These two meetings – the
film class and book club, respectively – are fun as they get together a group
of varied like-minded individuals to discuss a subject everyone involved is
interested in. When discussing, a person usually goes about it from their
own perspective, but in these settings the emphasis is that of having a
conversation, getting a group of people to share their perspective on something and where they bring their own background in discussing it – with the results always being
stimulating.
*****
Now on to Stanley Kubrick,
where in discussing him I’m going to talk about Michel Ciment’s Kubrick: The
Definitive Edition (2003), as well as
the reception of Eyes Wide Shut at
both Cahiers du Cinema and Positif.
The sections in Kubrick:
The Definitive Edition are: Kubrick’s
odyssey with its two sections Milestones
(on Kubrick’s biography) and Standards (on Kubrick’s creative process, his perfectionism);
Directing, Between reason and passion, Kubrick and the fantastic, Full Metal
Jacket, Number 13: Eyes Wide Shut,
and a memorial. The book also includes interviews
with Stanley Kubrick (revised for the English translation of the book), and
with his collaborators: James B. Harris, Ken Adam, John Alcott, Julian Senior
(all from the older edition of the book); and Michael Herr, Frederic Raphael, Les Tomkins,
Marit Allen, Andrew Birkin, Malcolm McDowell, Marisa Berenson, Diane Johnson,
Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall (from the new edition).
Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick was born in the
Bronx in 1928, the son of American Jews of Central European origin. His parents
were very encouraging, for example his father got Kubrick at a young age
interested in both chess and photography. It is interesting that Ciment brings
up how Kubrick’s three favorite childhood activities would leave a lasting mark
on his filmmaking, that of chess, photography (he was a photographer for Look magazine) and jazz. James Naremore is insightful about this period, in his book On Kubrick, as Naremore discusses how the popularity of Weegee’s
photographs in New York at the time could have influenced Kubrick’s own
photography. As well Naremore highlights the James Agee influence, with Agee
being a leading New Yorker film critic of the time, and where Naremore
speculates that Agee’s writing might have been one of the reasons Kubrick
started to take cinema seriously, as well a guide to Kubrick’s emerging taste.
Kubrick would then go on to
make two documentary shorts Day of the Fight and Flying Padre (both 1951), and then move
on towards an amateur war-film Fear and Desire (1953). He was able to present his personal vision to
achieve commercial success - and a form of independence through resourcefulness - in his next two features Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), both film noirs.
At an early stage of his career, Kubrick understood the importance of castings
and having bankable actors in his films, so where in The Killing there is the rough Sterling Hayden, moving forward
Kubrick used Kirk Douglas to be able to make the anti-war film Paths of
Glory (1957), and who he would work
with again as a hired-hand on Spartacus (1960). Afterwards, Kubrick was starting to get fed up with all the
distractions and all of the delays in Hollywood, so with his next film Lolita (1962), based on the Vladimir Nabokov book, Kubrick
filmed in England where he has kept his opperations until his death in 1999.
Kubrick’s films are
sometimes accused of being too detached and sardonic, but like other modernist
filmmakers like Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky, there are metaphysical
questions being scrutinized under the surface. Ciment describes his approach
as, “The contradiction which he
has been exploring – that of admitting the importance and legitimacy of the
instincts and the subconscious, while at the same time regarding reason as the
only solution for both the individual and mankind as a whole – is one that
confronts us all.” In a recent issue of The
New Yorker – their Science Fiction
Issue (June 4 & 11, 2012) – it
includes a piece by Anthony Burgess The Clockwork Condition from 1973 on his book, and the film adaptation, which
he though of as a Orwellian critique of society and the state; “It would seem
that enforced conditioning of a mind, however good the social intention, to be
evil.” While Gilles Deleuze on Kubrick
from Cinema II: The Time-Image,
from his discussion of the cinema of the body, and that of the cinema of the
brain,
"If we look at Kubrick's work, we see the degree to which it is the brain which is mise-en-scene […] Kubrick is renewing the theme of the initiatory journey because every journey in the world is an exploration of the brain […] But if the calculation fails, if the computer breaks down, it is because the brain is no more reasonable a system that the world is a rational one.”
Other great essays in Kubrick:
The Definitive Edition includes Kubrick
and the fantastic which highlights
how Kubrick’s films deal with the fantastic, which Ciment defines as “the hesitation experience by a being cognizant
only of the laws of nature when confronted with an apparently supernatural
phenomenon.” And in these moments, Ciment writes, “the spectator is incapable
of supplying a rational explanation for what he has witnessed and ends up by
accepting the supernatural.” On Full Metal Jacket, Ciment narrows in on the first weapon of the film,
the hair clipper; and on the film, “Full Metal Jacket provided a clinical examination of reality.”
