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Heavily built, Kubrick felt ill at ease in physical contact and his body language was stiff, Herr notes. It took Kubrick four years before he placed his hand, awkwardly, on Herr's shoulder, and then he backed off, lest he had overdone it. At the same time, Herr emphasizes that he was a warm person but did not express this in bodily contact, at least not with people. Most of all he hated being photographed.
In the early 1970s, Kubrick decided that the media was beyond the pale for him. Already in an interview to "Rolling Stone" magazine, in 1972, he said that the test of a work of art lay in the feeling one has for it and not in one's ability to explain why it is good. In that period, he gave quite a few interviews and turned out to have a razor-sharp humor. He told The New York Times that year, "I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering." He remarked that no critic had ever succeeded in illuminating even one aspect of his work.
"Right from the beginning he realized that he wasn't good at interviews," his widow says. "He would listen to an interview with him on the radio and grumble that he had done himself damage and that he sounded idiotic. That was not true, but that is how he felt. As someone who began his career as a photographer for Look magazine and was present at interviews with people whom he admired as being intelligent, Stanley discovered that in interviews smart people sound stupid. If there is one thing he hated, it was superficiality and small talk. A person like him, who made films with such meticulous attention to detail and wanted everything to be perfect and correct, told himself one day that his films expressed him best, that they are concentrated and contain the gist - so why give interviews? He was frank with himself and understood that he was bad at that."
So it's as simple as it sounds? There was no self-hatred or anything like that involved?
"It did not stem from self-criticism. Stanley preferred to devote his energy to his films. He was a good businessman and wanted to focus on the budget, the production and marketing, on everything that is entailed in directing a film, and especially on working with the actors. That was the most precious thing for him and the center of his life. He was a happy person who loved to be in his home. He worked most of the time and the term `going on vacation' would bring on an outburst of anger from him. The quiet of life outside the city, in a rural setting [in England], with the children and the animals was the right thing for him. He was a person who took an interest in everything, from the news to sports and literature and history and what have you, and because of his status he did not have to go anywhere: whoever wanted to work with him came to the house. He thought that was wonderful, and would say, `I'll sit in the garden and wait. They will come.'"
In 1987, Kubrick told the Chicago Tribune that everything that had been written about him was grotesquely wrong and that he was not a recluse but led a normal life. But the image that clung to him was so convenient and so attractive that it developed a life of its own. Christiane confirms that the decision to stop giving interviews exacted a high price. "Barricading himself from the media acted like a boomerang. One day he understood that it was a bunker, because the media hates him and is making up stories about him. He admitted that he had made a mistake and that he had to correct it. `Maybe I'll write an article,' he said. `Dear people, in practice I am charming and amiable.' And we both burst out laughing."
But the laughter gradually faded, she said, "because the situation became worse in the 1990s, when someone named Alan Conway went around for a long time in all kinds of places pretending to be Stanley Kubrick and trying to seduce children by promising them a part in a film. The police tried to catch him but failed, and the thing got bigger and bigger in the press, and people said Stanley Kubrick was a pedophile. Stanley thought something needed to be done, so he turned to his friend Mike Herr, who had fought in Vietnam and had written `Dispatches,' an important document about the war, and was also involved in writing the screenplay for `Apocalypse Now' [directed by Francis Ford Coppola]. Herr, a Jew who became a Buddhist, knew Stanley well and wrote a moving book about him. The Conway affair ended with his arrest and his confinement in a psychiatric hospital. But later a documentary film was shown in which Conway said how much he had enjoyed being the great Mr. Kubrick, and that was awful. So, when Warner Brothers suggested that I and my brother, Jan Harlan [who was the executive producer of Kubrick's films in the last 30 years of the director's life] produce a documentary film about Stanley, I thought it was time to stop being insular and weeping and whining. After his death, the stories only proliferated and worsened and became grotesque. We said that if we remained silent and did not react, people would say it was all true."
As a guest of last month's Haifa Film Festival, Christiane, a German-born artist whose uncle, Veit Harlan, directed the notorious Nazi propaganda film "Jud Suss" (produced 1938; released 1940), brought not only a copy of the documentary about her late husband, "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," but also a wide-ranging homage to the director, which included new prints of five of his films: "Paths of Glory" (1957), "Spartacus" (1960), "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) and "Barry Lyndon" (1975). She and Harlan are also behind an international exhibition about the director's work, which is about to open in Melbourne and may come to Israel. (Her paintings can be viewed at www.christianekubrick.com.)
"Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures" was made by Jan Harlan in 2001, and features figures such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, co-author of the screenplay (with Kubrick) for "2001." The film is a lengthy and somewhat didactic personal portrait, which progresses chronologically via the 13 feature films Kubrick directed between 1953 and 1999, through conversations with members of the family, actors and directors, interspersed with rare archival footage from Kubrick's childhood and equally rare footage of Kubrick directing. The exhibition, which contains about 1,000 objects from Kubrick's estate, including costumes from his films and examples of his work as a still photographer, is accompanied by a massive catalogue-album, also overseen by Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, and published by Taschen, "The Stanley Kubrick Archives" which sells for $200.
It was all personal
Kubrick conducted most of his ties with the world by phone. He and Christiane lived on an estate in Hertfordshire, north of London, surrounded by animals. His favorites were the cats, which were concentrated in his wing. Herr writes that Kubrick was capable of conducting hours-long phone conversations. He notes that the writer Gustav Hasford, on whose book "The Short-Timers" Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" was based, told him that he once spoke with Kubrick on the phone for seven hours. Hasford likened Kubrick to an earwig, a small insect, that enters one ear but doesn't go out the other until it has "eaten clean through your head." Christiane confirms this predeliction: "There was no one whom he did not reach by telephone. If someone told him it was the middle of the night, he would say, `But you are awake, aren't you?'"
Kubrick's parents, Jack and Gertrude Kubrick, were American-born, to parents who immigrated from Russia and Romania. His father was a doctor and his mother, Christiane says, was an autodidact and knew how to go about raising her gifted child. "She said that he took no interest in himself as a child. He was a gifted boy, brilliant and independent, and she, in her wisdom, succeeded in implanting in him a strong belief in himself."
School was not his thing, he decided to forgo a bar mitzvah because it didn't interest him, and at the age of 15, as a high-school student, he was not much in class. He was a drummer in the school band and on Sundays attended an art class. He started to take pictures with his father's Graflex camera. His scholastic achievements continued to be mediocre (he finished high school with a 70 percent average, and so did not go on to college), but his photographs were published in the school magazine and he preferred to spend his time in movie theaters and wander about with the camera around his neck. In June 1945 a photograph of a newspaper vendor mourning President Roosevelt won him $25 and the image was published in Look magazine. A year later he was working for the magazine and publishing photo-stories about boxing and jazz performances, about Frank Sinatra and about the young actor Montgomery Clift. At the age of 19, he married his high-school sweetheart, Toba Metz, and the two moved into a one-room place in Greenwich Village.
Christiane: "He didn't want to be a boy and his mother said he didn't do anything silly as a boy except for getting married so young. He was focused and very ambitious and he was bored to death in school and would copy the lessons from a friend. Getting married at such a young age was an act of taking responsibility by someone who had a burning desire to be an adult. He was a photographer for Look and played chess for money and read a tremendous amount. His father was a very nice man, a bit conservative and a worrier, who sold his life insurance so Stanley could make his first film, `Fear and Desire,' in 1953."
Kubrick was then reading about 20 books a week and often visited laboratories and film-editing rooms to see up-close how films were made. He liked jazz and he never missed a Yankees baseball game. He directed his second feature film, "Killer's Kiss," at the age of 27, this time with funding from his uncle, and his name appeared prominently in the list of credits. According to Herr, Kubrick believed from the very outset that he was the greatest director of all. He never said so, but behaved as though he was. "They say he had no personal life, but that's ridiculous," Herr writes. "It would be more correct to say that he had no professional life, since everything he did was personally done, every move and every call he made, every impulse he expressed was utterly personal, devoted to the making of his movies, which were all personal."
In 1955 Kubrick married Ruth Sobotka, a dancer and choreographer. (His first marriage ended during the shooting of "Fear and Desire.") According to Christiane, that marriage did not succeed because Sobotka traveled a great deal and was not faithful to him. But at the same time Kubrick had already established his first production company, and his third film, "The Killing" (1956) led to the making of his important antiwar film "Paths of Glory" (1957), starring Kirk Douglas. The film was shot in Germany, and during the preparations for it, Kubrick, who was watching television in Munich, saw the beautiful actress Susanne Christian, nee Christiane Susanne Harlan. It was love at first sight for him, but she was already married.
"He called my agent, who told me that an American director wanted to see me. I thought I was going to meet a redneck. I went to the studio and liked him at once. I was unhappily married to a German actor and we had a daughter of two and a half. Stanley and I soon started to live together in Munich. We were married in Las Vegas in 1960," Christiane says.
After five years in Hollywood, he began to work in England, making "Lolita" in 1962 and "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" the following year. "Our daughters [Anya, born in 1959, and Vivian, born a year later] grew up in England and we liked the fact that his studio was in the village. The urban Stanley suddenly had a large garden and a big kitchen and life was wrapped in great tranquillity."
Did the man who devoted his life to his films find time for his family?
