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ABSTRACT
Through three archival case studies, this article explores problematic aspects of Stanley Kubrick’s relations of production and the power underlying his role as a film producer by the 1960s and 1970s. The case studies explore Kubrick’s practices in the casting of women, his attitude toward trade union regulation and labor relations, and his interactions with politicians in the UK in the 1970s in attempting to lobby for more favorable tax conditions. This article makes a critical intervention in Kubrick studies to argue that the use of the Stanley Kubrick Archive is vital for future research to reframe scholarly understanding of Kubrick. The filmmaker instigated a ‘myth’ about himself that continues to dominate, a self-promotional strategy that has obscured the relations of production on his films. Empirical evidence is required to reveal new perspectives on his attitudes and professional behavior. The article concludes that wider comparative research is imperative in Kubrick studies to ascertain the level of Kubrick’s uniqueness or otherwise in these relations of production and to determine whether they are indicative of wider systemic behaviors across the American and British film industries in the twentieth century.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The field of Kubrick studies gained momentum following the three-day conference Stanley Kubrick: A Retrospective held at De Montfort University in May 2016. In July 2019, a five-day scientific workshop, Life and Legacy: Studying the Work of Stanley Kubrick, was convened at the University of Leiden, where it was agreed that a Kubrick Studies Network would be established going forward.
2. This wave of new work on Kubrick, much of which has utilized the Stanley Kubrick Archive (among other archives), was initiated by the publication of Peter Krämer’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (2010). Other scholars were subsequently influenced by the work of Krämer, including Nathan Abrams, Mick Broderick, James Fenwick, Catriona McAvoy, Joy McEntee, Matthew Melia, Simone Odino, Manca Perko, Karen Ritzenhoff and Filippo Ulivieri (among others).
3. Kubrick persistently talked of the struggle to remain ‘independent’ in order to avoid studio interference. See, for example, his interview in Gelmis (Citation1974[1970]): 382, 392–393, or the interview with Colin Young in Phillips (Citation2001): 4–5, 8.
4. Broderick (Citation2019: 1–3) provides an overview of the recent activities within Kubrick studies in order to evidence the filmmaker’s enduring public and academic legacy.
5. The traditional auteur approaches to writing about Kubrick have reinforced the notion of his central positioning vis-à-vis the films with which he is associated. Even when there has been a turn to discussing collaboration, Kubrick remains centered (Perko Citation2019; McAvoy Citation2015). As was indicated in a dossier on the archival turn within Kubrick studies, “This embarrassment of archival riches has modified – but not undermined – the established view of Kubrick” (Fenwick and Pezzotta, Citation2017, 368). This is why a key question for the Kubrick studies community (myself included) is whether Kubrick studies needs saving from Kubrick? In other words, does the community need to move beyond the exclusive focus on Kubrick, particularly when using the SKA? And in what ways can those films associated with Kubrick be studied without focusing on Kubrick? After all, the SKA contains evidence of the material conditions of production that involved a range of creative, technical and administrative workers beyond Kubrick. As I’ve previously argued, “it is perhaps time we recognized that the Stanley Kubrick Archive can serve as an archival source not just for the insular study of Stanley Kubrick but for research relating to the wider American and British film industries from the 1940s to the 2000s. In short, the Stanley Kubrick Archive, indeed Kubrick studies as a whole, doesn’t have to be just about Stanley” (Fenwick Citation2021b, 5).
6. This is not to suggest that Kubrick was not without his critics. Far from it, with the likes of Pauline Kael persistently attacking Kubrick’s work as cold and misanthropic.
7. For more on the way that these directors were complicit in developing their own mythic image, for Hitchcock, see Kapsis (Citation1992) and Gamaker (Citation2018); for Welles, see Simon Callow’s three volume biography, commencing with Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Citation1995). Callow points out the problems typified by this canonical mythmaking, finding that Welles’s life is surrounded in confusion, but that “the source of confusion is, almost without exception, Welles himself” (×ii); for Chaplin, see Lieberman (Kuhn Citation1994).
8. The documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin (2022) considers Chaplin’s relationship and marriage to young women and how he silenced them in histories of his life and work.
9. Kubrick himself is linked to the origins of Kubrick studies. His self-promotion strategy involved working closely with authors of some of the earliest critical studies on himself by the likes of Alexander Walker, who provided Kubrick typescripts of his Stanley Kubrick Directs (1972) for him to correct (see “Letter to Stanley Kubrick from Alexander Walker” [Citation1972] January 21, SKA, SK/1/2/4/1/47). One of the first comprehensive studies of Kubrick’s work, the reliability of Walker’s book, and Kubrick’s level of involvement in coordinating how he and his work are discussed, is called into question via archival evidence.
10. Conversely, the Kubrick family made Kubrick’s personal archive available as a means of inspiring future generations of artists but also to demystify his process of producing films. This, however, presents the unique opportunity to uncover how the myth was constructed by Kubrick himself.
11. The archival documents could not be reproduced as images for this article. Permission to reproduce images from the Stanley Kubrick Archive must be obtained through the Kubrick Donors, which is a protracted process and one that often results in a rejection due to any perceived commercial conflict of interest.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James Fenwick
James Fenwick is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2021) and editor of Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (2018). He is also the author of Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry (2021) and co-editor of Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (2020).