It is also worth bringing up here Geoffrey Cocks’ book The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, the Holocaust, where Cocks' is able to find in the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Bill is pushed by a group of thugs onto a blue Mercedes, significance that, "That the car is a Mercedes is, moreover, a typically tiny clue to Kubrickian passions and concerns directly related, though often indirectly expressed, to the problematic nature of human existence in general and the dangerous history of the modern world in particular." And that, "But at the center of this body of work - like the Minotaur in its maze - lies The Shining, for in that film there slouches a deeply laid subtext that positions the Holocaust as the modern benchmark of evil." This is one interesting way to read The Shining, though as I’ve discussed elsewhere (cf. Stephen King on The Shining), is not the only way to read the film. Which brings me towards an interesting documentary that was recently made, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, which is a documentary on a variety of people’s interpretation of what exactly The Shining is about?
It is also worth bringing up here Geoffrey Cocks’ book The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, the Holocaust, where Cocks' is able to find in the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Bill is pushed by a group of thugs onto a blue Mercedes, significance that, "That the car is a Mercedes is, moreover, a typically tiny clue to Kubrickian passions and concerns directly related, though often indirectly expressed, to the problematic nature of human existence in general and the dangerous history of the modern world in particular." And that, "But at the center of this body of work - like the Minotaur in its maze - lies The Shining, for in that film there slouches a deeply laid subtext that positions the Holocaust as the modern benchmark of evil." This is one interesting way to read The Shining, though as I’ve discussed elsewhere (cf. Stephen King on The Shining), is not the only way to read the film. Which brings me towards an interesting documentary that was recently made, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, which is a documentary on a variety of people’s interpretation of what exactly The Shining is about?
Eyes Wide Shut
In the issue of Cahiers
(N.538) which features Eyes
Wide Shut, Tom Cruise is on the
cover (earlier in that year Cahiers also had a Kubrick issue). Nicolas Saada’s review Scenes de l’envie conjugale, pin-points exactly how a Kubrick fan would respond
to the film, “Five Seconds. It’s about the time it takes for one to fall under
the spell of the new film by Stanley Kubrick.” Saada talks about how the film
is based on Rhapsody: A Dream Novel
(1926) by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, and then makes a Viennese
connection between the Kubrick film and those of the European émigré direcrors
Max Ophuls and Ernst Lubitsch. The mysterious death of the young woman in Eyes
Wide Shut seems like a reference to
Kubrick’s own early noirs, and in
the scene in the mortuary, when Bill (Tom Cruise) is contemplating the corpse
in front of him, Saada is quite insightful when he describes the scene as,
“We don’t know if Bill desires to sense the dead or, on the contrary, to transmit life to this inert corpse. And it might be because of this gesture that Tom Cruise, with this hand posed on the forehead of the dead, has something indelible and shaking, that goes against the simple mystery of a man who can finally just let go.”
Kent Jones, a American
correspondent for Cahiers at the
time, in the same issue has a piece, Frissons, on how American film critics discussed Eyes Wide
Shut at the time of its release:
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert liked it versus The New Yorker and Dave Kehr, who didn’t. While in a few succeeding
issues of Cahiers came Laurence
Giavarini, Puissance des fantasmes, which
is one of the more thorough readings of Eyes Wide Shut. Giavarini sees Kubrick’s last film as a horror film, it’s not the story of Bill and his ghosts, but
that of Bill in the land of ghosts
– which makes it a horror film as much as The Shining. Giavarini, “It is clear that this bewitchment is the
temptation of Eyes Wide Shut. It
is thus a horror film for this reason of slowness that the exact images passes
in front of us, that bring the couple red-eyed together in the morning.”
While in Positif (Sept.99, N.463), Michel Henry has a great essay La
penombre des ames that contextualizes
Eyes Wide Shut within the turn
of the century Vienna, the actual setting of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovella
(the original German title of the
book), and places the film in the Kammerspielfilm “chamber drama” tradition of Germany of the 1920s.
While Jean-Pierre Coursodon’s review Fear and desire: the night of masks in the same issue is a lot more skeptical, “We can
regret that his other projects – Napoleon, or A.I. – have been
abandoned for this one, but, if someone had to turn Traumnovelle into a film, we doubt anyone could have done a better
job.”
While in a couple of issues
later, Positif would do a special
issue dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, Ciment from it’s editorial, “Positif is without a doubt in the world, the one magazine
that has dedicated the most text to the films of Stanley Kubrick.” And that
issues centerpiece is The tomb of Stanley Kubrick which asks forty-eight filmmakers, from Woody Allen
to the Taviani brothers, what they think Kubrick’s relation to cinema is and
what films they are most attached to.
