Stanley Kubrick is remembered

Stanley Kubrick is remembered

The death of director Stanley Kubrick at age 70 robs the film world of an increasingly rare item in popular culture: the perfectionist. At a time when commercial forces and sped-up technology pressure artists to create with speed and rapid-audience-access in mind (an executive for the MP3 Internet music company just told the New York Times, ”An artist can have a creative urge at 2:30 p.m., upload it at 3:30, and have it on the Web at 4:30”), Kubrick’s mature career was a series of long waits.

The most obvious example of this is his latest project, ”Eyes Wide Shut,” a thriller with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman that has been four years in the making. (At this point, it’s not even clear whether Kubrick had finished editing the movie, which is scheduled to open July 16.) Famous for research of snail’s-pace thoroughness and for doing a hundred-plus takes of any given scene, Kubrick behaved like an avant-garde creator — or what the critic Manny Farber has termed a ”termite artist” — while always working firmly within the confines of the commercial film world whose slapdash methods so frequently frustrated him.

This quality of artistic meticulousness is what helped make his films, especially ”Dr. Strangelove” (1963), ”2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), ”A Clockwork Orange” (1971), the underrated if terribly overwrought ”Barry Lyndon” (1975), ”The Shining” (1980), and ”Full Metal Jacket” (1987) seem — no matter what you thought of their ultimate quality — like uniquely conceived, fully thought-out events.

Cold and detached (quite literally, in a geographic sense, since this Bronx-born Hollywood-funded auteur had long ago relocated to England), Kubrick and his film style do not lend themselves to warm appreciations. But at a time when the concept of ”independent filmmaker” has been reduced to the notion of a young maverick cranking out product on a shoestring budget, Kubrick was a ”true” independent, pursuing his vision to the exclusion of studio meddling, critical anticipation, and audience expectations. His work stands as an implacable monument to a rapidly vanishing method of moviemaking.