
The cult of Stanley Kubrick - pseudolus
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2018/12/10/the-cult-of-stanley-kubrick
======
DanCarvajal
2001 is a movie that my Dad and I have bonded over for some 15 years now. He
was a scifi nerd in college when the movie came out and it's stayed with him
ever since. As a child I unknowingly played with his model Moon Bus and PanAm
Space Clipper, effectively ruining them, but he just told about the movie and
wasn't even mad. Eventually when I get into films we watched his LaserDisc
copy of the film and on every format since (except VHS).

Starting last Christmas, I started buying him the Mobius Models 2001 re-
releases to replace the models I broke (He's getting a new Moon Bus for
Christmas). Our highlight of the year though was going to the Smithsonian to
see the IMAX restoration of 2001; it was like seeing the film all over again
for the first time.

I'm incredibly fortunate to have been able to bond with father over the years
around this special film. My dad is the stoic engineer type, but this movie is
a window into him that I’m grateful to have. All this is to say that I’m 100%
a Kubrick cultist.

(I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled
at me "What the hell was that?!")

~~~
jorvi
> (I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just
> yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")

Reminds me of taking a few of my friends to a screening of Blade Runner 2049.
On the way there I was gushing about how the original Blade Runner is amazing
and one of the pillars of cinametic sci-fi. After the movie was done I was
going off on how this was an amazing homage to the original etc., one of my
friends interjected with ‘I don’t understand what the hell did I just watch’
and the others were just staring at me with this ‘???’ look on their face.
They even thought I pulled a fast one on them in saying that the original
wasn’t required viewing as the links are only tangential.

~~~
gavinmckenzie
In contrast to the other comments about how 2049 was slow etc., let me say
that I took my wife and daughter to see 2049.

We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049
and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected
the movie.

After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original
but wished it could have been an hour shorter.

My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even
longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so
possibly that's partly why she loved it.

~~~
bostik
I thought 2049 was a wonderful, visually appealing film with a neat small
story set in a big world. Which makes it a bold movie.

Sure, it was set in a universe we probably never thought to see again. The
outset was flogging a horse I thought would have been better off stay dead.
But in this age of huge stories - epics even - doing a beautiful, cruel,
unforgiving _small, and slow-paced_ story takes some balls.

I wasn't entirely on board with how the universe had been treated, but even
then, I liked it.

~~~
fzeroracer
I have to agree and I think it's one of the areas that cyberpunk stories can
really excel in. Telling a small story in a big world helps contextualize and
ground the setting.

------
haywirez
Just want to say that Michael Benson's Space Odyssey[0], the oral history of
making the movie, was the best book I've read this year. Kubrick somehow,
through a lot of luck, determination, and frankly a hefty dose of delusional
thinking, managed to gather the best minds of a generation to work on what
basically amounted to a crazy art project. The book does a good job of
impressing that for a lot of people involved it became the apex of their
professional and personal lives. In the end, they made something that truly
mattered and changed culture. I left the book wishing I got to experience
something as intense as that. Most of what we do doesn't matter.

[0] [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-
Odyssey/Michael...](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-
Odyssey/Michael-Benson/9781501163937)

~~~
pitt1980
"Most of what we do doesn't matter"

One of the pernicious aspects of our culture of celebrity worship is that it
leads to the feeling that if something won't be recorded in a book, or on TV,
or in a movie, that it doesn't matter.

This is wrong, the instance to instance living of our lives matters, it all
matters.

I've seen Space Odyssey a few times, its a cool movie.

How I treat the people I come in contact with today, will matter as much to
their lives as how they spent 3 hours several years ago.

It all matters.

~~~
philwelch
How I was treated by most of the people I have come in contact with over the
past three months of my life will be forgotten over the course of the next
three months.

I will never forget 2001: A Space Odyssey. And this is true for millions of
people.

It doesn't have to have anything to do with celebrities or entertainment, but
it's very hard and very remarkable to have a profound impact on large numbers
of people. And it's exceedingly rare to do this unintentionally.

~~~
pitt1980
But it will have changed the quality of how you lived these 3 months,

The remembering isn’t the important part, the living itself is the important
part

~~~
philwelch
If I die at age 72, the quality of any three particular months of my life
represent less than a percent of my overall quality of life. An experience
that I remember or that changes my life, or an invention that I use on a
regular basis, changes my life _continuously_ from that moment forward.

------
l33tbro
> In his films, Kubrick exists as a kind of deep state, while his fans are
> conspiracy theorists.

I love Kubrick, but does anyone else grow a little tired of the legacy
management around him? With each generation of film fan, he's become the go-
to-guy to project this archetype of the cinematic Godhead onto. Meanwhile,
scores of equally detail-focused and enigmatic auteurs of his era slip through
the cracks (eg, Visconti, Antonioni, Bresson, De Palma, to name a few).

Kubrick's unparalleled achievement will always be becoming a film-artist on
studio dime (he established himself just before New Hollywood took off - and
had cultivated enough of a mystique to carry-on after it crashed in the
early-80s). But plenty of his contemporaries exercised the same degree of
control that this article talks about, yet they're consistently overlooked
because Kubrick became this meme of the cinematic Übermensch.

~~~
Applejinx
But that's always how it works. A Kubrick, a Gates, a Bezos is one percent
their efforts and virtues (without which there'd be nothing) and 99 percent
being in the right place at the right time. Malcolm Gladwell (another example
of this!) is glib but has talked about that in relation to the Silicon Valley
titans: they were born at a historical moment, and were part of a small cohort
(you mention four directors who didn't become 'Kubrick', not 4000) and among
that cohort, their talent and effort lined up with good fortune.

You can say luck so long as you understand that ONLY luck won't get you this
result. But among those with talent and determination, it's really fairly
arbitrary who becomes the titans of art, industry, finance. You get good
enough to meet the bar, and then it's up to Fate.

This is normal. It's more about what celebrity/stardom/ultimate merit IS,
rather than what Kubrick is. It's a lot like internet virality. The pool of
possibles is not large, but moderate: from that point onward it's luck and
self-reinforcing prophecy. And again, you can't make a nothing into this sort
of total winner because they must meet the bar first, they've got to earn
their spot in the pool, but anyone in the pool would do as well.

~~~
lostphilosopher
Kevin Kelly has an interesting take on this in _What Technology Wants_ [1].
Essentially - that these sort of works were inevitable. If Kubrick, Gates, or
Bezos hadn't made 2001, MS, or AMZ - someone else would have. Not _exactly_
the same thing of course, but something so similar as to fill the same spot in
history. 2001 happened because 1968 was, in a sense, "ripe" for it. The book
undoubtably explains it better. :-)

(Weird. This is the second book recommendation I've made on HN today... I
swear I'm not a bot!)

1\. [https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-
Kelly/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-
Kelly/dp/0143120174)

~~~
porpoisely
I think yours is the sophisticated view of progress rather than the naive
"great man" theory. I subscribed to the "great man" theory that the great man
pushed society's progress. Now I think that it is society's progress that
creates the great man.

We are taught to think that there was something special or even superhuman
about newton, turing, etc. But the reality is that they were one of many
highly intelligent people working on the same problems created by society's
progress. Even if they didn't succeed or achieve, someone else would have. But
humans have an innate myth making imperative and a desire to hero worship so
we create heros. But reality and history is far more complicated than the
idealized myths we create. Without newton, we'd still have calculus ( leibniz,
et al ). Without turing, we'd still have computer science ( Church, et al ).

------
rbanffy
Having re-watched 2010 a couple days back, I'm again impressed by someone even
attempting to make a sequel to 2001. It required a serious amount of courage
(and a lot of arrogance).

2010 is not a bad movie, the same way its original material is not a bad book
(unlike 2061 and 3001), but it's also no 2001 and doesn't come even close. The
best scenes are exactly the Bowman appearance aboard the Discovery, which kind
of follow from the hotel room scene from 2001 with long silences and a Bowman
that's no longer human, but still remembers what human is.

Gone, unfortunately, are the distinctive flat square screens, the careful
walks in zero gravity on top of velcro strips. Hyams and the actors certainly
forgot the Discovery lacked artificial gravity in everything but the carousel
(and propulsion would be a lot easier if we knew how to do artificial gravity
everywhere). Quite frankly, the lack of attention to detail is a big turn off
for me.

I'll certainly schedule a trip do London to visit it.

~~~
jefurii
> “The essence of a dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without
> it being plainly stated,” he said. “When you say something directly, it is
> simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for
> themselves.”

I watched 2001 with some friends on 1 January 2001. Unfortunately I picked the
wrong group of friends, people who couldn't settle back into to the slow pace
and no appreciation of mystery - they were constantly asking me to explain
everything. Later that day I watched 2010 (by myself). That movie never raises
a question that it doesn't answer within about 10 minutes.

~~~
ghaff
Especially with editing styles in general being much more frenetic than they
once were, 2001 is tough for a modern audience. And, if don’t basically know
the background plot, it’s pretty inscrutable as it was at the time.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s on my best movies list. But it’s going to be a bit
tough for a first time, non movie buff audience today.