Kubrick, Ciment and
Positif
Kubrick: The Definitive Edition by Ciment is not only a great Kubrick book, but as I’ve argued elsewhere (cf. Kubrick by Ciment) is a great example of Positif-ien criticism. Where the form of the publication gives precedence to the films. So through a management of space – Positif is the magazine with the largest page size and it publishes twelve issues a year – and the placement of texts and images, there is the impression of a rapid-fire effect of film appreciation. Some of Positif's different magazine sections are: film reviews, interviews, books and DVD reviews, voix-off, which are unpublished contributions by filmmakers; Bloc-notes, diary like entries by their writers; and features dedicated to subjects and film history. All of these different forms of writing not only expand on Positif’s discourse on cinema, but express that writing about cinema can be a form of self-expression. And similar to The New York Review of Books, Positif’s dozen writers stand out in such a big magazine through their prose, knowledge and generosity.
Kubrick: The Definitive Edition by Ciment is not only a great Kubrick book, but as I’ve argued elsewhere (cf. Kubrick by Ciment) is a great example of Positif-ien criticism. Where the form of the publication gives precedence to the films. So through a management of space – Positif is the magazine with the largest page size and it publishes twelve issues a year – and the placement of texts and images, there is the impression of a rapid-fire effect of film appreciation. Some of Positif's different magazine sections are: film reviews, interviews, books and DVD reviews, voix-off, which are unpublished contributions by filmmakers; Bloc-notes, diary like entries by their writers; and features dedicated to subjects and film history. All of these different forms of writing not only expand on Positif’s discourse on cinema, but express that writing about cinema can be a form of self-expression. And similar to The New York Review of Books, Positif’s dozen writers stand out in such a big magazine through their prose, knowledge and generosity.
In Kubrick, Ciment brings up
Kubrick’s cinema in relation to the other art forms whether they be painting,
literature, philosophy, classical music, opera and theater. Unlike Cahiers which seems more interested in cinema in terms of
medium-specificity, Positif aligns
cinema with all the other arts (e.g. see their recent dossier on Opera and
Cinema). Where Cahiers can dismiss a “bad” film in a short paragraph, Positif’s lengthy reviews enrich film criticism within that
of the larger field of art- and literary-criticism. For example here is Ciment
on Kubrick, “His approach is more like that of a write or painter. The fame of
writers like Stendhal, Flaubert, Kafka, and Joyce is based on a relatively
small number of works.”
Ciment’s Kubrick book is similar to other books by Positif writers like Robert Benayoun’s photo-based book Le
regard de Buster Keaton or the
intellectual prose of Vincent Amiel’s Joseph Mankiewicz et son double. These forays into book publishing, continues the
canon that Bernard Chardère wanted to create when he founded Positif in 1952. At
this current date Ciment, the current director of the publication, does not
publish too much in Positif. Ciment writes
several of the magazines monthly editorials - usually directing the magazines
editorial stance - as well as he conducts a lot of the interviews with the big name
directors, a bloc-notes in January
where he lists his ten favorite films of the preceding year, and he contributes
some of Positif best memorials
(e.g. Raoul Ruiz, Theo Angelopoulos). The feel of Ciment's writing is more like a friend talking about something - it seems personal - which is different then the
“objective” writing style of a New York
Times. And he isn't afraid to take on unpopular positions (e.g. see his recent attacks toward Jean-Luc Godard). Reading Positif on a regular basis gives off the impression of being in
one of their famous monthly meetings – the ones where they discuss the films
that they’ve seen and choose the upcoming months magazine cover.
Why discuss Positif so much? What do I like so much about the magazine?
Does Positif have the secret key
to unlock all of the mysteries of cinema? First off, before I get to these questions, I want to say, that I’m
not only person to inquire about the history of this revered magazine, and for more information I would have to point you towards the great French film-blog Nightswimming
by Edouard Sivière, who has dedicated
three lengthy entries on the history of the magazine (I, II, III).
Even though Positif has changed over the years, there seems to be a
constant to it, and I think what is at the heart of Positif returns back to the magazines title, Positif, to be positive, and the writing gains from their writers, people
sharing their pleasures about why they like certain movies, and why they have given their
lives to cinema. If I read and write about Positif so much, its just because it's an important part of my cinephilia.
If I can point to only one of their issues, as a summit of Positif-ien thought – as useful as Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema - it would be their recent Portfolio 80 cinéastes vus par… Positif et Nicolas Guérin (2010). What is it about? Well... Let’s talk about our favorite auteurs. Let’s talk about cinema. Let’s talk about history, politics and culture. Let’s do it well, and let’s make it look good!
If I can point to only one of their issues, as a summit of Positif-ien thought – as useful as Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema - it would be their recent Portfolio 80 cinéastes vus par… Positif et Nicolas Guérin (2010). What is it about? Well... Let’s talk about our favorite auteurs. Let’s talk about cinema. Let’s talk about history, politics and culture. Let’s do it well, and let’s make it look good!