Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine

Philippe D. Mather

Description

From 1945 to 1950, during the formative years of his career, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Offering a comprehensive examination of the work he produced during this period – before going on to become one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers – Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine sheds new light on the aesthetic and ideological factors that shaped his artistic voice.   Tracing the links between his photojournalism and films, Philippe Mather shows how working at Look fostered Kubrick’s emerging genius for combining images and words to tell a story. Mather then demonstrates how exploring these links enhances our understanding of Kubrick’s approach to narrative structure – as well as his distinctive combinations of such genres as fiction and documentary and fantasy and realism.

Introduction

PART I: Authorship: A Sociology of Production

Chapter 1: Psychosocial Context: A Formative Period. Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine in the Lifespan

Chapter 2: Macro-objective Analysis: Look Magazine’s Organizational Structure

Chapter 3: Micro-objectivity: The Work Culture at Look Magazine

Chapter 4: Macro-subjectivity: Look Magazine’s Conception of Photojournalism

Chapter 5: Micro-subjectivity: Stanley Kubrick’s Conception of Photojournalism and Film PART II: Genre: Contexts of Reception

Chapter 6: Photojournalism Genres: A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach

Chapter 7: Photography and Film: History, Ontology and Pragmatics

Chapter 8: From Photojournalism to Film: Transmedial Correspondences in the Formal and Stylistic Systems

Chapter 8: From Photojournalism to Film: Transmedial Correspondences in the Formal and Stylistic Systems

Chapter 9: Photography in Film: Photographic and Documentary Aspects of Kubrick’s Films

