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Kubrick’s letter of praise to Bergman, 1960
07.11.2011
12:42 am
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February 9, 1960

Dear Mr. Bergman,

You have most certainly received enough acclaim and success throughout the world to make this note quite unnecessary. But for whatever it’s worth, I should like to add my praise and gratitude as a fellow director for the unearthly and brilliant contribution you have made to the world by your films (I have never been in Sweden and have therefore never had the pleasure of seeing your theater work). Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today. Beyond that, allow me to say you are unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a film. I believe you are blessed with wonderful actors. Max von Sydow and Ingrid Thulin live vividly in my memory, and there are many others in your acting company whose names escape me. I wish you and all of them the very best of luck, and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films.

Best Regards,
Stanley Kubrick
 
Via Open Culture

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.11.2011
12:42 am
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An animated short of Stanley Kubrick’s films
04.29.2011
09:03 pm
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Superb animated timeline of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography by animator Martin Woutisseth. Music by Romain Trouillet.

 
(via KFMW)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.29.2011
09:03 pm
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Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ gets ultra-violent with David Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’
03.01.2011
03:41 pm
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Edited by Jeff Yorkes. (NSFW)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.01.2011
03:41 pm
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2001: A VHS Obelisk
02.02.2011
03:27 pm
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VHS 2005 Foam
 
Humorous artistic tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s inscrutable cinematic masterpiece created in 2005 by David Herbert. What I’m more interested in is seeing the VCR that can handle this gargantuan tape.
 
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(via Booooooom!)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.02.2011
03:27 pm
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Before 2001 - Pavel Klushantsev’s classic science fiction film ‘The Road to the Stars’
01.20.2011
06:20 pm
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Scenes from Road to the Stars and 2001, side-by-side.
 
Film-maker Alessandro Cima has posted some fascinating clips from Pavel Klushantsev’s classic 1957 Russian science-fiction film The Road to the Stars, over at Candlelight Stories. Forget Kubrick’s 2001 for as Cima explains, Klushantsev’s masterpiece was the first and arguably the better of the two films.

Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 film, Road to the Stars, features astoundingly realistic special effects that were an inspiration and obvious blueprint for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years later.  The film is an extended form of science education, building upon existing 1950s technology to predict space exploration of the future.  The sequences with astronauts in zero gravity are incredibly realistic.  The second excerpt from the film features the construction of and life aboard a space station in earth orbit that is not only convincing but also beautiful.  There are several scenes with space station dwellers using videophones that anticipate the famous Kubrick videophone scene.

Watching these short clips now, it is no surprise that The Road to the Stars has been described as:

...one of the most amazing special effects accomplishments in film history.

However, Klushantsev faced considerable difficulties in making such an effects-heavy film, at one point being asked by one Communist Party bureaucrat why he didn’t make a film about factory manufacturing or beetroot production, but as Klushantsev explained:

The Road to the Stars proved to me I did the right thing thing, one must envisage the future. People should be able to see life can be changed radically.

Klushantsev started work on the film in 1954, and liaised thru-out with Russia’s leading space program scientists, Mikhail Tikhonravov and Sergey Korolyov, to achieve accuracy with his own designs - from space suits, to cabin temperature and rocket design. Indeed, everything in Klushantsev’s film had to at least have an element of possiblity and it is this factual core that gave Klushantsev’s film a documentary-like feel. The film coincided with the launch of Russia’s robotic spacecraft, Sputnik, and led the previously antagonistic Russian bureaucrats to “foam at the mouth” and demand The Road to the Stars include shots of of the satellite in the film.
 

 
Bonus clips, plus short making-of documentary, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.20.2011
06:20 pm
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Stanley Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings, Starring the Beatles
01.03.2011
01:38 pm
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Super Punch is currently holding a bizarre art-mashup contest of the Beatles meets Stanley Kubrick meets Lord of the Rings. There are some pretty humorous entries in the lot. Here’s a taste:
 
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Go visit Super Punch to view more entries and vote.

Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.03.2011
01:38 pm
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Stanley Kubrick street graffiti
12.05.2010
03:28 pm
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Imagine walking down the street and seeing this! Pretty great, huh? 

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.05.2010
03:28 pm
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Stanley Kubrick explains the plot of ‘2001’
11.27.2010
05:55 pm
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If you or anyone you know insists that they know what Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey is all about, they are of course, bluffing, because no one really knows what that film is all about. There was, of course, one exception, and that would be the auteur himself. So what did Kubrick have to say about the “plot” and meaning behind his iconic film?

From a 1969 interview with Kubrick by Joseph Gelmis:

You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe—a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.

That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.

 

 
Via Kottke

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.27.2010
05:55 pm
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Here’s E.T.!
05.03.2010
06:58 pm
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Ran across this thinking it was possibly a cartoon rendering of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith (see previous post).  Nope, just E.T. looking to take an axe, or, in this case, his finger, to The Shining‘s Wendy Torrance.  And here’s a bit of that film’s Shelley Duvall (now, sadly, bonkers) talking about shooting with director Stanley Kubrick:

 
(via SlashFilm)

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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05.03.2010
06:58 pm
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A Clockwork Orange
03.21.2010
07:01 pm
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Looking for the Chrome video posted below, unsurprisingly I was also shown various YouTube clips from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Check out this trippy trailer for the film. Nice. Also, take a gander at the various posters for A Clockwork Orange at Posterati or look on Google images for book covers. I especially like some of the minimalist Eastern European posters and covers you can find out there. What a great project to be thrown if you’re a designer.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.21.2010
07:01 pm
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Exposed: The Kubrick-Illuminati Connection
08.06.2009
05:39 pm
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Oh, those tricky subliminals—they’re everywhere!  Especially over on the YouTube site of 111TRUTH111 (if that really is his/her name).  The site attempts to rip the Masonic robes right off of not just Stanley Kubrick, but off other, to my knowledge, non-Masonic-types like Neo, James Bond, and, why not, Buzz Lightyear.  Didn’t spot the triangle imagery Kubrick seeded throughout Dr. Strangelove?  Well, you can see it all here.  Wanna play spot-the-Horus-eye in A Clockwork Orange?  Once again, 111TRUTH111’s got you covered (with some lovely accompaniment, of course, by Massive Attack and Radiohead).

But as George C. Scott‘s Buck Turgidson sighs in Strangelove, “The truth is not always a pleasant thing.”  Nor is it very graspable, either.  Like much of the Illuminati-related material out there, these clips suggest everything and explain nothing.  Where are you when we need you, RAW?!

 
RE: the top photo, bonus points for those of you who spotted the triangle formed by Kubrick!

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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08.06.2009
05:39 pm
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