Director study - Stanley Kubrick



Kubrick at work on "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968)

 Stanley Kubrick is director who created 16 titles, working from 1951 to 1999. Stanley Kubrick was born in New York in 1928, he died in 1999. Nototrious in his youith for being poorly graded, he is famously quoted for saying he "never learned a thing at school" and that "I didnt read a book for pleasure until I was 19". Kubrick excelled in the field of photography and slowly leanrt of the art of film through his youth working as a phot journalist. Despite only releasing 13 original (non documentarial) films in his career spanning almost 50 years, Kubricks output is deemed one of the best in film history, every film produced by Kubrick is a tour de force, crossing genres, even creating entire film styles, encapsulating what film is and how it evolved under Kubrick's control.

As a thriller director Kubrick is the best. Each of his plots contains elements of mystery and each film glows with a strange, haunting style, polished to perfection his films get undere your skin long after watching. For example, a past post on the sound of thriller I used an opening to Kubricks most famour thriller, "The Shining" (1980), Kubrick adapts Stephen King's chilling novel to perfection, creating a self contained, effective story of mystery and ghosts of the pasts using a small collective of actors to great effect. Kubrick creates the chilling thriller through the music and context of the film, intertwining a dark fable of the upper class and isolation under a story of a family on the brink, isolated, preyed ojn by the "voice" of the dark context, personified in the grounds of the hotel they are trapped in. The chilling envrionmetn is portrayed in the cinematography, which Kubrick controlled as well as directing, much to the dismay of the cinematographer he employed. This kind of film obsession with perfection in every facet o his film maming marks Kubrick as a classic director, a director who collabareted but knew exactly what he wanted from each shot, this is outline in another quote from the director, "If it can be thought, it can be filmed" and his films are his thoughts.