"When we met, I knew I was getting onto a merry-go-round. I left everything and went to America with him with my daughter. It was not a small risk. He read 20 newspapers a day looking for stories, and with the same intensity he devoted himself to his goldfish, to me and to the girls. He was involved in everything. If the cat was sick he would drop everything and talk to the vet and tell him `We will do so-and-so,' and argue with him. He was certain that he was a good doctor and would drive people crazy telling them to take pills of one kind or another. He would explain to the women who worked on the set what to do about a difficult menstrual period - `Don't eat salt, eat this and this' - and would walk away, his cigarette leaving a trail of smoke. He did the same thing with the girls and it was hard for all the pampered women who wandered through our house.
"He was always available for us and he was accessible and attentive. He would speak on three telephone lines at once and if someone came in and asked him something, he would drop everything. He didn't lock himself in when he wrote, and when he had to he would leave everything and then go back to writing as though he hadn't been disturbed. Nothing made him lose his concentration and he also had a phenomenal memory.
"I think that in many ways he was a better mother than I was, because his eyes were always open. We were good friends and I learned from him how to live everyday life and concentrate on work. I copied that lifestyle. When people visited us in Munich, they were astounded at the mess there. People came and went and there were meals and even his mother was taken aback by the mess, but we loved it. When he started to make money, we had a house with large spaces and Stanley thought that this was exactly the purpose of money, for space and time."
Wasn't he dominant and domineering about the girls?
"They are pretty dominant themselves. Katharina [Christiane's daughter from her first marriage] is a painter, Anya is an opera singer and Vivian is a composer. Stanley was very involved in raising the girls and because he was in the house a lot, that was nice. The girls fought him, especially Anya, who would say things like `People think you are amazing but they have no idea how boring you are.' He would sit and grumble that he had no say in the house. What does not come through in any of his films, and probably will not come through when the widow tells about it, either - and I really do not want to sound like the professional widow - but what made Stanley extraordinary was his ability to love truly and to identify with the girls and with what was happening with them. He was angry and upset when they did not take his advice, but they loved him because he was a tremendously devoted and loving father. Yes, and domineering, too."
The murderers' state and me
She was born in 1932, to a family of theater and entertainment people. From childhood she dreamed of being a painter but studied and made a living from dance and acting. Her paternal grandfather was a playwright and the director of a theater. Her father, Fritz Harlan, was an opera singer; his brother, Veit Harlan, a film director, entered history because he made "Jud Suss." The film is a rare case in the history of cinema: at the end of the war its maker was arrested and placed on trial in Hamburg for crimes against humanity and preparing the ground for genocide, with the film introduced as evidence. He was acquitted twice in 1949, once on the grounds that the film was essentially immaterial to the events that occurred, the second time on the grounds that he was coerced by the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Harlan went on making films in Germany until his death in 1964, at the age of 64.
Christiane: "That is the heavy burden I have borne since childhood. I would be happy if I didn't come from a state of murderers. Stanley took a great interest in my catastrophic family background. We spoke about it a great deal. People asked him, `How could you marry a German woman, especially one with a background like that?' I thought a lot about the fact that no one could have taken a greater interest in my family background than Stanley, who understood that I came from the other side, which was the opposite of his [background]. But he also knew that my generation could plead innocence: I was very young during the Holocaust, though at the same time old enough to remember everything."
What did his parents say about his choice of a wife?
"I was very nervous ahead of the meeting with his parents, and he was very nice and supportive, because he sensed that I was suffering. I sat there as though my head was weighed down by a ton. If only I were not from a state of murderers, I thought to myself - but his parents were wonderful, especially his mother."
Prof. Michal Friedman, from the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, discusses "Jud Suss" in her book about Jews in Nazi cinema, published in France in 1984. The film, which was based (distortedly) on the 1925 novel of the same name by the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958) - it was released in the United States under the name "Power" - won a prize at the Venice Film festival of 1940 and continued to be shown in occupied Europe until the fall of the Third Reich. It is thought to have been seen by 20 million people.
The plot of the film, Friedman says in an interview, maintains tension because of the protagonist's acts of dispossession and rape. "The success of the film lies in the fact that the central character was widely known from German literature and plays, which developed it for different goals. In 1934, for example, a film of the same name was made in England, based on the Feuchtwanger bestseller. The film, like the book, extols the activity of a court Jew in 18th-century Germany who, because of schemes related to his origins, was executed in 1738. The Nazi version, however, portrayed a Jew who plunders the local population and exploits its women to satisfy his lust. The brutal rape of an Aryan girl in London leads to his execution, as he violated the race laws."
