Tag Archives: Stanley Kubrick

Check it out, Festivals

I, Olga Hepnarová

I, Olga Hepnarova
I, Olga Hepnarová

Seen at Fantasia 2016, Montreal (Canada)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 November 2016

Distributor: Mubi

Directors: Petr Kazda, Tomas Weinreb

Writers: Petr Kazda, Tomas Weinreb

Cast: Michalina Olszanska, Martin Pechlat, Klara Meliskova, Marika Soposka

Alternative title:
I, Olga

Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, France 2016

105 mins

The brutal, moving tale of an abused young woman’s revenge in Communist Czechoslovakia had its North American premiere at Fantasia.

***** out of *****

While watching this grim, superbly realized feature-length dramatic biography about the last person ever executed in Czechoslovakia, my mind occasionally drifted to the famous tagline for Meir Zarchi’s rape-revenge exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave. It read:

‘This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition… but no jury in America would ever convict her!’

Within the context of that vile, but oddly affecting grade Z drive-in picture, it’s hard not to agree with the provocative sentiments expressed in the aforementioned declaration. I Spit on Your Grave is, however, pure fiction, whereas I, Olga Hepnarová is hardly an exploitation film: it is based on a true-life revenge-crime story that actually occurred in Prague during the summer of 1973.

Watching it, I imagined my own tagline:

‘This woman has just hijacked a two-ton diesel truck in Prague and plowed it full-throttle into a street full of innocent bystanders… but no jury in Czechoslovakia would ever convict her!’

Ah, but they did.

Writer-directors Petr Kazda and Tomas Weinreb have crafted a compulsive, moving and shocking film out of their title character’s life and the events leading up to her capture, conviction and execution. Most importantly, their picture pulls you in so closely and deeply that it’s impossible not to feel for this lonely young woman living a life of neglect and abuse in the post-Prague-Spring world of Communist repression, one in which all of former Czech party leader Alexander Dubček’s progressive reforms were reversed with a vengeance.

The astonishing young actress Michalina Olszanska plays Hepnarová from age 13 to her death 10 years later. She manages to pull off the near-impossible task of a poker-faced intensity that forces us to look beneath the veneer and into her eyes, which alternate between shark-like death stares and deep humanity, ranging from innate intelligence, sensitivity and confusion, to pain and anger, and even, on occasion, humour. She delivers one of the great screen performances of the new millennium and it serves the superb screenplay and austere mise en scène perfectly.

Using gorgeously composed long takes, shooting in evocative monochrome (via the expert lensing of Adam Sikora of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights with Anna and Essential Killing fame) and presenting Hepnarova’s sad tale using voice-over excerpts from her haunting journals, the filmmakers offer a compelling arms-length plea for understanding. It’s their carefully controlled, often Kubrickian observations that deliver the kind of humanity and emotional core with which the late director of Dr. Strangelove, et al, was so often not properly credited with. Control and austerity does not mean the kind of coldness many critics mistakenly attribute to such work and in contrast, can often guarantee the film’s ability to reach right into the flesh and rip our hearts out.

I, Olga Hepnarová goes even further by tearing into us and exposing our nerve endings – pulling and tugging at the raw tendrils and putting us in as much pain as humanly possible to capture the life and emotions of this young woman. The film shares her life with us and we’re placed in the eye of the storm of this woman who spent a lifetime being callously neglected by her mother (‘To commit suicide you need a strong will, my child. Something you certainly don’t have. Accept it.’), raped by her father (captured with a subtlety that’s far more horrific than any graphic depiction), numerous attempts to kill herself, incarceration in a Soviet-style snake pit of an asylum (suffering even more physical and psychological abuse) and an early adulthood of exploring her sexual identity with often very sad results.

And finally, the filmmakers present us with the visuals depicting the results of Olga’s actual words:

‘I am a loner. A destroyed woman. A woman destroyed by people… I have a choice – to kill myself or to kill others. I choose to avenge my haters. It would be too easy to leave this world as an unknown suicide victim. Society is too indifferent, rightly so. My verdict is: I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to death.’

Of course we weep for her victims, but the film achieves the extraordinary by allowing us to weep for the ‘destroyed woman’ whose pain goes so undetected and neglected that her only choice seems to be the declaration of a death sentence upon a society bereft of caring.

To say the film takes a story from the 70s and makes it even more vital for our contemporary world would be an understatement. We weep for Olga Hepnarová, but we’re also placed in a position wherein we might be able to weep for those who carry out acts of violence and, in so doing, kill themselves.

