⁣Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a 2001 documentary about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick, famed film director, made by his long-time assistant and brother-in-law Jan Harlan. Its running time is 142 minutes long, it consists of several 15-minute chapters, each detailing the making of one of his films – and two more showing his childhood and life.

Jan Harlan got many of Kubrick's collaborators for interviews, including Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Keir Dullea, Arthur C. Clarke, Malcolm McDowell, Peter Ustinov, Jack Nicholson, György Ligeti and Matthew Modine. It also has interviews from film directors who were inspired by Kubrick such as Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Sydney Pollack.

The film contains some rare footage, including from the Kubrick family home videos and on film sets, and clips from Fear and Desire - Kubrick's first feature-length film.
It was released on DVD on October 23, 2007, and was featured on the tenth disc of Stanley Kubrick: The Essential Collection and Stanley Kubrick: Limited Edition Collection DVD and Blu-ray released May 31, 2011, respectively. The documentary was also bundled in a box set of some of Kubrick's other films released January 22, 2008.

The soundtrack of the film is by composer and musician Jocelyn Pook, who had previously worked with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Stanley Kubrick is one of the first names you hear when the word "director" is brought up. His career spanned many decades, and the movies he worked on were given his undivided attention. He was obsessive, reclusive, and demanding.

And if you've ever wanted to learn pretty much everything you could ever want to know about the iconic director, well, there's a movie for that. Originally released back in 2001, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a documentary that spans his life, offering behind the scenes looks at what went into his directing and thought process. As luck would have it, Warner Bros. has made it available to watch for free online, complete with an introduction by ReelBlend podcast hosts Sean O'Connell, Kevin McCarthy, and Jake Hamilton.

There are some real gems in this thing, from Jack Nicholson talking about the ways Kubrick made him feel satisfied as an actor to looking at the newsreels that helped him understand how to make Dr. Strangelove...including Martin Scorsese's reactions to watching Kubrick movies.
What about the music in A Clockwork Orange—what could be behind playing the William Tell Overture five times fast?

Kubrick's work has touched us all, and the step to understanding the themes and ideas he explores are all captured in this doc.

⁣Filmworker charts the multiple decades that Leon Vitali spent as the jack-of-all-trades assistant to famously demanding film director Stanley Kubrick. It’s a glimpse into the ways Kubrick worked that is both fascinating and heartbreaking, especially in the ways the director, and then his estate after his death, treated someone who was unwaveringly loyal. The lone bonus feature is a Q&A with Vitali and director Tony Ziera.

Behind every Hollywood legend there’s usually at least one assistant who helps keep that person’s world turning in countless unsung ways. In the case of famous film director Stanley Kubrick, there was Leon Vitali, who was different from other assistants in film lore because he cut short a promising acting career to take on a thankless role.
He was also different because he did so much more than keep the trains running on time, so to speak. When needed, Vitali served as casting director, editor, film archivist and restorationist, and more. He even stepped in to play a masked role in Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, which, of course, didn’t allow him to shirk his other duties even as he was filming his lines over and over again, as the director famously liked to do.

Director Tony Zierra’s documentary about Vitali, Filmworker, takes its name from the occupation Vitali put on various forms. It was something he came up with, he says, because he saw himself simply as someone who works in film. He acted in many British TV shows and movies before being cast as Lord Bullingdon in the 1975 Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. While on the Lyndon set, he was fascinated by how the director was involved in every aspect of the production and how every crew member around him had a key role to play.

That fascination led him to essentially creating a job for himself with Kubrick, who, as Vitali tells it, was masterful at coming across as benign and gentle at first before later revealing his controlling and demanding side. In that context, Vitali notes that Kubrick loved to play chess, but I don’t know if that’s a masterful relationship move as much as someone who wants to hide their distorted personality until the other person is in too deep. Kubrick was brilliant, but he was also abusive – I’ve long felt that his infamous obsession with shooting even the most mundane moments over and over wasn’t so much about perfectionism as it was about a sadistic tendency to see how far he could push people.

In Vitali’s case, I don’t think there was ever a notion that he was in too deep. He seemed to revel in his relationship with Kubrick, enjoying the fact that he worked long hours seven days a week to serve all of the director’s whims and needs. The only times cracks seem to appear in that happy façade are when he relates moments where he’s perhaps considering that Kubrick went too far – such as when he horribly mistreated Vitali on Christmas Eve, gave him a present and sent him home, and then started calling him on Christmas Day to hound him about many tasks that needed to be done.

When Kubrick died, Vitali seemed to be cast aside by people closest to the director who took over his estate. It’s telling, for example, that this documentary doesn’t feature interviews with Kubrick’s widow Christiane and her brother Jan Harlan, who executive produced several of the director’s movies and was known as his right-hand man. Vitali was constantly at Kubrick’s home when he wasn’t on movie sets or doing prep work for movies such as location scouting and casting, so obviously the two of them would have been around him quite a bit.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.flickeringmyth.com..../2021/03/blu-ray-rev

⁣Rodney Ascher's wry and provocative Room 237 fuses fact and fiction through interviews with cultists and scholars, creating a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of Kubrick's still-controversial classic The Shining.


