Lacma museum stanley kubrick biography

Cities Atlanta Austin Boston. Chicago Detroit Los Angeles. New York San Francisco Archive. A highlight is the large collection of Kubrick's personal camera equipment, including the enormous, NASA-designed lenses that allowed him to film the painterly, candlelit interiors of his masterful Barry Lyndon Strangelove's War Room also is re-created as one of several highly detailed, miniature models in the exhibit, many of them from the innovative production ofincluding the Discovery spaceship and the museumlike Baroque Room of the finale, with its unnerving light emanating from the floor.

Seeing the physical models allows the viewer to move back and forth and study these movie spaces in three shifting dimensions. The most fascinating is a model of 's spacecraft centrifuge, a rotating stage with trap doors that allowed Kubrick to film from strategic vantage points. Unfortunately, not all of the prop reconstructions in the exhibit are as interesting as the models; life-size replicas of the erotic mannequins in the Korova Milk Bar of A Clockwork Orange seem inauthentic and merely decorative.

The exhibit continues through a series of smaller spaces, each devoted to Kubrick's later works. Especially rare and fascinating are exhibits devoted to two of his most cherished unrealized projects: the stalled Napoleon production and the Holocause drama Aryan Papers. Hundreds of photos — contemporary Slovakian streets and archival research courtesy of Ealing Studios — reveal possible locations for the latter, and the experimental 16mm short film Unfolding the Aryan Papersby Jane and Louise Wilson, revisits wardrobe tests Kubrick photographed in with actress Johanna ter Steege.

See sidebar for more on these projects. Throughout the exhibit are copies of Kubrick's screenplays marked with his personal revisions. The inclusion of his chess set is a reminder of his lifelong interest in the game. It also reinforces the portrait of an artist who was in a constant state of study and negotiation, with research and preparation giving way to lengthy shooting schedules and refinements of dialogue in conversation with his actors.

Lacma museum stanley kubrick biography

Stanley Kubrick breaks with strict chronology and instead creates clusters of visual and informative "microclimates" within the exhibition hall — a different weather for each film discussed, as it were, with meaningful asides to present Kubrick's work as a photographer for Look magazine in the 40s and his research for two unrealised films, referred to as Napoleon and Aryan Papers.

In doing so, the retrospective conveys quite well the "bodily" experience of immersing oneself in a world or point of view through film. At the same time, it provides a necessary cerebral lifejacket: just enough background text, comparison, and thematic cohesion to buoy the viewer from drowning in the various dramas on display. Although the exhibition takes care to remain inviting to those uninitiated in the films of Kubrick, the show is, of course, most satisfying for those who come to it having seen at least some of his masterpieces.

Half the fun is staring at familiar scenes in this unfamiliar context, wherein the heavy chewing has been taken care of already. Looking at a gorgeous scene from Barry Lyndonfor example, one need only turn an eye to the ready-to-think text outlining how the film "offers a stunning arrangement of symmetries and doublings, of intense colours and perfectly realized tableaux copied from eighteenth-century paintings by Joshua Reynolds, Johann Zoffany, William Hogarth, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Stubbs.

Well, that's one less trip to Wikipedia! Other such nuggets matter-of-factly discuss the colour red in Kubrick's films, stating that he "developed a constellation of meanings and sensations surround the colour" and offering a very convincing palette of stills as example. The matter of fact tone and direct nature of such captions throughout the show do well to allow Kubrick's work to do most of the talking, and refrain from clashing with the artistic flourishes of the director or the personal reactions of the viewer.

The retrospective, which originated in Frankfurt's Deutsches Filmmuseumhas already been traveling Europe for years, and its arrival in Hollywood seems a no-brainer, albeit an exciting one eliciting long lines and positive reviews.