The Stanley Kubrick Archives (review)

You, lucky cineaste, have been chosen to see the archives of elusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. You sail across the sea in deference to the director's reluctance to fly. One of his associates takes you the roundabout way to the English countryside in St. Albans, and the Kubrick estate in Childwick Bury. Four electric gates open, and you stroll around the grounds to rooms, more rooms, and portable cabins full of boxes, whose contents Kubrick devoted his life to organizing. Sliding—not lifting—off a specially designed top, you start to rifle through the secrets of the auteur.

Or, in a less mythical adventure, you buy this 411 x 300mm book: this glossy volume of 544 pages and twelve pounds, succulent and cumbersome as a Thanksgiving turkey, a portfolio of an archive in its own box, with a handle for portability. Leafing through it, with different colored tabs marking each film, is easier than going to an archival trove. You've no appointment, dust, or fear of fingertip oil. Two hundred dollars arranges your personal Kubrick tour, if you have not been invited to the estate, or have not seen the exhibit that has already traveled more than the director, running through July 2004 in Frankfurt, April 2005 in Berlin, January 2006 in Melbourne, and January 2007 in Ghent, and is scheduled to open later in 2007 in Rome, before being housed in the archive's new repository in the University of the Arts, London.

You could body surf on The Stanley Kubrick Archives. You can also pore over its gorgeously mounted contents, considering the fittest ways to present Kubrick's, or other film directors', trove of moviemaking materials.

Part One of the book consists of beautifully reproduced stills. In its publicity, the publisher Taschen claims that this design creates a completely "nonverbal experience," echoing Kubrick's intention for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The approach seems appropriate because Kubrick began his career as a photographer, and the frame enlargements show he retained an exemplary eye. The images evoke the flow of the films and their striking sequences, such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1962) taking a celebratory drink in his bath, and Alex undergoing the "Ludovico Treatment," with his eyelids pinned open in A Clockwork Orange (1971). However, stills alone fail fully to reveal the artist by imitating his intentions. The method cannot convey the original music choices or emblematic camera movements, which are also nonverbal elements that make Kubrick's movies powerful cinema. To excise words also handicaps the images. One longs to hear, or at least to be reminded of, the way the nymphet Lolita, the Teutonic Dr. Strangelove, the computer Hal, the young punk Alex, the narrator of Barry Lyndon, the crazed Jack Torrance, and Gunnery Sargeant Hartman speak. Their idiomatic voices prove what the writer Michael Herr called Kubrick's "faith" in literary mise-en-scène (526).

While unfolding a wonderful wealth of materials, The Stanley Kubrick Archives is also not a critical study. As Part One demonstrates, the book takes an honorary approach to a keen and irreverent creator. Part Two, titled "The Creative Process...," consists of summary essays, and production photographs from the films combined with documents of Kubrick's careful and constant engagement with his work. The favorable articles from Gene D. Phillips, Rodney Hill, and Michel Ciment on the films, and from Alison Castle and others on Kubrick's unshot works, unintentionally testify to the director's quote, in bold on one of the final pages: "No reviewer has ever illuminated any aspect of my work for me" (535). One wishes the critical essays, as sympathetic as they are to Kubrick's oeuvre, had the vigor and rigor of his films. Besides the director's writings and interviews, the speculations by fifteen-year-old Margaret Stackhouse on the meanings of 2001 and Michael Herr's profile of the director are the...