Conclusion

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Stanley Kubrick
• Télévision
• Hollywood
• Film
• Radio
• History
• General
• Ontology
• Photography
• Television
• Pragmatics
• Publishing
• General officer
• Photojournalism
• Film director
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783200443
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover photo: © Estate of Philip Harrington. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LOOK Collection.
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978-1-84150-6111
eISBN 978-1-78320-044-3
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Authorship: A Sociology of Production
Chapter 1:Psychosocial Context: A Formative Period. Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine in the Lifespan
Chapter 2:Macro-objective Analysis: Look Magazine’s Organizational Structure
Chapter 3:Micro-objectivity: The Work Culture at Look Magazine
Chapter 4:Macro-subjectivity: Look Magazine’s Conception of Photojournalism
Chapter 5:Micro-subjectivity: Stanley Kubrick’s Conception of Photojournalism and Film
Part II: Genre: Contexts of Reception
Chapter 6:Photojournalism Genres: A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach
Chapter 7:Photography and Film: History, Ontology and Pragmatics
Chapter 8:From Photojournalism to Film: Transmedial Correspondences in the Formal and Stylistic Systems
Chapter 9:Photography in Film: Photographic and Documentary Aspects of Kubrick’s Films
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Photographic Credits
Acknowledgements
There are so many individuals who have helped me over the past ten years to produce this book that I find myself unable to list all of them, but I trust they will forgive me. I would like to single out a few people and organizations that provided significant technical, financial, intellectual or moral support, or a combination thereof: The Campion College President’s Research Award Committee, the University of Regina President’s Fund Committee, my colleague Dr. Philip Charrier from the University of Regina, Dr. Gary Rhodes from Queen’s University – Belfast, Dr. Mario Falsetto from Concordia University, Dr. Gene D. Phillips from Loyola University – Chicago, Barbara Orbach Natanson from the Library of Congress, Melanie Bower from the Museum of the City of New York, Phil Grosz and SK Film Archives LLC, Richard Daniels from the Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts – London, Felipe Diaz from the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, my publisher Jelena Stanovnik at Intellect Books, the anonymous peer reviewer at Intellect, my parents, Bruce and Pierrette Mather, and my wife, Angeline Chia.
Introduction
Authorship and Genre
In late February 1948, a 19-year-old photojournalist from Look magazine was sent to cover the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus at their headquarters in Sarasota, Florida. The resulting photo-essay, published in the May 25, 1948, issue of Look and titled “How the Circus Gets Set,” is a social study providing information concerning the resources required to run a circus, including 1,400 employees and 900 animals, from April to October each year. We learn that the winter months are a time for renewal, as the circus remains in “its 200-acre winter quarters in Sarasota, where these candid [ sic ] pictures were taken.” The essay features flash photographs focusing on the women of the circus, acrobats and aerialists seen rehearsing, relaxing or waiting for a practice. A recently published photography book has made a surprising claim concerning this photo-essay, particularly its pictures of aerialists and a low- angle shot of a chimpanzee on roller skates being held on a leash by a statuesque ex-Folies Bergères performer (Crone, 2005, 91). It is suggested that these images foreshadow the 1968 science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey , a film as far removed from a circus as one could imagine. Yet the chimp and the circus performer are compared to characters from 2001 ’s “Dawn of Man” sequence, with Moonwatcher as the chimp who is controlled by a being further along on the evolutionary chain. The relative sense of spatial disorientation and weightlessness achieved by the aerialists and a somersaulting bareback rider also convey the futuristic notion of defying gravity (Crone, 2005, 81).
Superficially, this unusual comparison between a late-1940s photo-essay and a late-1960s Hollywood film is justified by the fact that the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey , Stanley Kubrick, was also the young photographer who was assigned by Look magazine to capture images for the circus story. However, the implied influence of an early career in photojournalism on a later, and much better known, corpus of feature films, would require a sustained and detailed argument. Indeed, Stanley Kubrick’s reputation as a cinematic auteur and audio-visual artist is primarily based on 12 feature-length fiction films that he directed between 1955 and 1999. He is admired as a fiercely independent filmmaker, an autodidact who neither attended film school nor worked his way up through the film industry. Less well known is the fact that prior to making films, he spent almost five years working as a photojournalist, publishing over 1000 photographs in Look magazine. This book’s guiding thesis is that the Look magazine photographs can shed light on the aesthetic and ideological factors that shaped the development of Kubrick’s artistic voice, as well as our own understanding of his later film work. Moreover, since Kubrick was at a formative stage in his career during his tenure at Look , it will be argued that this represented an alternative to formal schooling in the visual arts. This will be supported by close textual analyses of Kubrick’s photo-essays, as well as explorations of the contexts in which this work was produced.
Scholarship on Kubrick’s work has largely focused on the “mature” films, beginning with his third feature, The Killing (1956). This book seeks to establish precise developmental connections between the Look photographs and Kubrick’s three documentary shorts as well as his first two feature fiction films. The object is to uncover the publicly accessible historical sources of the Kubrickian worldview, a worldview that has been identified by critics as a means of interpreting his later films, but whose origin has seldom been studied as such. Furthermore, the single major research effort conducted thus far on Kubrick’s photojournalistic career has adopted a curatorial approach bent on studying individual photographs outside the magazine context, which eschews the critical matter of editing multiple images in a narrative context (Crone, 2005, 6). Our goal will therefore not be to search for lost masterpieces but to gauge the extent to which the process of selecting still images in accordance with a shooting script, in the collaborative environment of a general interest photomagazine, shaped Kubrick’s emerging talent in combining words and images for storytelling purposes. Analysing the influence of photojournalism on Kubrick’s later film work should enhance our understanding of his approach to narrative structure, as well as his distinctive combination of pragmatic and aesthetic categories such as fiction and documentary, fantasy and realism.
While the critical literature on Stanley Kubrick’s fiction films is fairly extensive, his photojournalistic output remains relatively unknown. Studies on Kubrick’s cinema generally make only passing comments on his training as a photographer. For instance, Norman Kagan briefly claims that Kubrick’s career at Look merely allowed him to “experiment with the photographic aspects of the cinema,” overlooking photojournalism’s narrative and editorial aspects (1). Thomas Allen Nelson provides a questionable rationale for ignoring Kubrick’s Look output, suggesting that the documentary nature of photojournalism was so formulaic that it represented an aesthetic straitjacket, impeding the future filmmaker’s creative self-expression (3). In contrast, Michel Chion correctly identifies the importance of the documentary aesthetic in Kubrick’s feature fiction films, although he declines to investigate the Look photographs (12).
One exception is Vincent LoBrutto’s 1997 biography of Kubrick. This text highlights the importance of the Look photographs in terms of both their scope and quality, and provides some useful background information for a more thorough examination of Kubrick’s photojournalistic work (LoBrutto, 19–69). Another important exception is a major curatorial effort conducted, since 1998, by the Iccarus group, based in Munich at Ludwig Maximilian University’s Institute of Art History. It has resulted in a travelling exhibition, a catalogue, several articles and most recently, a book edited by Iccarus founder Rainer Crone, Drama and Shadows , which presents approximately 400 photographs printed from the original Look magazine negatives stored at the Library of Congress and at the Museum of the City of New York. It should be noted that members of the Iccarus group tend to downplay contributions from the social and historical context in analysing Kubrick’s personal signature. For instance, they present Kubrick’s work outside the magazine context, including unpublished photographs, in effect making curatorial decisions designed to recover a voice assumed to be compromised by the journalistic situation (Crone and Von Stosch, 21). Also, when acknowledging influences, they focus on comparisons with established art photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans and Robert Frank, rather than with Kubrick’s colleagues at Look