrick pointed out that some critics didn’t understand the film
because they were, in his opinion, too verbally oriented.
To quote him “every child that sees the film…
knows that Doctor Floyd goes to the moon.
You say 'Well how do you know' and they say ‘Well, we saw the moon.’
Whereas a number of people, including critics,
thought he went to the planet Clavius.
Why they think there’s a planet Clavius I’ll never know.
But they hear him asked, ‘What about you?'
'I’m just on my way up to Clavius.’”
Kubrick’s also said that by communicating through visuals
and through music,
we can get free of the pigeon-holing of language concepts
that words are inherently subjective and limiting.
So he wants us to outgrow that instinct to reduce cinema
to some words that encapsulate the “meaning,”
allowing us to promptly be done thinking about the movie we just saw.
With that in mind to get thinking more visually,
what are the aethestics of a Kubrick film telling us?
Kubrick often uses one-point perspective --
All lines appear to lead toward one vanishing point
on the horizon line.
This creates a feeling of depth -- we feel drawn in to the image.
His one-point perspective,
and his frequent use of symmetry and center-framing,
create a sense of order.
But this clean, aesthetic orderliness creates
mixed feelings in us.
We feel a tension between wonder and terror.
On the one hand we’re full of awe
because his frames are so beautiful,
but on the other hand this eerie order
makes us feel uneasy, like something is off,
and something terrible may be about to happen.
In The Shining or Clockwork Orange
we’re witnessing very dark things,
but we’re seduced by the formal beauty of the images,
so we feel conflicted.
In 2001, the majestic order and circularity of the visuals
feed our fascination about the mysteries of the bigger universe
and this greater intelligence that’s contacting humanity;
but all of this is equally penetrated by fear,
infused with a sense of threat, both from without,
and from within ourselves and our technological creations.
"Stop, Dave, I'm Afraid."
The production design feed this tension, too --
Perfect precision in the composition is paired with wild,
incongruous oddities in the set or costumes.
So there’s a constant mix of visual right and wrong
confusing our brains.
Kubrick’s aesthetic feels cold to us--
It's orderly, structured, richly beautiful
and alluring but never emotionally warm,
never to be trusted.
The cold images --
and that formal, orderly distance in the mise-en-scène --
correspond to a worldview that is strikingly unsentimental.
Kubrick’s stories are never clouded by the closeness of warm feeling.
He’s looking for Objectivity Through Distance,
so that he can give us accurate insights
about the human condition.
His gift for wide lenses visualizes the emotional distance
and objectivity he’s giving us.
The wide lets us to see more of the world we’re entering.
And it's not just the formal compositions that make us feel like
we are removed from the regular world --
it's also his topics and settings
which are largely in the past or the future --
whether we’re in space, an urban dystopia,
on the battlefield of a historical war,
or locked up in a creepy hotel.
Being removed from our everyday life,
it’s as if we’re looking at human nature under a magnifying glass,
subtracting the usual variables that might make a story
too close-to-home to properly understand.
Kubrick once said that he believed the basic purpose of a film is
“illumination…
showing the viewer something he can’t see any other way.
And I think at times this can be best accomplished
by staying away from his own immediate environment…
He added that “dealing with themes that are
either futuristic or historic…
it removes the environmental blinkers, in a sense,
and gives you a deeper and more objective perspective.”
In conjunction with his perfectly ordered compositions
and mise-en-scène, he’s also achieving an image that’s
dynamic, kinetic, in motion, not a series of still photographs.
This scene of Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut is a perfect example.
The lens interacts with Kidman --
with both the people and the story and the architecture
or the design they’re inhabiting --
and this leads to natural energy onscreen.
The feeling of interaction is what makes his images come alive.
Kubrick’s films tend to inspire all kinds of
theorizing and speculation -- famously many people believe
The Shining is his confession that
he helped fake the original Moon Landing.
All these referencing to Apollo 11...
From the Apollo 11 rocket that he has on the sweater
to the configuration of the carpet that looks like
the launchpad from space of where Apollo've launched.
You wonder what’s really going on in these films
because there’s something for anybody to go into this movie
and have some kind of interpretation.
if indeed the moon landing was faked,
Kubrick would have been the one to do it.
The meticulously structured images,
even the way that all the lines lead to a central unifying point --
visually in part of feeling to us that there is some deeper meaning here,
more than what’s being said.
And because we’re not being told what to think,
some strange, more far-fetched interpretations can result.
With Kubrick, it’s really dangerously wide open.
Kubrick is very influenced by Nietzsche
and the concept of Eternal Return or Eternal recurrence,
which is the idea that everything repeats over
and over infinitely across time and space.
We feel that sense of infinite repetition
in Kubrick’s endless images, and in his stories.
In The Shining, Jack is implied to be a reincarnated spirit
who will continue to surface over and over,
wanting a blood sacrifice each time.
In 2001, human society continues to repeat the same ape behavior
no matter how much we evolve.
so the first weapon becomes the space ship.
The wide open desert that intimidated the apes
before they were predators,
becomes the vast intimidating openness of outer space.
The apes around the watering hole
trying to assert their dominance over rival apes
become the Americans and the Russians in a circle talking casually,
the clash now contained in subtext.
"We should be given all the facts, Dr. Floyd."
"Yes I…
I know.
As I said, I'm not at liberty to discuss it."
Everything repeats itself.
We go through many changes but in the end we’re unchanged.
Kind of ironic, and also it's something that's antithetical to most filmmakers --
usually there's an arc to a character --
who they are at the beginning,
and they’re totally different person by the end of the movie.
But he has a way of -- they went through maybe some changes
only to then they come back to their point of origin.
This is illustrated in the movie Lolita.
