Celebrity Biographies
Stanley kubrick
Thirteen fiction feature films in a forty-six-year career. Six of them throughout the first decade behind the camera. It cannot be said that Stanley Kubrick lavished himself on filming movies. Each of his cinematographic creatures was unique and required meticulous preparation from him, until the happy birth.
An aura of mystery has always surrounded the personality of Stanley Kubrick. Born in 1928 in the New York neighborhood of the Bronx, belonging to a Jewish family from Central Europe, his personality was overwhelming. Stubborn and determined, cold and calculating – one of his favorite hobbies was chess – he seemed capable of undertaking anything he set his mind to. He didn’t like showing off in public, especially after taking up residence for him in London. It was after the filming of Spartacus (1960), the only film in which he did not have absolute control, and in which he took over from Anthony Mann . The difficulties in Hollywood and the subsequent problems in the adaptation of “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, had a lot to do with his determination to withdraw from the madding crowd. His fame as taciturn and manic would grow over time, along with the aura of a great guru, which Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman fueled by recounting their experience with him in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his last film, which did not reach see released.
Fortune and a taste for photography led Kubrick in his youth to photojournalism. His snapshots, highly appreciated in Look magazine, would lead him to film newsreels. And then he was clear. He wanted to tell stories with the camera. And he was willing to invest his own capital. All in order to do what he wanted, without interference. Fear and Desire , Killer’s Kiss , Perfect Heist . Small films made from 1953 with little means, but that get the exhibition. And they attract the attention of critics and a smart guy, James B. Harris, who will become a friend and confidant. From here the studies, first MGM, then Warner, notice the undeniable talent of a director with intellectual concerns and enormous visual power. While making a film, he seems to be solving a mathematical problem, calculating the moves needed to deliver the decisive checkmate. A take is not perfect, and he will repeat it over and over again until he gets what he wants, even at the cost of exasperating the actors and crew. He will invent a thousand tricks and gadgets so that the plans are how he has imagined them.
Kubrick tackles films of all genres and on all subjects: anti-war plea ( Paths of Glory , Full Metal Jacket ), Roman cinema ( Spartacus ), intimate story about love, passion and marriage ( Lolita , Eyes Wide Shut ), political satire ( Red telephone we fly to Moscow ), science fiction and philosophy ( 2001: a space odyssey ), reflection on violence and freedom ( A Clockwork Orange ), picaresque ( Barry Lyndon ), terror ( The Shining ). He missed the western (he should have directed Marlon Brando in The Impenetrable Face, but the actor decided to take on the task) and his long-awaited project on Napoleon. Because even without having strictly made a musical, he demonstrated his vibrations in this field in 2001 (the ships and “The Blue Danube” by Johan Strauss, the dawn of man to the beat of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss ) and The Orange ( Beethoven’s ninth, McDowell’s occurrence of humming “Singing in the Rain”).