~~~
Fricken
Popular audiences were just as baffled by 2001 when it was released as today.

Arthur C Clarke had written a narration explaining everything and was dismayed
to discover, at the premiere, that Kubrick had opted to drop the narration
entirely. Thank God Kubrick was calling the shots and not Clarke.

------
pseudolus
Kubrick was also a fairly skilled photographer and contributor to "Look" \- a
widely popular pictorial magazine that had a peak circulation of over 7
million copies. The Museum of the City of New York is hosting an exhibit of
his photographic work entitled "Through a Different Lens". Unfortunately the
exhibit ends January 6, 2019. There's also an accompanying book for sale.

[https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/through-different-
lens](https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/through-different-lens)

[https://shop.mcny.org/products/through-a-different-lens-
stan...](https://shop.mcny.org/products/through-a-different-lens-stanley-
kubrick-photographs)

------
smacktoward
An interesting case study that's recently had me revising my views on
Kubrick's obsessiveness is one of his less-appreciated films, _Barry Lyndon_.

To reproduce the not-yet-electrified world of its 18th-century setting,
Kubrick famously spent huge amounts of time on that project finding ways to
shoot scenes using only natural light (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography)).
This went so far as shooting interior scenes set at night using only
_candlelight_ , since that's how they would have been lit in real life.
Cameras aren't really designed to work well with such low and inconsistent
lighting, so he had to go to great lengths to get usable footage.

Ever since its release, the standard take on _Barry Lyndon_ has been that the
results didn't justify all that effort. The unusually low lighting made scenes
seem willfully obscure, like Kubrick was capriciously forcing the viewer to
work extra hard just to keep up. This (along with a sadly weak performance by
Ryan O'Neal in the critical role of the eponymous Barry) is a big part of why
_Barry Lyndon_ has languished for decades in the "lesser Kubrick" bargain bin.

But a recent remastering has produced a 4K version of _Barry Lyndon_ , and I
was surprised to discover when watching that version on a large TV that
suddenly the film _popped_ visually in a way it never had before. Where before
it had seemed dark and hard to watch, now it felt more like observing a great
painting, with lots of subtle detail I'd never noticed before. And then I
realized that all those years of bad feelings about _Barry Lyndon_ had come
from watching it in low resolution on small screens, while Kubrick had been
shooting for the big, bright cinema screen. I'd literally been watching the
movie wrong all that time.

So it turns out Kubrick's obsessiveness in this case really did pay off. Those
of us who'd only ever seen it on home video -- which is to say, most people --
just had to wait for the quality of the home viewing experience to catch up to
his standards in order to see it.

~~~
lostgame
I would agree that his films very much suit themselves to the silver screen,
and watching them, e.g. on a laptop or computer-monitor sized screen is
certainly not going to do it justice.

I was fortunate enough to catch many of his films during the Toronto
International Film Festival during an exhibit. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was
particularly fantastic.

------
Zealotux
If you're in Barcelona and even slightly intrigued by Kubrick's work I
strongly suggest you spend an afternoon at the CCCB exhibition, the 6 euros
are worth it: plenty of props, costumes, camera gear, some interesting
documents as well.

~~~
BBlarat
Thanks, I'll definitely visit that exhibition next time I visit Barcelona :)

------
kilroy123
One of my favorite bars in Mexico City was this place that was sort of,
Stanely Krubic themed. It was a weird but cool place.

They had a replica of the room from the final scene of 2001 Space Odyssey, in
the back of the bar. You would go in there, lie on the bed. You could smoke a
cigarette and enjoy your cocktail. It was so awesome.

~~~
maw
Where, what was it called?

------
ctrager
All about the fonts in 2001:
[https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-
odyss...](https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyssey/)

------
morley
I recommend anyone interested in Kubrick as a person check out the documentary
Filmworker on Netflix, about his personal assistant Leon Vitali. (Warning that
if you have a very black-and-white hero worship of Stanley, the film might
disabuse some of your notions.)

Ian Watson, who was one of the writers who worked on AI, also wrote a bemused
article about his experience working with Stanley:

[https://www.ianwatson.info/plumbing-stanley-
kubrick/](https://www.ianwatson.info/plumbing-stanley-kubrick/)

------
sidcool
Stanley Kubrick movies reveal some new aspects each time I watch it.

~~~
Synaesthesia
All of the movies by him that I’ve watched are brilliant.

