Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition review – catnip for mid-century modern fans
Posted by The Editor on April 28, 2019 2:59 am
Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Art, Art and design, Barry Lyndon, Culture, Design, Exhibitions, Film, Lolita, Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
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Design Museum, London
An exhibition of the enigmatic film-maker’s paraphernalia is rich in detail but low on magic
“Just as actors have a recurring fear that they’ll never get another part,” Stanley Kubrick once remarked, “I have a recurring fear that I’ll never find another story I like well enough to film.” Flitting like a demented magpie across genres, Kubrick’s cinematic cosmos embraced horror, war, sci-fi, fantasy, pornography, crime and historical drama. “He is incapable of repeating a subject, as it would mean repeating himself,” wrote the film critic Alexander Walker in 1971.
Beginning in the early 1950s with a clutch of pulp thrillers, Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, and ending with the equally pulpy Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, Kubrick’s 13-film oeuvre is a succession of minutely choreographed worlds-within-worlds, each laboriously realised from scratch, each going off on a new and exacting tangent. It’s a cinematic treatise on late modernity, distilled into a familiar string of Kubrick moments: cavorting ape-men, the old ultraviolence, lecherous Humbert Humbert, the War Room, “Heeere’s Johnny!”