Citizen Kubrick (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Citizen Kubrick (2004)

theguardian.com

110 pointsakkartik25 comments

There is a documentary video of this by the author, KUBRICK'S BOXES: http://vimeo.com/78314194

I had the good fortune to study the films (made and unmade) of Stanley Kubrick for a semester in college. If ever a filmmaker embodied the hacker spirit it was Kubrick - he taught himself still photography, dropped out of high school to successfully pursue the career, hustled chess, bootstrapped his first film, licensed the rights to a book, put together a round of funding, and built a career in Hollywood. Then left Hollywood and the U.S. and took huge chances with his career to pursue his art, hack innovative tech for his films, and change the history of cinema. Many years after college, I'm still inspired by Kubrick's life. But man was Eyes Wide Shut a clunker.

Well, you're not actually describing a 'hacker' - you're describing an entrepeneur. But, yes, he was a lot more technically invested than a lot of other auteurs. I recommend the documentary 'Stanley Kubrick: a life in pictures' to anybody interested in living life on their own terms. Very inspiring.

Oh, and I find 'Eyes Wide Shut' to be a woefully mistunderstood and underated gem. I'd rate it second to 'Barry Lyndon' in the Kubrick oeuvr. A lot of his other films (Shining, 2001, Clockwork) I found to be technically marvelous but mishandled in terms of storytelling.

"Eyes Wide Shut" is a masterpiece but also a very difficult film to understand. Even at its very slow pace it is too much to understand in one viewing. I paticularly love all the incidents that tangential to the main plot: the drug overdose, encounter with a streetwalker, and costume shop daughter's perversions. Great stuff.

This is wonderful and touches on Kubrick and chess:

http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/rare_1960s_audio_stanley_....

Thanks for that!

If a film maker could be described as a hacker, it is Kubrick without a doubt, in my view. There is just a weird multiple layered thing going on that you appreciate after multiple viewings.

Whenever I read about the eccentricities of famous, wealthy people, I remind myself that these are the same kinds of quirks that I have, just amplified by near infinite means. This is also, perhaps, a warning against reading too much into a famous, wealthy artists' eccentricities.

The other side of this piece may also be a warning against spending too much time preparing, just because you have the luxury of doing so. Yes, as his assistant says, that's just how Kubrick worked. But when Kubrick had less means, he still worked that way, I just assume that he had less means, and eventually an outside party would push him to actually complete something. When you have near infinite means of your own, that push may not exist, and you may end up being less productive as a result.

On the other hand, it's the means that wealthy artists have that allows them to push the edge past what others have done.

On the other hand, Woody Allen has managed just fine. However, has anyone ever suggested that the historical scenes in Midnight In Paris are perfect?

>Whenever I read about the eccentricities of famous, wealthy people, I remind myself that these are the same kinds of quirks that I have, just amplified by near infinite means.

maybe there is no amplification - just that nobody goes through your shit after you die.

Wealthy people can amass much, much more than you and I.

Everything is not class warfare. You just argued above that he created less because of his (well deserved) wealth later in life. So you can be both jealous and disappointed. Nice rhetoric!

I remember about this time last year seeing the Kubrick exhibit at LACMA http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/stanley-kubrick. They had many of the items mentioned in this article. So you can see the index cards about Napoleon.

Oddly, the article doesn't mention why Kubrick wanted a copy Hotel Auschwitz. Kubrick was known to making a film on the Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_Lies. Not long after Schindler's List came out was the project abandoned.

And, just like everything Kubrick, I don't understand the ending. What did being fussy about boxes, and only having them available to people inside the house, have to do with finding what he was looking for?

My interpretation is that the author wrote this article to find something about Kubrick that defines who he was.

Kubrick is known to have demanded perfection, jotting down tons and tons of notes and details. But the public only seems this side of Kubrick in the movies he makes. One can be a perfectionist about a trade, but carefree in other aspects of their life.

But the boxes were the author's "Rosebud" in that even though no one outside of the estate would see/use these boxes, and by the looks of it would have rarely been opened, Kubrick still took the time to get boxes that were incredibly well-designed. So in essence, the boxes embodied Kubrick's true self, a perfectionists.

That's how you used to have to do research - boxes of files. Today he would have had everything scanned and indexed multiple ways in a database. But there is something special about the less satisfying about this than a room containing every book ever written about Napolean.

The article at some point says that the movies are Stanley. I believe they mean that the best way to know stanley i to know his work. The boxes wer, in such a sense, what Stanley Kubrick was about. I think what the author means in that no one outside the Kubrick house ever saw the real Stanley Kubrick.

swang (above) puts it better than I could but I thought the story of the boxes was to show that Tony was right when he said "It's all there, those films are Stanley." The point being he put the same level of work in to the boxes and his many unfinished projects as he did with the films that saw release. In essence, boxes or films, he's doing it for himself and our enjoyment of his work is incidental to the process. The films and the boxes are Stanley Kubrick. The films just happen to be the bit we get to see.

It is worth mentioning that in his 1968's Film you see video conferences and touchscreen tablets - as skype and iPad was invented by him.

Samsung even used it in their case agains Apple..

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/02/judge-rules-out-samsu...

> touchscreen tablet

No, I haven't seen anybody used touchscreen there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo

We can even recognize that "the tablet" is by IIX and that it has 10 real buttons (1..9 than 0):

http://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/rapny-1.jpeg

So it was probably then designed as a portable flat TV. Still it looks good.

The device is by IBM, not IIX. The site below has some better pictures of the device's logo (and some other bits of “IBM” hardware), along with lots of pictures of Kubrick's preference for san-serif fonts:

http://typesetinthefuture.com/2001-a-space-odyssey/

You're right, I haven't seen that even better resolution photo.

http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_ibm_tele_p...

We see even the brand:

   IBM
   TELE PRO

So it is a flat TV set after all, made by IBM.

What I wan to know is why Tony called the author two years after Kubrick's death...

That has to be an interesting story in itself.

Edit: The answer is in the documentary Kubrick's Boxes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7615310). It appears that Tony (Kubrick's assistant) was reading a book by the author and remembered his request for the tape and gave him a call.

Aren't we all amassing a collection boxes? Some which will go untouched from the moment they are organized. We just do it with folders on a hard drive today. Just yesterday I started to organize my media archive (http://pastebin.com/ZhtNgiBK). Some things I've only collected on the prospect that maybe a friend or relative would like to watch it one day, I have no intention of viewing it myself.

On a note related to Kubrick, here's a link to the analysis of The Shining referenced in Room 237 by mstrmnd: http://www.mstrmnd.com/log/802

It's a cool read if you're into his films, and you've approached a point in your own personal analysis when you thought, the deeper I go, the closer to madness I am.

What's the point of being a great artist if you don't produce? Only one movie in the last 12 years of his life is sad for him, and for us.

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