Formal Film Study: Stanley Kubrick's Top Three

Stanley Kubrick is a name well-known in the movie industry for films that push the envelope and really invite audiences to think about what they're seeing. He's a cult film hero and many of his films remain unmatched in style and editing to films today. I like to think I'm well-rounded when it comes to movie-viewing but a problem I kept running into with Kubrick films was that I've started many, but never finished a single one. Because I'm new to his work, I decided to go for his three most popular films The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also ordered the lineup I watched the films based on how much I knew about the film before viewing it. I'd gotten through half of The Shining, so I began with that and knew nothing about 2001 so I ended with that one.
Sound: Something Kubrick likes to do is play on your emotions with the choice of background music. Across all three films, there would be instances that could look normal, like a mother and son running in the snow or astronauts posing for a picture on the moon, but the sound playing behind it be so eerie and unsettling that you instantly felt fear for the inevitable agony of the people on screen. The Shining seemed to never have a quiet moment in it and when there was, it was so off-putting that my heart raced a bit from the suspense.  Kubrick was a big fan of the screeching sound, so anytime you were meant to understand that there was upcoming doom, expect a nail on the chalkboard. The sound effects in that film are spot on for getting how you should feel when watching a particular scene. Except one scene when Wendy finds Jack's "novel" and the sound playing in the background along with Wendy's horrified face gets to be a bit comical because of how long it plays out. The music was often times what told the story. According to IMDb, there is 88 out of the 160 minute 2001 where there is no dialogue. During this time, you'd probably be listening to classical music or Stanley Kubrick's breathing (IMDb also said that Kubrick provided the breathing heard in the spacesuits). Kubrick's choice to use classical music primarily over scenes in a spaceship 33 years into the future was to make the scene timeless. He couldn't predict how the technology decades away would look but by adding music over it that has been around for centuries, he gave the scene a bit of irony and further stressed the idea of human evolution present throughout the rest of the film. The first appearance of the black prism is accompanied by a lovely screeching noise that foreshadowed the chaos it'd bring later with the astronauts. I didn't notice the sound as much in Clockwork but I think that's because there was more of a focus on the strange British dialect the characters speak in. Although an important part of the plot is the song Alex sings when he rapes the writer's wife and later accidentally reveals himself to the same writer.

Theme: A message I found throughout these 3 Kubrick films was the power of man to push past his limits and evolve. Alex in Clockwork began the film a scumbag criminal and I don't think he's really cured by the end, but the entire middle of the film centers around him trying to change his ways. Jack's evolution in The Shining is a bit more twisted. His turn from family man to psychopath is attributed to the hotel and it's encouragement to kill his family. The butler continually taunts him, asking him whether he has what it takes to do what the hotel wants. In 2001, man is represented by all of humanity. The movie begins with man in his most primitive state, a simple ape. We then jump to man much further evolved, in space, and creating artificial intelligence.

Camera: Kubrick is a fan of the steady cam, often keeping the camera on one plane and moving it only horizontally or vertically to keep up with the action. Only when there is a sudden change in the action, like two twins who are supposed to be dead walking in on Danny, does the camera break the plane and quickly zoom in to show Danny's puzzled face. This style of camera work reminds me of how Wes Anderson shoots his movies, but Kubrick uses more depth than Anderson. While Anderson's movie will stay primarily in that 2D style of setting up a scene, Kubrick uses a lot of mirrors to make his scenes seem more three-dimensional even if the camera isn't doing much. An angle I saw repeated through his movie was when the camera is set underneath the subject and looking up at it. In these scenes, the subject had his head pressed up against a wall or door and had just made some kind of realization. In The Shining, this angle was used after Jack had officially lost it and was on a manhunt for Wendy. He beats at the freezer door for a bit before the scene cuts to the extreme low angle and Jack realizes that the one he really need to find is Danny. A similar scene occurs in Clockwork when Alex is singing "Singing in the Rain" in the bathroom of the writer he had previously robbed and handicapped. We cut to the low-angle as the writer recognizes the song and voice of the man who had done these horrible things to him and he has a little seizure.

Something Kubrick's films lacked was diversity. All his movies feature an all-white cast except the one black man in The Shining. Perhaps this could be explained by the time period these films were made in (2001- 1968, Clockwork- 1971, Shining- 1980). This was before film makers could use an all white cast without getting backlash from the public for being discriminatory. Other than that, I found Kubrick's films to be extremely captivating and timeless. These films are all older than me, but none of them feel that way. Because Kubrick sets his movies in a distant future or isolates his characters so it's like they're the only ones on Earth, he's able to make his own little world where the stories live on forever.