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Kubrick’s shining odyssey
27 September 2009 By Ros Drinkwater
Think of the images he seared into our consciousness: a crazed Jack Nicholson hacking his way through a door; Malcolm McDowell’s evil eye; the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Aged 70, Stanley Kubrick had the best possible death.
Days after he finished editing Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, he went to sleep in his Hertfordshire home and never woke up. This week, an exhibition opens in celebration of his life. The man behind the event is The Sunday Business Post’s film critic John Maguire, who has commissioned 25 new art works inspired by Kubrick’s films.
Kubrick still exerts a huge influence not just on cinema, but on our entire culture.
‘‘As a working film critic for ten years, I’ve yet to see a film that has inspired me as much as anything Kubrick has done," says Maguire.
‘‘There have been very few individuals with his vision and nobody who could capture a moment with his grace and wonder. From his first films, he had a restless desire to innovate, to change perceptions, to show things in a new light. This is the function of the artist."
Maguire is also attracted by Kubrick’s ability to put on the screen precisely what he intended.
‘‘Very few directors in the history of film can make the same claim," he says. ‘‘Today, virtually no one can say that his finished film is exactly what he set out to do. Cinema today is compromise, the ‘directed by’ credit should really read ‘negotiated by’, because that’s how they make them now."
The idea for the exhibition was born last February when Maguire was in Berlin for the film festival.
‘‘Walking around town, I found myself confronted with an astonishing piece of spray-paint graffiti: Nicholson in The Shining, holding a spray can. As street art, it was startling and creepy, but the spray can gave it wit.
‘‘I took a photograph of it; then, several weeks later, I bought a screenprint of the Malcolm McDowell image by LA-based artist 2 Cents. It occurred tome that other than film showings, there was no discussion planned as to his legacy. Kubrick was a great picture maker - his images stay with you forever - but more than that, it is the emotion behind the image that endures. His aim was to draw a map of the landscape of the human spirit: the imagination.
‘‘Thirty or 40 years after some of these films were made, they continue to inspire artists. Then it dawned on me that I had the genesis for a show, an exhibition that would straddle art and cinema, and reflect that his images are still alive in the minds of other image makers."
Maguire spent three months on the internet searching out artists, photographers, galleries, ‘‘always looking for that little spark, that ‘Kubrickian touch’ ".
In the ideal setting of the Light House Cinema in Dublin’s Smithfield, the result is a tour de force of invention for anyone who enjoys art and a feast for the Kubrickophile.
Two otherworldly townscapes - photographs by Joby Hickey - reference Kubrick’s early career as a teenage photographer for Look magazine. Padhraig Nolan, aka Scalder, has summed up the sex, violence and madness of Dr Strangelove in his maniacal portrait of actor Peter Sellers, an atomic cloud over his head peopled by saucy pin-up models.
Chicago artist Kiersten Essenpreis provides a delicate, girly, but menacing, painting of the bathroom in The Shining, painted on pine from a tree near the hotel where the film was shot.
Kubrick’s rare leading ladies are represented by Steve Doogan’s portrait of Sue Lyon as Lolita; Geraldine Doherty’s depiction of a stoned Nicole Kidman; and an exquisite pen and pencil sketch of Marisa Berenson in the funeral scene from Barry Lyndon.
The work thatmost typifies Kubrick’s vision, however, is an unsettling, photo-realist interior by Francis Matthews. It shows an eerie, dimly-lit corridor, the door at the end recalling the monolith in 2001.
Of the artists he approached, Maguire didn’t get a single refusal.
‘‘A lot of the energy created in the show is because these people didn’t need prompting. They were literally waiting for an opportunity to pay their tribute."
He has spent the past six months negotiating the minefield of what is, in effect, a one-man operation.
‘‘All of the artists have donated their work for free, and the Light House has been hugely supportive. The exhibition is free and a non-profit exercise. It’s not about sales. The works can be bought from the artists themselves."
The business of bringing what was in Kubrick’s head to the screen involved insurmountable problems for his technicians.
‘‘Time and again they’d want to say: ‘Stanley it’s impossible’, but Kubrick didn’t take no for an answer.
The steadycam was pioneered for The Shining; superfast lenses developed by Nasa for the Apollo moon landing allowed shooting by candlelight in Barry Lyndon; and, while filming A Clockwork Orange, h e threw an Arriflex camera off a roof for a specific effect.
‘‘Nor did he consider his work over when the film premiered. When 2001 opened, he visited cinemas around Britain to check that viewing conditions were ideal, from the alignment and the masking, to the age of the bulb in the projector - old projector bulbs were his bete noir."
Life was not easy for his actors. Kubrick believed that a performance could be made in the editing suite, and tales abound of his clashes with his stars. During the filming of Dr Strangelove, he persuaded George C Scott to go way over the top ‘‘just as an exercise for rehearsal’’ - and then used the footage. Scott never forgave him. In Kubrick’s defence, Maguire makes the point that, although film-making is a collaborative art form, the need for a leader is paramount.
‘‘He might have strange tactics, but at the end of the day he has to be trusted. More than 100 takes for poor Shelley Duvall in The Shining seems excessive, but I forgive him. The result of all the dramas are these marvellous pictures. The fights and nervous breakdowns are forgotten, but the pictures are eternal.
‘‘Strip away all the mechanics and the legends that built up around him and what you have is 13 movies, each of which contains something nobody else has said - or if they have attempted to say it, didn’t get to the end of the sentence.
‘‘He communicated really heavy, puzzling notions in a way that could reach a mass audience.
What Kubrick does with an image is bring you away with a thought experiment. You try to figure it out, but it quickly becomes less about figuring out what you see, and more about figuring out what you feel. Cinema doesn’t do that very often."
Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light, a Group Exhibition of Work Inspired by the Films of Stanley Kubrick, The Light House Cinema, Smithfield, Dublin 7; www.kubricktaminglight.com
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