Visual Expression Assignment No. 2

Flat Space:

Limited Space:

Visual Expression Assignment No. 1

1-point perspective:

2-point perspective:

Flat Space:

Ambiguous space:

Dr.Strangelove (1964)

I have heard that Stanley Kubrick insisted that the cloth of the table in the War Room should be green even though it is a black and white film. Just to show even more that the politicians and generals look like they were playing poker with each other. It is stories like this make you like that man even more.

The main thing I will write about in this entry is the use of phallic symbols; we talked about some of them in class. The opening scene with the refueling of the airplane is one good example. The second one is about Gen. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) when he smokes his big cigar. This made me think of Gen. Turgidson (George C. Scott). He does not smoke a big cigar like Gen. Ripper, instead he is constantly chewing bubblegum. Naremore mentions that this makes him look like a giant child, I agree about this but my initial thought when I saw this is that he is trying to quit smoking. He has lost his phallic symbol. Which may explain why he is shrugging away like “a little boy” when the president tell him to be quiet. When we are first introduced to Gen. Turgidson he is with his girlfriend that is also his secretary. She may be the one that has told him to quit and she even calls him up during the meeting in the war room just to make sure she is not just another girl. Gen.Turgidson even at some point thinks they should maybe continue with Gen. Ripper’s plan and he also speaks gladly about the B-52’s pilot’s ability to continue to their target even if the plane is damaged. Perhaps if he was allowed to continue smoke he may even be a supporter of Gen.Ripper or the one that had started the thing himself.

Finally I just want to show what I found when I was looking through some of Stanley Kubrick pictures from Look Magazine.

“I am inspired by everything I seen” is a famous quote from Stanley Kubrick and perhaps he was taking inspiration from this photo for the look of Dr.Strangelove.

                                      

Lolita (1962)

The thing that caught my eye the most when I was reading through Elisabeth Powers text about Lolita was that she refers to her as a star. Naremore also mentions this briefly in his book. I did not see Lolita as a star when I watched the movie, but the more I think about it the more sense it makes.

In the movie Lolita is like a movie star and she has aspirations of becoming on in real life. When she meets Humbert she knows from their very first meeting that he will, if he gets the chance, treat her like a star. Humbert becomes like an obsessed fan with Lolita. He cries in her room like a little girl when she leaves, just like young girls were devastated when the Beatles split up. (As seen in Apollo 13). He also sends her candy, almost like fan mail, without her mother’s permission. He pampers her by serving her drinks and sandwiches “just the way you like them”. He also buys her things, do all the housework and even paint her toenails. She is using him but being treated like a star is not like actually being a star, and the only man that can do that for her is Quilty.

Quilty has connections to Hollywood and he promises her to take her there and she leaves Humbert. When it turns out that Quilty takes her to star in pornographic “art” movies she leaves him. And she takes on the role of wife and mother instead. Humbert still acts like an obsessive fan and when he learns that she will not come back with him, again crying, he goes out to take revenge on the one that took her away from him.

Another thing I noticed in the film is the returning theme of order and contingency that I brought up in the The Killing. In Lolita we can see that all of Humbert’s plans seem to fail and these are caused by things he cannot predict, even if they are in some cases apparent for us the viewers. He plans to sleep in the same bed as Lolita, but she wakes up. His plan to take Lolita to Mexico fails, because he cannot see that Quilty will take her away. The he also plans to kill his wife Charlotte but this is the only plan he abandons, but as it turns out she dies anyways making the contingency the cause of her death. 

Spartacus (1960)

When I wrote about Killers Kiss I hinted that I was going to talk about Spartacus. I agree that this movie is the least “Kubrick-ian” of Kubrick’s films and I understand why we did not watch it in class. But there are some moments that I find interesting. I will mention two of them.

The first one is the famous gladiator scene where Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) battles Draba (Woody Strode). This scene is very similar to the battle scene in Killers Kiss.  Just as Davey was equipped with a spear in Killers Kiss so is Draba in this scene, and just as Davey Draba “wins”. The spear is a very common phallic symbol and those are something Kubrick used on several occasions.

The second one is for me the most interesting one. If we look through some of Kubrick’s photographs from his time at LOOK magazine we will see this photo. 