Kubrick has her point to the odometer and she goes,
"Hey look, all the nines are changing into—"
So you can go 99000 miles and then just start all over again.
Malcolm McDowell called Kubrick’s humor as "black as coal."
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here!
This is the war room!"
Kubrick makes light of things that are usually considered taboo,
or off limits to comedy.
"Here's Johnny!"
Alex exuberantly sings and dances
while assaulting a couple in their home.
"I'm singin’ in the rain"
Lolita, a story of pedophillia, became a black comedy, too --
"Do you believe in God?"
"[Burps] The question is -- does God believe in me?"
which was Kubrick’s response to having to tone down
the eroticism of the novel to get the film by the censors.
"I wonder if the symbolism was a bit heavy-handed at times."
War is another subject Kubrick can find humor in --
The wit of the names in Dr. Strangelove:
"Group Captain Mandrake speaking."
"This is General Ripper speaking."
"General Turgidson."
"Major King."
And the visual sexual innuendo of the war scenes
make the entire movie one of the darkest comedies
we can think of.
His comedy is so black that it ends with
the whole world being blown up.
And the irony-infused Full Metal Jacket
ends with the men singing
the Mickey Mouse Club theme song on the battlefield.
[Singing Mickey Mouse Club theme song]
Kubrick’s films explore Sinister sides of Domesticity,
and taboo or hostile erotic exploits.
"If you men only knew..."
They have a Dark View of Power & Technology
of war, and of human society.
Look at The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Dr Strangelove, Barry Lyndon --
Kubrick is hardly holding out any hope
that society will stop being so hung up on senseless,
irrational violence or sexually charged shows of power.
Kubrick has a very jaundiced view of humanity I would say...
Human beings, it's like a cautionary tale,
if we’re not careful, we’re not going to make it out of here,
we’re going to destroy ourselves…
there's plenty evidence for that
His Paths of Glory is a movie about how they pick three innocent guys
to execute to motivate their own troops, they're killing their own men.
He’s always about how things turn on,
no matter what you make it’s going to turn on you,
Hal turns on you, he's a computer that is supposed to serve us,
he turns on us and tries to kill us.
"Open the pod bay doors, Hal."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
In Lolita they’re in the movie theater together,
Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon and James Mason,
they’re watching The Mummy --
when the mummy comes back to life,
it immediately turns on the person
that brought it back to life and kills that person.
So, this is the recurring theme throughout Kubrick.
And so, who is the one person suppose to protect you the most in life?
It would be your father, right?
He should give his life to protect his children.
But no.
The Shining is about how the father
turns on his wife and son and he is going to slaughter.
At the same time, Kubrick strongly objected to the idea
that he was a misanthrope.
In 1968 he said,
“You don’t stop being concerned with man
because you recognize his essential absurdities
and frailties and pretensions,”
and also, “In the deepest sense, I believe in
man’s potential and his capacity for progress.”
Kubrick's social critiques and his quest for objectivity
aren’t about embracing hopelessness or futility.
His films are instead trying to avoid
the easy, false answers of sentimentality
and illusions that we wish to be true…
Kubrick’s films do imply that there is meaning in things,
but we have to be prepared
that it’s not the meaning we expect.
The truth may be strange, dark and difficult to accept.
Still, if we push beyond our initial darkness and fear,
we may be able to find something worthwhile on the other side.
Kubrick doesn’t soften his conclusions --
he often leaves us in a very dark place.
So hope is not to be found in the so-called civilized societies
that humankind has produced to date,
but there may still be some hope at the end of a Kubrick film.
Danny in The Shining escapes his violent father
and doesn’t take after him.
2001 ends with the Star child heading toward Earth,
giving us reason to think perhaps we have
another more intelligent state of being ahead of us.
Full Metal Jacket ends on the darkly sardonic note of the soldiers
singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song on the battlefield,
yet paradoxically the Joker has achieved
a sort of relief after becoming a killer --
he has counter-intuitively accessed something human in him again.
Kubrick has spoken about how our awareness of mortality
spoils that wonder and joy that we have as a child,
but we can quote “emerge from this twilight of the soul...
into a rebirth of life's Élan.”
As he said, “The most terrifying thing about the universe
is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent;
but if we can come to terms with this indifference
and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death,
our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.
"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
So there’s a running message in Kubrick’s work and interviews
that sounds a lot like Existentialism --
first we need to let go of our illusions of immortality,
accept the indifference of the universe,
and after that, we can build a more sustainable
and durable outlook for ourselves…
We can perhaps go on to make or do something meaningful.
"The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive."
His movies are sometimes impenetrable,
hard to really fully understand.
All the levels he's operating aren't simultaneously.
He's certainly multi-dimensional, highly innovative
and has many things to say.
He says eloquently,
But he says almost the same thing across every movie --
just other incarnations.
He will use different genres, grapple with the same message:
"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use,"
"which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."
Hi guys, this is Susannah, we at ScreenPrism are all about life-long learning.
We're always trying to improve our knowledge of film and visual culture.
So we're really into SkillShare.
They are a online learning community, offers over 80000 classes --
all for less than $10 a month.
Right now, they're offering a pretty amazing deal,
You can get 2 months access to all their classes
for just 99 cents total.
But that's only if you're one of the first 500 people to click on our link
in the description below,
So if you want that deal, hurry up!
We really like their classes on film, like cinematography,
how to make your film look like a movie.
Not to mention all their classes on business, design,
photography, writing...
These are some big, distinguish teachers coming to you
through your computer screen.
So if you want to take your work or your art to the next level,
try SkillShare!
Clink the link in our description below,
head over to skillshare.com,
and start filling your brains with the knowledge you need
to develop all the skills you've ever wanted.