Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition review – from erotic milk bars to haunted hotels
Design Museum, London
This astounding show reveals the obsessive level of genius the great director showed, whether inventing the space age – or restaging the Vietnam war in a London gas works
A photograph of a rambling snow-covered hotel in Oregon is on display in the Design Museum, annotated with the energetic scribbles and emphatic instructions of film director Stanley Kubrick. After sending his set designer to scour America for locations, he had finally settled on the building he would use as the exterior of his haunted hotel in The Shining. Labels stuck liberally across the image explain exactly how he wanted the curving path through the snow to appear in the shot, along with a characteristically stern warning: “THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO IT, REPEAT NO OTHER WAY. Exercise the greatest care as the compositional effect of a different path might be BAD BAD BAD.”
The photograph provides a glimpse of the obsessive attention to detail and relentless perfectionism that Kubrick brought to his films, a method of total control vividly depicted in this new blockbuster exhibition on his life and work. Featuring over 500 objects – from Ken Adam’s sketches for the War Room in Dr Strangelove, to erotic furniture from the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange – the show plunges the visitor headlong into Kubrick’s meticulous, and often disturbing, mind, revealing how he constructed entire worlds from scratch to tell his stories.