In the photo the people are made to look like they are in a cage. This must have been something that Kubrick found interesting or funny “the caging of man” since he decided to take a picture of it. In the interview with Bernstein form 1966 Kubrick says that he found the first part of Spartacus “turned out quite well” but the rest of the story was quite silly. The interesting thing here is that it is in the first part if Spartacus that takes place during the gladiatorial training. During this part of the movie we see our main character being locked in cages and forced to do things such as battle to the death for others amusement. It is perhaps because he got a chance to explore this theme that he found that he found this part “turned out quite well”. 

Paths of Glory (1957)

The Killing was Stanley Kubrick’s first Hollywood picture, it may not have been a commercial success but it caught the eye of one of Hollywood’s biggest star at the time, Kirk Douglas. He agreed to star in Kubrick’s next project, Paths of Glory, if Kubrick would direct other projects for his production company. Douglas was also the one that made United Artist finance the film.

Paths of Glory takes place during World War I and follows Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) that is the commanding officer of three men that have been charged with cowardice, which sentence is death. Dax attempts to defend the men against this charge in a court-martial.

The charges against these men have been brought up by General Mireau (George Macready). Mireau symbolizes to me the old school of warfare. He has a distinct scar on one of his cheeks; we were told in class that this could be a dueling scar. This tells us that he is from a more privileged background which he shows in his gentlemanly way and therefore he feels more at home in the luxurious mansion than in the muddy trenches. This is important because World War I is to me the last “gentlemen’s war”. When I say that World War I is the last gentlemen’s war I mean that warfare changed after and during this war. When tanks were introduced to the battlefield it made it possible to storm the enemy’s lines without losing many men. Warfare also became a lot faster. Since the invention of the firearm till World War I, warfare in Europe had kind of looked the same. The two sides marches towards each other, one side shots then the other side shots and is then followed by a bayonet charge. The two sides looked like they were on equal terms. In World War I we can see similar traits. One side attacks and gets shot down by the enemy, after that it is the next sides turn to attack and they are also shot down. This type of fighting did that battles could last for months, since no side made any progress. The men in the movie know this and are therefore hesitant before going out on the battlefield. General Mireau sees this and demands that the men shall be disciplined.

“If those little sweethearts won’t face German bullets, they’ll face French ones!” 

Colonel Dax on the other hand is the opposite of General Mireau and thinks that the idea of killing their men is stupid. Dax knows how the men are feeling and understands them. He is down in the trenches with them and is not as comfortable as General Mireau is in the mansion. Dax has seen the true side of war. It’s brutal and horrible and it’s not as noble or honorable as General Mireau think it is.

The Killing (1956)

After Killer’s Kiss Stanley Kubrick met James B. Harris. The two of them started a production company together and their first project was The Killing. The film was based on a book called Clean Break and they got funding from United Artist, making The Killing Kubrick’s first real Hollywood picture. Kubrick also regarded The Killing as his first professional film.

In the film we follow a group of men, led by Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), perform a well-planned robbery of a racetrack. But in the end the money is lost and the men either imprisoned or dead.   Naremore mentions that critics often use this movie as a template for Kubrick’s subsequent work, which usually involves a careful plan that goes disastrously awry. This theme describes the metaphysical conflict between order and contingency.

In the film we can hear the narrator telling us the exact time a person is leaving, which tells us that the robbery is very well planned. The plan even has alternatives if something should go wrong. The narrator tells us this when Johnny drives to the apartment where they will divide the money and he sees George, all covered in blood, walk out from there. But even a robbery so well planned cannot escape the unpredictable. There are multiple events in the movie like this. George telling Sherry, Sherry telling Val, Nikki’s encounter with the parking attendant (even if it did not affected the overall plan), the broken locks on the suitcase, the little dog at the airport etc. These contingencies were some of the reasons the plan failed.

Thinking about this made me realize that the group themselves are a contingency. Even if they had a plan, no matter how detailed and pre-planned it was, the disturbed the “order” of the horserace. The horse that Nikki shot was the horse everybody expected to win. I am also sure the audience did not expect a big hairy man without a shirt beating up security guards either.

And now to something completely different.

Christopher Nolan payed homage to The Killing in the opening sequence of The Dark Knight, were the Joker and his thugs perform a well-planned bank robbery. The most obvious similarity is the use of clown masks.

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker that is very influenced by Stanley Kubrick and I will have more reasons to come back to this later in the course.