Stanley Kubrick

This article was first ublished in the Age on June 12, 2004

When I was a kid I was taken to see 2001: A Space Odyssey (Sunday, 9.30pm, SBS). I hovered between boredom and terror for 2 1/2 hours and then had nightmares about the embryo (known, I learned later, as the 'Star Child') in side the black monolith (known, I also learned later, as the alien). Watching it thirty years later there was less boredom, as much terror, and continued awe at the intelligence, if bleakness, of Stanley Kubrick's vision. He reminds a contemporary audience that long slow scenes can build a lot more tension than fast cutting, that for science fiction to be more than a thriller set in the future it must be intelligent, that the soundtrack is as important as the visual components of a film and yes, that Sixties art direction is really, really cool.

There is something telling that the character that has the most force in 2001 is the computer, HAL 9000. Kubrick, one senses, is not overly keen on real people which may be why his films do not work for everyone. HAL begins to take the lives of the spacemen - on a mission to Jupiter in search of the monolith - into its electronic hands. The moment where he cuts off the life support of one of the astronauts, spinning him off into the silence of space is quite terrifying. In fact everything in this film spins and waltzes: space craft, the music, humans, planets - even the nature of time itself is cyclical. That four million year jump cut in which a bone used as a tool by our ancestor apes is flung into the air and transforms into a spacecraft as it spins down? Well that's still breathtaking, despite being the butt of a pretty funny joke in Goodbye Lenin in which a small time wedding video maker tries to reciprocate the moment using a bouquet of flowers. In fact there is much about 2001: A Space Odyssey that has deeply influenced, and not been bettered by contemporary cinema. Best of all: it even made me forgive the turgid Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick was famously private and running parallel to the retrospective of his films the SBS has been screening is Stanley Kubrick: A life in Pictures (Tuesday, 10.00pm, SBS), an engrossing three-part documentary about the man's life and work. This analysis of his films, and the interviews with major players - like Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack, Martin Scorsese, Malcolm McDowell, Shelley Duvall, Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise (who also narrates the series) - really do add to our understanding of his work. However this series, which was produced and directed by his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, delivers much more modestly on its promise to fill us in on the details of Kubrick's private life, despite its interviews with Christiane Kubrick, Stanley's wife for over 42 years. I gathered the greatest insight from Kubrick's daughter, Katharina Kubrick-Hobbs, who reads for us the 37th instruction (how to separate their two tomcats, Freddy and Leo) of a 15-page document of care instructions on how to mind the family pets. Control freak? Yes. Obsessed with detail? Yes. But if there were any great skeletons in his closet no one is saying.

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