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.