The Visual Poet
Prelude of the book 'Stanley Kubrick. Visual Poet 1928-1999', by Paul Duncan
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The meaning of a film is usually conveyed to an audience through the words of a film reviewer in a newspaper, magazine or book. This analysis is an intellectual exercise that tries to interpret the emotions the reviewer felt whilst watching the film. However, just as each novel has a meaning unique to each reader, so does each film. Consequently, there are as many meanings as there are viewers. Kubrick was very careful not to present his own views of the meaning of his films,as he explained to Rob ert Emmett Ginna in 1 960: "One of the things that I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, 'Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?' And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T. S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him - I believe it was about The Waste Land - what he meant by the poem. He replied, 'I meant what it said.' If I could have said it any differently, I would have."
This leads to one conclusion: if you want to understand a Kubrick film you must experience it for yourself. This is easy to do because a Kubrick film is primarily made with a series of images and sounds that combine to elicit an emotional response. We are all capable of doing this, as Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis: "...an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication." This explains why many of Kubrick's films do not have dialogue for long periods and why the story is primarily conveyed through images and music/sound.
It is interesting to note that when the characters do speak, the words emphasise the characters' relationship to their environment and bind them together, like the swearing and jargon of the soldiers in Full Metal Jacket, the evocative euphemisms of Dr Strangelove, or Nadsat, the adolescent street language invented by Anthony Burgess for his novel A Clockwork Orange. As Gilbert Adair wrote in a review of Full Metal Jacket: 'Kubrick's approach to language has always been of a reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all the whims, shades and modulations of personal expression.'
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
The meaning of a film is usually conveyed to an audience through the words of a film reviewer in a newspaper, magazine or book. This analysis is an intellectual exercise that tries to interpret the emotions the reviewer felt whilst watching the film. However, just as each novel has a meaning unique to each reader, so does each film. Consequently, there are as many meanings as there are viewers. Kubrick was very careful not to present his own views of the meaning of his films,as he explained to Rob ert Emmett Ginna in 1 960: "One of the things that I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, 'Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?' And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T. S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him - I believe it was about The Waste Land - what he meant by the poem. He replied, 'I meant what it said.' If I could have said it any differently, I would have."
This leads to one conclusion: if you want to understand a Kubrick film you must experience it for yourself. This is easy to do because a Kubrick film is primarily made with a series of images and sounds that combine to elicit an emotional response. We are all capable of doing this, as Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis: "...an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication." This explains why many of Kubrick's films do not have dialogue for long periods and why the story is primarily conveyed through images and music/sound.
It is interesting to note that when the characters do speak, the words emphasise the characters' relationship to their environment and bind them together, like the swearing and jargon of the soldiers in Full Metal Jacket, the evocative euphemisms of Dr Strangelove, or Nadsat, the adolescent street language invented by Anthony Burgess for his novel A Clockwork Orange. As Gilbert Adair wrote in a review of Full Metal Jacket: 'Kubrick's approach to language has always been of a reductive and uncompromisingly deterministic nature. He appears to view it as the exclusive product of environmental conditioning, only very marginally influenced by concepts of subjectivity and interiority, by all the whims, shades and modulations of personal expression.'
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Stanley Kubrick
Flexicover, 19.6 x 24.5 cm (7.7 x 9.6 in.), 192 pages
$ 19.99
$ 19.99
"I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel." -Stanley Kubrick
Still from 'Full Metal Jacket' (1987). Private Joker (Matthew Modine) on patrol in "a world of shit."
Still from 'Killer's Kiss' (1955). Davy (Jamie Smith) holds Vincent (Frank Silvera) at gunpoint in an attempt to rescue Gloria, the object of their desire.