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As With The Use Of Sound, Imagery And The Laborious Editing Process, The ...

As with the use of sound, imagery and the laborious editing process, the transference of a novel to a film was a meticulous process that would have frightened off many alternative talented directors. To Kubrick, though, the pairing of literary fiction and film-making was an ideal partnership that would enable crossgenre diversity as well as the opportunity to remain an auteur.
The above should be seen as a brief outline of the dominant character traits of Stanley Kubrick as a film-maker. All of these can come under the broader umbrella of a ‘totalitarian director' who directly oversaw every part of the movie manufacturing process. It should be noted, though, that Kubrick was not a dictatorial film-maker with regards to the way in which he extracted performances from his actors. Although famously obsessed with attempting to achieve as near as he could to cinematic perfection, he was likewise attentive and sensitive to his actors needs and treated each lead actor in a way that suited his or her individual temperament. Diversity in his films was consequently as much due to the choice of actor as it was a deliberate ploy on the part of Kubrick to appear to be switching genres with each film. With the basic tenets of Kubrick the film-maker having been asserted, attention must now be turned to analysis of his select body of films to see how he treated each movie as a wholly new cinematic project. Kubrick's Films: A Chronology
Stanley Kubrick embarked upon his movie making career by experimenting with the medium of the documentary. Day of the Fight, which was made in 1950, permitted Kubrick the opportunity to test out his theory of film being largely an editing process, an experience which he then transferred to his first feature film Fear and Desire, which was released in 1953. This introductory film, based upon the precept of a military drama, was not a commercial success; indeed, the film-maker was known to be happy that the project was ever even completed. It did, though, act as a steep learning curve, which taught Kubrick that many of the philosophical concepts that he wished to introduce to the movie (such as the notion that intelligence is meaningless and that the world can be understood as a dream) were dependent upon a bigger budget and higher quality actors.
However, it is noticeable that the key character traits of Kubrick (represented as a totalitarian vision of directing and editing movies) are not at all present his second and third motion pictures, Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), which are both considered to be surprisingly incoherent movies that fail to hold the viewing audience in the same way as his later films were able to do.


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