Billie Muraben
Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ca. 1968. Courtesy
of London’s Design Museum.
Stanley Kubrick once said that “most films are little more than
stage plays with more atmosphere and action.” Going beyond the relationships
between a scene and a sentence, the director relied on an expanded definition
of film grammar to underpin his stories: The lighting, sets, and props acted as
commas, semicolons, and dashes to join his narratives and define their rhythm.
In an exhibition about Kubrick at London’s Design Museum, which runs until
September 15th, it’s these environments—and the meticulous research on which
they were based—that take center stage. There’s a model of the war room from Dr
Strangelove (1964); a re-staging of the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange
(1971); and drawings, paintings, photographs, and diagrams from each of his films.
Kubrick often sent teams of people around the world to measure and
photograph locations—from precise documentation of New York streets, to tens of
thousands of location-scouting photographs for Kubrick’s unmade film on
Napoleon Bonaparte. The director recreated these real-world locations in London
studios in part because of his fear of flying, but also to have command over
every element of the set and make use of it as a narrative device. Kubrick’s
stories may have had a degree of abstraction, but they were never lacking
control. More interested in raising questions than providing answers, the
director was driven by an interest in symbolism and the subconscious,
considering an emotional response potentially more powerful than an
intellectual one.
Before Kubrick started making films, he made a small living playing
chess for cash in New York’s Washington Square Park. The nature of chess as a
game that requires strategy and big-picture thinking made it a logical
precursor to his approach to film. The ability to maintain control, to move
artfully and tactically from beginning to end, mirrors the exacting attention
to detail that defines his filmmaking.
Around the same time, in the mid-1940s, Kubrick started working as
a photographer for Look magazine, which informed his approach to composition
and mise en scène. In an interview with Michel Ciment for the book, Kubrick
(1983), the director emphasized: “To make a film entirely by yourself, which
initially I did…you must know about photography.”
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Kubrick’s intention in
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), was to create “a visual experience, one
that…directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic
content,” he told Playboy in 1968. The sci-fi flick was filmed during NASA’s
Apollo missions, and the set had to outpace emerging technology to successfully
look futuristic. Alongside art director John Hoesli and cinematographer
Geoffrey Unsworth (and later in production, John Alcott), Kubrick meticulously
researched NASA’s design, and employed a team of astronomical artists,
aeronautics specialists, and aerospace engineers to design the spacecraft
interiors. Dialogue is scattered sparsely throughout the film—totaling at only
40 minutes over two hours of film—so the sets, props, and costumes play a
prominent role, drawing viewers into the atmosphere of the film and its vision
of the future.
Conversely, A Clockwork Orange utilized real locations, in
particular London’s Thamesmead estate, a utopian social housing project built
in the mid-1960s. The Brutalist architecture was the backdrop to much of the
action, and its position as a project meant to represent the future of cities
made it a fitting space for a film that was as much a social document as it was
dystopian science-fiction. It was also cheaper to film there (Kubrick’s budget
was considerably smaller after 2001), but shooting in London suited his
creative aims, to show a future already being shaped in the present.
Although set in Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket (1987), was also filmed
in London, the battle scenes in the city of Hué captured at Beckton Gasworks in
the Isle of Dogs. The gasworks had been built by a company of architects who’d
worked in Hué, and the Docklands location only needed a few details added
before it became the site of the action. Kubrick’s ability to work with
believable reconstructions is also evident in his final film, Eyes Wide Shut
(1999), which was set in New York’s West Village and filmed at London’s
Pinewood Studios. He sent a set designer to photograph and measure shop fronts,
the width of streets, and distances between locations, and recreated the area,
complete with faded shop signs, jazz dives and apartment buildings.
Accuracy also drove the set design of The Shining’s (1980) Overlook
Hotel. “We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally
spooky movie hotel,” Kubrick told Climent. Designed like a labyrinth, with
impossible corridors and rooms, the oppressive space disoriented even the
actors and crew. It was spacious and modern compared to the tradition of dusty
horror sets, and rather than building tension out of claustrophobia, it
achieved it in the use of high ceilings, elaborate patterns, and vast expanses
that would dwarf its characters.
The Overlook’s interior was based on American hotel rooms
photographed by the set designer, Roy Walker. Kubrick felt that in order to
really affect his audience, the film needed a balance of realism and fantasy
that he likened to author Franz Kafka, who balanced fantastical, allegorical
stories with straightforward writing. The idea of taking a familiar space and
turning it on its head is evident in much of Kubrick’s work. “I’ve never been
able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people’s attention
while you do everything else,” the director once mused, “or whether the plot is
really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an
unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did.”
Billie Muraben
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-stanley-kubricks-meticulous-set-designs-made-films-strikingly-eerie?utm_medium=email&utm_source=16754397-newsletter-editorial-daily-05-01-19&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario