volumes on the military leader and made
a card catalogue for every day of his life.
It is from this archive that the exhibition,
initially conceived of by the Deutsches
Filmmuseum, is built. It covers all the
elements that have gone into the making of
Kubrick’s films – the director, the choice of
subject matter, the collaborators, the research
and development, the script writing, the
location scouting and casting, and the set and
costume design – and uses all the right props
and cues to present Kubrick as a genius. The
exhibition fetishises this story: precocious
talent at a young age combined with a gifted
camera; professional success despite poor
school performance, with a timely photo
earning the young Kubrick a job at Look
magazine; the confidence of his youth that
leads him to believe that he could make
movies ‘at least as good’ as the bad ones he’d
watched. It then follows his obsessive manner
of working, his high standards and the
eccentricities. The start of the exhibition lets
fans pore over his director’s chair, his personal
chess set, and later on, the cutting table where
he edited his films.
Rightly celebrating Kubrick’s spectacular
achievements, and documenting the force of
his character that got him there, the feeling
the exhibition engenders in its visitors is one
of admiration and inspiration. It does, however,
risk glorifying obsessiveness and fanaticism
whatever the cost. There is more to these
archives than the films that Kubrick made,
and behind the mythology you glimpse less
glorious moments – one example being the
very real trauma that he put Shelley Duvall
through in order to provoke her impressive
performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining.
The Design Museum has the expertise and
remit to contextualise further and discuss
Kubrick’s choices. The utopian vision of
Thamesmead in London served as his droogs’
made in the production of his films. Elements
are reframed and changed. For example, with
The Shining, the novel’s author Stephen King
disliked the way Wendy Torrance was
depicted, with less power and depth than in
the film. For many, that is the only version of
Wendy Torrance there is.
The London iteration of the exhibition was
designed by Pentagram, a well-respected
design agency and taste machine in its own
right. Its work builds on previous versions of
the show, with new elements including the
entrance film, displayed on multiple screens
to highlight Kubrick’s signature one-shot
perspective. From here, visitors are funnelled
through to peek ‘backstage’ at the complex
workings that went into the films, and on the
way you are surprised to discover that the
house of Lady Lyndon in Barry Lyndon was
actually a collage of 15 differently stately
homes. You then travel through various
worlds he built, admiring his chameleon-like
ability to so fully understand each of his
universes. You are excited to be invited into
them, to recognise the ‘Born to kill’ helmet
from Full Metal Jacket, the scale model of the
maze in The Shining, and the grand finale of
2001: A Space Odyssey, the Hilton Hotel of the
PanAm spacecraft, finding yourself impressed
by Kubrick’s eye for the importance of
branding at the start of the 21st century.
The exhibition, which runs until 15
September, is enthralling, full to the brim and
well worth a visit. There is, however, a feeling
that, via the lens of design, the curators could
dig deeper; the linguistic origins of the word
include a sense of motive: to designate, do or
plan (something) with a specific purpose in
mind. Kubrick spoke of his editing process as
whittling his films to their essential elements,
commenting: ‘I am never concerned with how
much difficulty there was to shoot something,
how much it cost, and so forth.’ This does work
for a convincing and engaging story, as does
the editing of a vast archive down to a singular
message. Buy for all the depth – the what,
where, how and why Kubrick studied to create
his films, a process shown wonderfully here –
the corresponding context for the telling of his
own story is perhaps lacking at times.violent playground in A Clockwork Orange,
and it is only now that another attempt is
being made at realising this 1960s
development’s original intentions. There’s a
risk of a certain nostalgia for a proposed
costume for the waitresses in the film and its
story of 20th century sexism – ‘functional
when arriving, decorative when departing’– as
well as for the extravagance of the off-white
clad teen droogs: the Victoriana entwined with
violence, false eyelashes, codpieces; the
fantasies of self-enhancement that seem to
fittingly see the main character Alex use an
oversized penis sculpture for a more violent
act than could be done by a regular penis.
When we see the penis sculpture in the
exhibition, do we know or remember the
murder scene that utilised it?
Kubrick’s worlds are painstakingly
realised, but it is not simply a matter of
replicating life. He is quoted here describing
a film director as ‘a kind of idea and taste
machine’. This raises interesting questions
about the notion of taste and the choices040 STANLEY KUBRICK
Left Kubrick’s controversial
movie, A Clockwork Orange
Below The ‘Born to kill’
helmet from Full Metal
Jacket, worn here by
Matthew Modine in the film,
can be seen at the exhibitionStanley Kubrick:
Design Museum until
17 September 2019ALL IMAGES: WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.