Stanley Kubrick

1575 Words4 Pages

"I would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself."

As one of the most widely acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era, Stanley Kubrick enjoyed a reputation and a standing unique among the filmmakers of his day. He had a brilliant career with relatively few films. An outsider, he worked beyond the confines of Hollywood, which he disliked, maintaining complete control of his projects and making movies according to his own ideas and time constraints. To him, filmmaking was a form of art and unlike Hollywood, not a business.

Working in a vast range of styles from dark comedy to horror to crime to drama, Kubrick was an enigma, living and creating in almost total seclusion, far away from the watchful eye of the media. His films were a reflection of his obsessive nature, perfectionist masterpieces that remain among the most thoughtful and visionary motion pictures ever made.

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 in the Bronx. In 1942, while still in high school, he initially had an interest in photography, which his father

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introduced. Stanley father, Jacques Kubrick, spend his life as a physician. His first brush with fame occurred when Look magazine published one of his early photographs of a newspaper seller overwhelmed by the headlines announcing the death of President Roosevelt.

Shortly there after, Kubrick started work at Look magazine as an apprentice photographer. In 1946 he became a reporter for the magazine and traveled across the United States and Europe. While a student at Columbia University, Kubrick became interested in filmmaking and attended the Museum of Modern Art showings regularly. To supplement his income, he played chess for money in Greenwich Village.

In 1951 at the age of twenty, Kubrick and a school friend, Alfred Singer used their life savings to finance his first film, Day of the Fight, a sixteen-minute documentary on boxer Walter Cartier. This short film was later purchased by RKO for its This Is America series and played in theaters in New York. Encouraged by his success, Kubrick quit his job at Look and pursued filmmaking full-time. Soon, RKO assigned him to head a short film for their documentary series Pathe Screenliner.

The title, Flying Padre was a nine-minute film...

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...range that almost all of his movies were successful with the moviegoers but received less than favorable reviews from the critics. Stanley Kubrick died on March 7, 1999, in his sleep of a heart attack just five days after the final cut at Warner Brothers never seeing the film released.

I personally agree that he has followed his cinematic dreams with relentless passion, regardless of time, money or commercial success. His perfectionist traits were as well known as his reclusive and highly private life. He has given all of us one of the cinema’s most challenging, diverse and altogether brilliant legacies. In many viewers eyes his films and him self will never be forgotten.

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Reference:

Ankeny, Jason. Stanley Kubrick Biography. Yahoo! Movies. 5 May 2001. http://movies.yahoo.com/shop.htm

Ciment, Michel. Kubrick and the Fanastic. Trans. Gilbert Adair. Growingfamily.com Network. 30 Apr. 2001. http://www.growingfamily.com network/kubrick263kf.htm

“Stanley Kubrick Biography”. Cosmopolis. 23 April 2001 http://www.cosmoplis.ch/english/cosmozero/kubrick.htm

“Stanley Kubrick and His Films”. Essortment.com. 23 Apr. 2001. http://kyky.essortment.com/stanelykubric_rrvd.htm

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