Stanley Kubrick & The Birth of Visual Poetry

Written by Shailik Bhaumik

The power of imagination makes us infinite – John Muir

Secretive, reclusive, strange, mysterious or cold whatever they say about Stanley Kubrick doesn’t fade the distinguished mark he left in the history of cinema through his works. Stanley Kubrick was far from a one-dimensional director. It’s true that the 13 feature-length films he made over 50 years of his film career present a disenchanted, sardonic and generally pessimistic view of humanity but what elevates Kubrick one of the greatest  storytellers of all time is his challenging, thought-provoking body of work that stands in comparison with any of the giants of world cinema.

His films, which frequently mix incisive political messages with disturbing character relationships and iconic horror imagery, are simultaneously artful and raw. In perhaps his best-known film, The Shining, his uncanny, labyrinthine and geometric framing of the film’s hotel setting transform inanimate objects like tricycles and corridors into pseudo-characters in themselves, capable of conveying horror and unease even without explicit violence.

In his Vietnam War indictment Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick blurs the line between military brutality and full-blown abuse, masculinity and femininity, violence and sexuality, in ways no other filmmaker could. Indeed, his unique blending of beauty and ugliness, politics and psychology, composure and unease, have marked Kubrick’s cinema even since his earliest projects, such as Fear and Desire (1953), Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956).




Kubrick’s Legendary Film Techniques

Stanley Kubrick is noted for being a demanding perfectionist, using painstaking care with scene staging, camera-work and coordinating extremely closely both with his actors and his behind scenes collaborators. Kubrick’s great obsession was: the relationship between the artificial and the natural, the constrained and the unleashed, the civilized and the base, the man and the machine.

People misunderstand Kubrick, based on thinking about only one film, or one scene from one film, believing he was anti-technology or anti-nature. In fact, his films, when taken as a whole, are less moralistic than journalistic: he’s reporting on human nature, and he doesn’t believe it’s malleable.

Characters as caricatures:

In his films, many of the characters’ traits are highly exaggerated. Examples: Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange (Alex himself, Dim, Deltoid); The Shining (Jack, Lloyd); Lolita (Humbert Humbert, Clare Quilty, Lolita).

Women portrayed as objects:

Women are heavily objectified in many of Kubrick’s films. Examples? Some of them (A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, and Eyes Wide Shut) are more obvious, but some less so. For example: in Dr. Strangelove the only woman who appears in the film is General “Buck” Turgidson’s secretary Miss Scott, with whom he’s having an affair. Her entire scene is done with her wearing spotted lingerie while briefing Turgidson on a military matter.


 Unusual use of zoom:

The slow zoom-out comprising the first shot of A Clockwork Orange may be one of the most famous zoom shots in the history of cinema. Kubrick also uses dramatic zooming in many of his other films. Usually it’s unusually fast or unusually slow and he loved close-ups of human faces, caught in extremely primal emotive states.

 Long tracking shots:

Famous tracking shots include those inside the hotel in The Shining following Danny on his bike as he rides through the halls, a very long tracking take moving through the trenches in Paths of Glory, and multiple tracking shots in Clockwork Orange, 2001, and Barry Lyndon.


Wide-angle lenses:

Kubrick employs extreme wide-angle lenses in almost all of his films. You can see the distortion at the bounds of the image in tracking shots that use a wide-angle, especially when the camera turns during a tracking shot. He also uses the wide angle lens up close to actors’ faces in some situations to provide a sense of urgency or pathos.

Extremely long takes:

Most of Kubrick’s films have shots lasting three or four minutes, or perhaps longer. One example of an unusually long take is the scene in Clockwork Orange in which Alex is checked into the Ludovico building. We see the entire check-in, from beginning to end — something that many filmmakers would simply skip over.

Wide shots:

In addition to using a wide-angle lens, Kubrick often eschews with close-ups and two-shots in favor of three-shots or even wider shots… making many of the characters blend in more with the scenery. He was obsessed with regimented images (a better term than “symmetrical”), such as the military marches in “Barry Lyndon,” the marines marching in “Full Metal Jacket” and the Droogs strolling in formation in “A Clockwork Orange.”