What is "Room 237" really about? On the surface, Rodney Ascher's documentary exhibits the theories a few obsessive fans have put forward to reveal what they think Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" is really about. According to them, Kubrick stashed "hidden meanings" in the vacancies, hallways, ballrooms, bathrooms, walk-in storage areas and hedge-mazes of the Overlook Hotel in his 1980 horror film.


Trouble is, the "Room 237" conspirators — er, contributors — don't seem to realize that those meanings are either not hidden, not meanings or not remotely supported by the secret evidence they think they've uncovered. "Room 237" isn't film criticism, it isn't coherent analysis, but listening to fanatics go on and on about their fixations can be kind of fun. For a while, at least.
Five off-screen narrators pitch various interpretations of "The Shining," accompanied by stock footage, illustrative recreations and clips from Kubrick's filmography. For Bill Blakemore, the subject of Kubrick's "Masterpiece of Modern Horror" is the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans by white European settlers; for Geoffrey Cocks, it's about the Holocaust in Nazi-dominated Europe; for Juli Kearns, it's an exploration of an impossible, Escher-like maze called the Overlook Hotel.


John Fell Ryan has discovered some interesting juxtapositions that occur if you project two prints of "The Shining" on top of each other at the same time, with one running forward and the other running backward. Jay Weidner, who characterizes himself as a "conspiracy hunter," insists "The Shining" is Kubrick's belated, life-risking confession/apology for faking the television footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing on the sets for "2001: A Space Odyssey" at the behest of the U.S. government.
"Room 237" could easily be (mis)taken for a comedic satire of fervent movie-geekery if the theories it presents — some more cockeyed than others — hadn't appeared on the Internet years ago. That's where Ascher found the inspirations for his documentary.


It starts off with a visual trick: In a digitally modified clip from Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) stands outside the Sonata Cafe in Greenwich Village, which is actually a set at Pinewood Studios near London (which is the source of a little in-joke: The location is identified as "EUROPE"). But instead of inspecting a display featuring his old friend, pianist Nick Nightingale, he's looking at promotional materials for "The Shining." You could say that "Room 237" is based on a similar illusion, getting us to see things in a movie that either aren't there or aren't what they appear to be.


Let's rewind: Back in 2010, Ascher made a notably similar short film called "The S From Hell," a parodic inquiry into the off-the-wall proposition that the Screen Gems logo, which appeared after episodes of popular TV series such as "Bewitched" and "The Partridge Family" from 1965 to 1974, was so frightening, it traumatized a generation of unsuspecting children. Maybe you don't recall being terrified by this or any other logo? Me, neither. But we could've repressed it.


The goofy premise of "The S from Hell" is no less unlikely than some of the blarney put forward in "Room 237." The movie doesn't judge the relative merits of its subjects' opinions, probably because that might be construed as favoritism. That's understandable. But as a result, the movie lacks examples of sound critical thinking. All we have here are do-it-yourself interactive fan games.
In "The Shining," the genial hotel manager (played by Barry Nelson) mentions that the Overlook was built on an ancient Indian burial ground — a familiar horror-movie trope. Sure enough, the hotel decor is inspired by Native American motifs, as we can plainly see. But what, then, is the movie supposedly saying about the genocide of Native Americans? That their vengeful spirits might come back and kill people at a hotel? As the saying goes, that's not subtext, it's text.


The proponents of the Holocaust and staged-moon-landing scenarios undermine their own hypotheses by backing into them. They start with extraneous information (Kubrick wanted to make a Holocaust movie but could never figure out how; nobody was in a better position than Kubrick to fake moon footage in 1969). Then they scour the nooks and crannies of "The Shining" for anything that could be construed to support, or at least reference, their chosen preconceptions.


So is the recurrence of the number 42 (on Danny's jersey; in the movie "Summer of '42" on TV) an allusion to 1942, the year of the Wannsee Conference when Nazi officials met to plan the Final Solution? What about that German typewriter? And is Danny's hand-knit Apollo 11 sweater linked to the ultra-scary Room 237 because the average distance between the Earth and the moon is 237,000 miles? Even though it isn't 237,000 miles, but let's not allow facts and a few extra zeroes to spoil a juicy conspiracy plot. What if the first word in the famous typewritten "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" manuscript could be read as "A11" — as in "Apollo 11"?! What if, indeed.
The double-projection trick isn't a theory at all, just a nifty experiment in randomness somewhat less remarkable than the discovery that Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" produces some striking juxtapositions when played along with "The Wizard of Oz." Likewise, it's sorta neat that the Outlook does not have an intelligible floor plan, as it fits with the movie's "lost in the maze" motif. But there's nothing unusual about it. That's the way movie sets are usually built — in disconnected bits and pieces, not as integral units.


Kubrick's longtime assistant and collaborator Leon Vitali (who played Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon") recently said that "Room 237" had him "falling about laughing most of the time" because he knows these ideas are "absolute balderdash." The Adler typewriter, for example, belonged to Kubrick himself, and that particular model was once as commonplace as late-model iPhones.
Any movie is the product of forethought, accident and improvisation. In the end, once the film is released, the filmmakers' intentions don't really matter anymore because it belongs to the audience. At that point, if something's there, it's there. "Room 237," regrettably, isn't all there.