On Stanley Kubrick

Even if you didn’t know that Stanley Kubrick got his start as a still-photographer, at the old Look magazine in the 1940s, you could confidently make the guess based on the way his still images appear within the films, the way he fills the frame with dramatic meaning and visual stimuli, the general compositional integrity of all those pictures within the pictures, like paintings you can hang on the wall except that the painting eventually moves. It’s almost as if his movies could be self-sustaining and stationary entities if they had to be, free of all story and sound. But, of course, they don’t have to be; they do so much more besides.

Think of some of the most effective and iconographic images in all of Kubrick, and then think of how they achieve their effects with a lingering patience, not in spite of but because of. Think of the tracking shot of Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory, and the way it conveys the horrifying claustrophobia of trench warfare. Think of the poised and resolute evil in Alex’s eyes in A Clockwork Orange (before those eyes need to be literally pried open for him to witness his own horrors), all that potential energy for evil, never more than one quick move away from kinesis. Think of the literally endless solitude of outer space, as presented in 2001, the eerie and deceptive calm of it mirroring man’s own inner space; then there’s the machines, too, those brilliantly detailed manifestations of man-made mania, which created the very visual language for the way such things have been designed and shot by filmmakers ever since. Think of Dr. Harford’s waking, walking nightmare through a New York City that looks a half-dimension removed from reality, in Eyes Wide Shut; and all those moody interiors where blue stands next to orange, fire and ice inhabiting the same frame, creating emotional vapors. Think of Dr. Strangelove’s Major Kong soaring Earthward in doomsday’s own saddle, while the camera looks on from above with sustained serenity, even as the bomb’s velocity slips faster and faster down. Think of the candlelit scenes of 18th-century formality in Barry Lyndon, which belie and comment deftly on all the barely restrained tension that dominates every scene of that misunderstood masterpiece. Think of the grand tour we receive of the haunted and haunting Overlook Hotel, in The Shining; the Steadicam races but the lens remains still, taking it in, each silent second more excruciating than the last, as if all the horror is only accreting in some adjacent room, just dying for someone to open up the door.