The Shining preview

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/the-shining-behind-the-scenes_n_4173538.html

Just had to share an awesome article I stumbled upon with behind the scenes stills on the set of The Shining! 

2001: A Space Odyssey

More could be said about this giant of a film than could probably ever be written into one entry (or several for that matter). Rather than regurgitate the claims made by the authors we read this week, with their many brilliant analyses of 2001, I'd like to point out an interesting comparison I noticed. When reading Hanson's piece on Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice, I couldn't help but be reminded of an oft-cited article by Andrea Huyssen titled The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Huyssen's article makes several claims about gender and the role of technology in Fritz Lang's acclaimed Metropolis that work well in conversation with Hanson's argument. 

The common thread in Hanson and Huyssen's analyses is that man's apprehension and anxieties about the machine or technology is conflated with a psychological male fear of femininity and otherness . Indeed, both narratives can be picked to bits by Freud's theories of castration anxiety, the fear a male undergoes once he realizes his mother does not have a phallus as he does. The mother (and females in general) become a threatening source of anxiety; one that needs to be subjugated. In the case of 2001, HAL serves to represent an Otherness that must be questioned by the two men traveling to Jupiter. This is due to HAL's mechanicity, but also, Hanson asserts, to his queerness. In Metropolis, the evil scientist Rotwang invents a robot which will destroy the entire city. Unlike HAL, the vamp is not merely a disembodied voice. Instead, the vamp is shown as having a characteristically female body, one that threatens and titillates men, and must also be controlled by them. The interesting disparity between these two representations emerges in the way that the vamp possesses a certain corporeality that HAL lacks. 

Ambiguous Space

Single Point Perspective

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Two Point Perspective

Flat Space

Thea Brown, another student in the class and my co-social manager in one of the Berkeley Student co-ops told me she will be posting about this too. But, hey, when you have a Kubrickian 2001 themed party at your co-op, you have to post about it on a blog like this right?

Lolita

Lolita is probably my favorite film that we have watched so far. Having never seen it before, I was pretty taken aback by the leap Kubrick makes in this film toward an even more constructed, veiled, and grotesque sort of humor. As we watched, it felt as though so much of the dialogue could be boiled down to allusions to sex and desire. Additionally, the visual composition and blocking seemed to insert sexuality and innuendo at every corner. Kubrick manages to generate a sexual tension between Humbert and Lolita that oozes off the screen without ever showing the pair have sex with each other. 

                                                        Lolita being pouty and flirtatious, a common thread in the film.

Kubrick's tongue-in-cheek manner of humor really appealed to me. When Charlotte is killed, Humbert's attitude is not one of grief, but relief. The music that comes on when he sits in the bathtub immediately following the crash could not be more inappropriate for the scenario. But, of course, this deliberate choice has the effect of trivializing the death in a funny way. Once again we also see the emasculated male figure used as a means for the comedy. Humbert carries a sort of Victorian masculinity, one that doesn't translate very easily into the American atmosphere he exists in. He is proper and gentlemanly, and consequently is taken advantage of by Lolita. The adolescent plays with his infatuations, emasculating and infantilizing him throughout Lolita. 

The Killing

The Killing this week further shows us Kubrick's development as a filmmaker. In what seems like a sort of revision of what his notions of film noir might have been, we see Kubrick playing a lot more with time here than in Killer's Kiss. The characters are also presented as slightly more complex than perhaps Davey and Gloria are in his previous film. Something I was really pleased by in The Killing was what felt like a first glimpse into Kubrick's grotesque sense of humor. I found the relationship and ultimate demise of George and Sherry to be the most comical. The bickering that the married couple engages in casts George as a sort of pathetic figure, working hard to please his wife but always coming up short. In the end, despite their added multi-dimensionality, one doesn't really sympathize or feel bad for any of the characters as they all reach their unfortunate ends.

Masculinity Challenged in Killer's Kiss

Perhaps what struck me the most about Killer's Kiss was the anti-hero qualities of it's protagonist, Davey Gordon. Despite the many obvious influences and traces of Noir to be found in the film, Davey (played by Jamie Smith) does not carry the same virility so often associated with stars like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. His impotence is demonstrated when he loses in a televised fight in one of the first few scenes. From the very outset, Davey's inadequacies are displayed for all of New York City and beyond to see. Of course this is not unusual for Kubrick, who usually does not limit himself to the narrative or visual parameters of any one genre, instead choosing to subvert them and make them his own.  

The initial boxing ring loss sets a precedent for the portrayal of Davey's masculinity throughout the film. In a later sequence, when Davey and his love interest Gloria return to the dance hall where she works, Davey's scarf is stolen by a street performer while he waits for her outside. He gives chase to the hooligans but Kubrick never allows us to see him catch them or retrieve the scarf. The action feels sort of pathetic, as if Davey is an easy target for this sort of taunting. Meanwhile, inside the dance hall, another interesting display of stifled masculinity is shown. All of the men dancing with the paid girls wear nearly identical business suits, except for one. This figure stands out because he dons a military uniform. The military garb is meant to indicate that he is a member of the hypermasculine institution, and as such, is probably an idealistically masculine man. However, the brief sequence shows the soldier being peeled off of one of the dancers and thrown out of the dance hall. I couldn't help but feel that this was another instance of the traditional notion of masculinity in a sort of crisis. 

Additionally, these moments come right on the heels of Kubrick's first feature film, Fear and Desire, which definitely explores similar themes. Most of the characters we see in Fear and Desire are soldiers and by the end, we see the youngest one crack under the pressures of what seems to be shell-shock. Of the later Kubrick films I have seen, Lolita is one that comes to mind also. The sophisticated character of Humbert becomes a slave to his desire for Lolita and by the end is somewhat conned by her. Though a claim that Kubrick chooses to render masculinity in crisis might be too strong, no one can argue that his varied and strange portrayals of masculinity are not worth examining as one of his oft-explored themes.