Mental illness is a genuine affliction. It can result in evil actions, but the perpetrators are, more often than not, sick in mind, body and soul. Healing and caring has escaped them. I, Olga Hepnarová speaks not just for one, but all of them.

Greg Klymkiw

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cinema releases

Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 July 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Writer: Stanley Kubrick

Based on the novel by: William Makepeace Thackeray

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee

UK, USA 1975

184 mins

An appraisal of the merits of Mr Stanley Kubrick’s considerable film essay on ambition and ruin.

It is the unenviable lot of every human being cast into this busy and brutal world that we must at once learn how to live life while at the same time living that very life we are attempting to learn how to live; and so it is perfectly possible, if not in fact probable, that the lessons that are the most important to our happiness, the invaluable realizations on how to get along in the world, on how to be content, on how to succeed, are bound to be worthless: for they come too late to be of any palpable use. It is for this reason indeed that we have modal verbs and the third conditional: I could have… should have … would have… etc., being essential adjuncts to our wistful condition. The great novelists tell us the same: Voltaire in Candide; Dickens in Great Expectations. And William Thackeray’s picaresque account of the rise and fall of an Irish rogue Barry Lyndon is a tragi-comic treatment on the same theme.

The erstwhile director of a series of remarkable moving pictures, Mr Stanley Kubrick, took on the novel following the collapse of his long planned epic on the life of Napoleon. Employing the research, he created one of the most authentic renderings of the Eighteenth Century, with characters who lived outside, exposed to the imminent weather, or huddled in candlelit rooms, poised and pinioned in their beautiful regalia. To speak of the film, one must first address its beauty. If Mr Kubrick were a painter, we would have to enquire as to where he procures his canvases, his pigments and oils, for all his films seem to be painted on a rich vellum with a wide range of nuanced colours apparently unavailable to other filmmakers. There is a peach-coloured tinge to the sky, his fires are pumpkin orange and the range of his palette – the spectrum of greens for instance – is simply breath-taking. ‘I do like the way the artist uses the colour blue,’ Barry Lyndon comments. Quite so, Mr Lyndon, quite so. Not to mention the framing – from the very first shot, which shows the duel that killed Redmond Barry’s father – the scene is composed so well, so finely structured – the diagonal run of the dry stone walling, the depth of vision – and so pleasing to the eye that the director rarely requires more than a single cut to tell his whole scene. The slow zooms are employed to reveal the world around his characters or to move in on a particular detail or individual, and later, in the second half, to reveal adultery and despair. But Mr Kubrick is varied in his means; a ruffian handheld syle suits a brawl and an almost documentary feel imbues a battle with immediacy and danger.

The story is simplicity itself. A young Irishman, Redmond Barry of Barryville (an outstanding performance from Mr Ryan O’Neal, best known for the sentimental drama Love Story), is forced to leave home after a romance with a cousin leads him to duel, he thinks fatally, with an English officer, an excellent and concise comic turn from the superb Mr Leonard Rossiter of Rising Damp fame. His journeys lead him from highway robbers to the English army, the Prussian army, a career as card player and conman and finally the successful seduction of a woman of wealth and station and the securing of his position in society. This is but part one and the second half of the film shows the other side of the hill, as Redmond Barry, now styled Barry Lyndon, is unable to hold all he has attained secure in his grasp, and through a combination of his own fecklessness and the unforgiving nature of the English upper class, his financial, social and familial standing are reduced to disaster and ultimately a sad mess of grief and tatters.

Over the years, the films of Mr Stanley Kubrick have acquired the reputation of coldness and Barry Lyndon is often posited as an example, but on rewatching the film such arguments appear wrong-headed. Barry Lyndon is a remarkably moving and humane piece of work, about a man in desperate search for love who fails to appreciate it when he finds it. A fatherless child who is to become a childless father to the sound of Sarabande, the triple timed dance that becomes a reminder that all marches are funeral marches in the end. It is a hard lesson, and like all lessons on how to live life it is learned only once life is over.

Mr John Bleasdale

Check it out, Home entertainment

The Killing

The Killing 1
The Killing

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 9 February 2015

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Jim Thompson

Cast: Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor

USA 1956

85 mins

In Stanley Kubrick’s thrilling heist movie The Killing, a charismatic ringleader, a brute of a man, an expert marksman, a crooked cop and three regular, ordinary guys, none of them natural criminals, are brought together for one reason: money. Fresh out of jail, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), with the help of his cohorts, decides, rather than reform his ways, to raise the stakes. Why go to jail for $500 when you can go to jail for a million? So he muses to his devoted childhood sweetheart, Fay (Colleen Gray), who has waited patiently for his return from five years in Alcatraz. His plan: to steal the takings at a racetrack on one of the biggest days of the season, a haul that could net the men a fortune.

