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Soon after Stanley Kubrick died in 1999 at the age of 70, it came to light that the notoriously private filmmaker had left behind over a thousand boxes, filled with notes, photographs and press clippings. Kubrick’s boxes, lasting proof of the meticulous research American cinema’s foremost Big Brain would undertake in the course of each project, might be seen as holding ... [+]

Soon after Stanley Kubrick died in 1999 at the age of 70, it came to light that the notoriously private filmmaker had left behind over a thousand boxes, filled with notes, photographs and press clippings. Kubrick’s boxes, lasting proof of the meticulous research American cinema’s foremost Big Brain would undertake in the course of each project, might be seen as holding the secret to why we keep returning to his work: the finished films are themselves repositories of densely packed visual and narrative information, forever offering up new readings and possibilities. (The process even spawned a documentary, 2011’s batty Room 237, on the various theories fans have on the meaning of Kubrick’s The Shining.)

A prodigiously gifted photographer – landing on the books of Look magazine before he’d even turned twenty – Kubrick’s eye for a striking image is apparent in even his rough-edged debut features: 1953’s Fear and Desire, a flop war opus the director had suppressed in an early demonstration of his perfectionist tendencies, and 1955’s zippy, off-kilter Killer’s Kiss, memorable for its showdown in a storeroom full of mannequins. With the following year’s The Killing, the old noir chestnut about a racetrack robbery gone awry, the young director exhibited a gift for switchback plotting that made the film an instant matinee classic.

The late 50s and early 60s saw Kubrick completing a run of films that passed into lore, yet studio chiefs still regarded him as little more than a jobbing imagemaker. 1957’s unforgettable Paths of Glory, one of the cinema’s most persuasive anti-War statements, owed as much to the tenacity of star Kirk Douglas as to Kubrick’s own vision; on 1960’s Spartacus, Kubrick was an afterthought, brought in by Douglas to replace Anthony Mann after the latter was fired a week into shooting.

1962’s Lolita looks like Kubrick’s attempt to finally prove himself: a flawed yet fascinating adaptation of a novel thought unfilmable in this decidedly censorious era, it anticipates the boldness of the Swinging Sixties cinema to come. Exhibit-in-chief: 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, a Cold War-derived masterpiece that made deliciously merry with the idea of global annihilation. This seems to have been the film that liberated Kubrick for good: he relocated to the UK during its production, and chose to remain there, raising a family with his wife Christiane at their home in Harpenden.

Having earned his independence, Kubrick began hunkering down, making fewer films, but committing to them obsessively. 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, remains light years ahead of its time: whatever its ultimate meaning, there is little else in the American cinema to match its precision-engineered combination of design, philosophy and technical wizardry. Just as Lolita saw in the permissiveness of the 1960s, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange was a pre-emptive strike on that decade’s savagery: it remains to this day an intensely divisive work, its ambiguously framed, proto-punk violence ripe for misappropriation – which was Kubrick’s reason for withdrawing it from UK circulation soon after its release.

After that burst of energy, 1975’s Barry Lyndon seems like a wind-down, a long yet supremely elegant adaptation of Thackeray’s novel that pushed the art of cinematography to a newly stratospheric level: NASA-originated lenses were deployed to allow scenes to unfold in authentic period candlelight. At the opposite end of the literary spectrum, in 1980 Kubrick took Stephen King’s dimestore favourite The Shining and turned it into a sprawling, boutique studio property, with deranged caretaker Jack Nicholson chasing poor Shelley Duvall around an abandoned hotel.

Years passed; projects were mooted and researched, then postponed; the cinematic culture changed. As Kubrick got older, the target audience was getting younger, and what had once appeared freedom now looked increasingly like remoteness. There were flickers of greatness in 1987’s Full Metal Jacket, which recreated Vietnam in London’s Docklands. Then, for the longest time, nothing: Kubrick busied himself with preparations for his Holocaust epic The Aryan Papers (abandoned as redundant after Spielberg’s Schindler’s List) and A.I. (which Spielberg later filmed).

Eventually, in the mid Nineties, rumours surfaced that Kubrick had started collaborating with Hollywood power couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The long-in-the-making Eyes Wide Shut remains a singular experience: a two hour forty-something vision of marital bliss, as set against the chilly rigours of the single life, that emerged in the same season as the first American Pie and Catherine Breillat’s Romance. Some said Kubrick was now a man out of time. Yet a year after Eyes Wide Shut, a new technical whizzkid, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, similarly came to cast Cruise in a debatably sympathetic light: as the sex guru coming unstuck in the masterful Magnolia. As always, Kubrick may just have been ahead of the curve.
Mike McCahill [-]