Dr Strangelove is my favourite movie. The Shining is excellent, A clockwork
orange, Barry Lyndon, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut ...

He was also a fantastic photographer.

~~~
sidcool
+1 for Dr. Strangelove. Amazing movie. Way ahead of its time.

~~~
pmoriarty
If you enjoyed _Dr Strangelove_ , check out _Seven Days in May_. It's kind of
like a serious version of the former, and was made right around the same time.
I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's still a good, and undeservedly
overlooked film.

~~~
philwelch
_Fail Safe_ is the serious version of _Dr Strangelove_ ; _Seven Days in May_
is a fictionalized account of the Business Plot.

------
random878
For those in the UK:

London Design Museum 26 April - 17 Sep 2019

General tickets on sale 1st Jan. Adults £16, Concessions £12 [1].

Such a shame to see yet another exhibition confined to central London. It's
absurd that I can fly to Barcelona quicker, and for less money, than it takes
me to have a day trip via train to London!

[1] [https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-
exhibitions/stan...](https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-
exhibitions/stanley-kubrick-the-exhibition)

~~~
Ntrails
I mean, depends where you are in the UK. I can train from London to Leeds for
~£25 if I book sufficiently in advance. On the day it's £120. (I hate this
model of train fares with a passion, but it feels overstated to suggest that
Barcelona is both cheaper and quicker when neither is true for me)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
After watching 2001, I was completely underwhelmed. I felt like the kid in The
emperor’s new clothes that yells “Mommy, the emperor is naked”. I later
watched a 1 minute LEGO parody of the movie
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4aQ2YbN-E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4aQ2YbN-E)
and thought it covered all the basic themes of the movie in a minute instead
of taking 2.5 hours.

------
scruffyherder
I liked the Rob Ager video 'the meaning of the monolith revealed', along with
'Kubrick's cover story'. Although these are paywalled video essays.

The $5 version is that the monolith is the movie screen, and that the movie
and actors are becoming self aware that they are in a movie. The hints are all
in the details, regarding camera angles, lighting, camera positions, and all
the arrows telling people to tilt their view.

What really sells it is the documentary/advertisement on how Kubrick is
raising money to make the film, and all the industry people he is tapping and
getting money from. People really thought it was going to be a hard core 'done
right sci-fi' movie, but if you look closer you can see how much of it is
stilted, and done incorrectly even though they obviously could have done
better.

TL;DR Kubrick played the 'space race propaganda' hysteria of the mid 1960's to
finance and make his art house film about actors being aware of how they are
making a movie.

------
hybridwebtech
Paywalled.

~~~
mikequinlan
[https://archive.fo/XpUA4](https://archive.fo/XpUA4)

------
asianthrowaway
I wonder if we'll ever see a sci fi movie as deep as 2001 again...

~~~
sethammons
Maybe I should try the book. I like me some good sci-fi (the Hyperion series
is probably my favorite read-wise). I've never gotten through the 2001 movie.
Several goes at it. I literally pass out asleep. Maybe I need to try a morning
viewing. I think of movies as entertainment. Trying to watch this one has
become a chore.

~~~
pjc50
This will annoy a lot of people, but: turn on the subtitles and turn up the
speed. Large sections of it can be zoomed through at 4x or 8x speed, returning
to normal once people are talking.

Large ares of it are basically "wow factor" shots which looked really
impressive in 1968 and lack a lot of that to present-day viewers. Sometimes it
feels more like an agonisingly slow pan across the concept art.

~~~
brlewis
For the last part of the movie, sure, speed through.

In the early part, the slow pace of the journey into space heightens the sense
of isolation. It's something a modern movie couldn't get away with, and is a
unique part of 2001 that you should really experience.

~~~
vict00ms
I'm in my late-30s but I think I'm simply to young to appreciate the impact of
the space imagery in '2001' because I grew up post-Voyager and came of age in
the post-Hubble world. I'm a huge fan of Kubrick and I'm highly tolerant of
slow pacing but '2001' just never really grabbed me.

~~~
Udik
I was enraged at Gravity's rendering of space, which at the opposite extreme
of 2001's: a crowded backyard playground, with plenty of traffic and people
wandering around and having a great time.

I believe space is black, silent, and immobile- though this might be just the
lasting imprinting of 2001. I doubt you'd see anything resembling Hubble
images up there.

~~~
zerocrates
To be fair to Gravity, low Earth orbit isn't exactly a great comparison to the
interplanetary travel taking place in 2001.

~~~
Udik
Is it actually any different, if you don't look in the direction of Earth?