Opening with an urgent, unsettling score, all beating drums and screaming horns, the film plunges the audience into the frantic atmosphere at the racetrack where the heist will take place, before introducing us to the ill-fated men and women caught up in the scheme. A narrator guides us through the unconventional chronology, his laconic delivery adding to the tension, as the intricacies of the plot are revealed in the lean, briskly paced film.

Johnny has devised a near-flawless robbery, but with one major weakness: George (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the track’s cashier, a browbeaten shell of a man who landed a gorgeous wife with never-realised promises of wealth. Emotionally manipulative, Sherry is a hard-boiled vamp, who literally flutters her false eyelashes to bend George to her will, only to sell him out for a future with her equally cynical lover. Perfectly played by Marie Windsor, Sherry is a nasty, manipulative piece of work, who can’t wait to be ‘up to her curls in cash’. But any whiff of misogyny is dispelled by the strength and presence of her character; she also gets the best lines in the film, the pitch-perfect dialogue written by the pulp novelist Jim Thompson.

A classic noir, Kubrick’s third feature revels in the genre’s striking aesthetics, with masterful tracking shots and use of lighting. The characters, George in particular, often appear behind bars, with the shadows in some scenes cast by an iron bedstead – what should have been an object of domestic bliss now a stand-in for George’s unhappy fate. The motif is repeated in a fabulously grim scene, where our characters find themselves trapped, enclosed by bars of light and dark, their fate sealed. The allegories – they are all pieces of a puzzle, pawns on a chessboard – are not always subtle, but they are evocative.

Although Johnny’s meticulous planning pays off, Sherry’s intervention means that there is no chance of a ‘happy’ ending, only a senseless, violent outcome. The very human weaknesses of envy and ego play their part in everyone’s downfall, but, Johnny, in the end, is also a victim of sheer bad luck, the unpredictable and unforeseen. As Sherry says, in the moment when her own fate has been decided for her, it’s ‘a bad joke without a punchline’.

Sarah Cronin

The Killing is released in a double feature Blu-ray edition by Arrow Video, together with Kurbrick’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955).
Check it out, Cinema releases

Room 237

Room 237 (The Shining)

Format: Cinema

Dates: 26 October 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Rodney Archer

USA 2012

102 mins

Subtitled ‘Being an inquiry into The Shining in 9 parts’, Rodney Ascher’s diverting documentary features a group of obsessives ranging from eccentric to out-and-out whacky expounding upon their theories about the Stanley Kubrick film in voice-over. Those are illustrated by an artfully assembled montage of graphics and manipulated clips from the film, together with well-chosen odds and sods from Western cinema in general and Kubrick’s oeuvre in particular, in a manner reminiscent of Adam Curtis’s work. Ascher does his damnedest to make it visually and aurally interesting, and lets his chosen voices speak without judgement.

Most of the speakers were disappointed by their first encounter with the film, but went back to it on VHS, on DVD, on Blu-ray, watching it over and over, convinced that a cinematic master with an IQ of 200 couldn’t just produce an overly mannered misfire, no, there had to be more to it than that. They started to map the geography of the Overlook hotel, read the posters, props and set decoration for clues, and assume that continuity errors must be there for a reason. The result suggests that what The Shining was really about was, well, take your pick: the Holocaust, Greek myth, American ‘Manifest Destiny’ and the genocide of the native population, and, my personal favourite, Kubrick apologising for his part in the faking of the moon landings by Apollo 11. This is Great Movie Mistakes as seen by people who don’t believe in mistake, chance or coincidence, and how much you enjoy it is going to be dependent upon how long you’re prepared to indulge their company – 102 minutes is a stretch.

But it says something about the reputation of the man and his cinema that this film, and doubtless hours more like it could be made. I can happily believe that he read the book Subliminal Seduction about hidden messages in advertising and interviewed Madison Avenue executives about how they worked. Maybe some of the weirdness in The Shining was the result. Who knows? But in his massively extensive research and attention to detail, the Kubrick of legend was just as obsessive as any of the contributors to this film. If, y’know, slightly more hinged.

As one of the unseen says at one point, ‘Kubrick is thinking about the implications of everything that exists!’

Mark Stafford