10 months ago
28/9/09
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If we had actually started in close to a six-foot man and then pulled the camera back until he was a speck, we would have had to track back about two thousand feet - obviously impractical…instead we photographed him on 65mm film simply tumbling about in full frame. The we front-projected a six-inch image of this scene onto a glossy white card suspended against black velvet and, using our worm-gear arrangement, tracked the camera away from the miniature screen until the astronaut became so small in the frame that he virtually disappeared. Since we were re-photographing an extremely small image there was no grain problem and he remained sharp and clear all the way to infinity.
— Stanley Kubrick, Kubrick Archives, referring to the scene in 2001 where the dead astronaut spins off into space. (in case anybody’s paying attention, my obsession with this book could go on for a while…)
To make a film entirely by yourself, which initially I did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography.
— Stanley Kubrick, the Kubrick Archives.
Stanley Kubrick Archives
Just burned a Barnes & Noble birthday gift certificate (+cash) on Taschen’s Kubrick archives. Probably not the most efficient use of my dwindling funds, but the most pleasurable that occurred to me today. Can’t wait to take a nice long afternoon to sift through the 800 high-res film stills.
kapi:
This is one of the most beautifully shot scenes ever.
Stanley Kubrick was a master of natural light.
Kubrick was actually the master of creating light. He rarely used natural light, he hated shooting on location and preferred to own all of his own camera’s, lights, etc. Most of the scenes which most people think are natural light are Kubrick’s genius at work: it’s all fake.
For probably more Kubrick than you’d ever want to know, check out The Kubrick Site. I basically spent college on that website. Also, watching his movies over and over again, and checking out his early photographic work for LOOK and various other magazines you start to learn that this kid was born with an amazing and keen understanding of human emotion, light and creating drama. Kubrick was, and is, a photographic genius.
Wow, great link. My favorite Kubrickism is his whole theory that film separates itself from other art forms via the editing/cutting process. Screenwriting is born from literature, cinematography from photography, acting from the theater, scoring from music, etc…but great film is devoted to the perfectionist ideal of collecting hundreds of hours of material and painstakingly editing it into a cohesive vision.
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