The Nazi film's drawing power was in part due to its high production values. Goebbels not only funded the film generously but recruited the finest cinematic talent available to him and chose the actors and the crew himself. Friedman: "The director, Veit Harlan, took advantage of this fact in his trial - his line of defense was based on the fact that he was chosen to direct the film because of his reputation and was therefore forced to submit to Goebbels' will. Actors and directors, including Dr. Fritz Hippler, the director of `The Eternal Jew' [the 1940 anti-Semitic film in which Jews are likened to rats], testified that they were put under pressure and threatened with being sent to fight at the front. It was not only the argument of coercion that ultimately got Harlan acquitted, as the judgment also noted, `It is difficult to complain that the director did not soften the anti-Semitism in the film, not least because the historical figure himself was a criminal and exerted brutal authority over the nation he controlled.'"
Did Kubrick see "Jud Suss"?
"He saw all my uncle's films," Christiane says, "and also met him in the same year we met. My uncle, who was tried and acquitted, was already sick. He liked Stanley and warned me that if I were going to America, I should not expect people to like me there. My uncle's story is complex. I liked him very much and thought he was a fantastic person. He and my father wanted to be circus people and used to do stunts, and when I studied dancing they would hurl me in the air. But it certainly depresses me to think about the nature of `Jud Suss.'"
At the age of 10 she, like all her peers, was inducted into the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth). "I liked going there because it released me from housecleaning duties. I was a girl whose whole world was the theater: I had a large puppet theater and I wrote and directed plays and took money from children to see them. And that's actually what I did in the Hitler Jugend. The first time we were evacuated was when Germany attacked France. In my conversations with Stanley, I often told him that the ray of hope I had came from my being a bad and rebellious girl. I was far from my parents and those people in the Hitler Jugend, and even though I was educated to be a Nazi and was no better than anyone, in my heart I did not believe it."
Is that a perception of hindsight or did you feel that way then?
"I remember that I painted well and that when they taught us [in art class] about the structure of the Aryan skull, I thought it was ridiculous. The person who gave the talk didn't even look Aryan. Germany is the most mixed state in the world - there were 11 borders along the Rhine and the Danube, where everyone came from - so what were they talking about? The whole race thing was totally insane. Afterward, we were sent to a labor camp that was protected from bombing and I did farm work there. Female prisoners - Ukrainian, Polish and a few French women - worked with us and I became friends with some of them and that gave me a new ray of hope."
Her parents, who were part of the Wehrmacht entertainment troupes, performed for the troops at the front. Her father was later drafted and sent to a combat unit in the Black Forest where, his daughter says, he guarded Russian prisoners. After the war he was detained in an American prisoner-of-war camp. She and her mother lived by Lake Constance, on the Swiss border, in the hope of being able to cross into Switzerland. "My father was arrested brutally - I will not go into details, because it is a terrible story. He returned home three and a half years later. My mother and I were at Constance; the Moroccan-French army captured the area and I was very sick and things were not easy. We got our `prize.' Stanley was fascinated when I told him about those years, but also sad, and sometimes we wondered who had a more horrific background - him as a Jew or me as a German who lived through the Nazi period."
How did your family react when you told them you were going to marry a Jew?
"There was a bit of chaos. My family was a microcosm of the events. My maternal grandmother, who was a pianist from Hamburg, married a Jewish violinist from New York, so that there was also a half-Jewish side in the family. The amazing thing is that this was in a society that had the chance to be respectable and was educated and not poor. The murders in Germany were perpetrated by people who it is hard to believe were capable of that. It is impossible to understand how it was physically possible to murder so many people. They did it meticulously, by manual means, and it was all documented in the certainty that the hatred was justified and that Germany was the savior of the world. I do not understand it."
She is from the generation that wanted to see and know everything. When Kubrick was engaged in the preparations and massive research for a film about the Holocaust, to be entitled "The Aryan Papers," based on the novel "Wartime Lies" by Lewis Begley, "I read all the material Stanley collected with his usual care and became depressed, even though I knew everything. He was also in a state of depression, because he realized it was an impossible film.
"It's impossible to direct the Holocaust unless it's a documentary. If you show the atrocities as they actually happened, it would entail the total destruction of the actors. Stanley said he could not instruct actors how to liquidate others and could not explain the motives for the killing. `I will die from this,' he said, `and the actors will die, too, not to mention the audience.'" (After originally trying to get Isaac Bashevis Singer to write an original screenplay for the film, Kubrick abandoned the project because Steven Spielberg was making "Schindler's List.")
Death and superstition
Interviews may not have interested Kubrick, but reviews did. "When reviews of his films were published, he would tell me, `You read it, I don't want to.' A while later he would ask what the critics wrote and when I told him he became angry. In the end he got angry at himself for getting angry at the reviews and said he wasn't going to think about it at all. Of course he was very childish, in all senses. He knew that. He would tell me, `I'm an asshole.'"
His friends knew what he meant. Herr writes in his book about the director that not only was Kubrick's attitude toward money pathological and that he was terrible as a businessman, but that even though he forsook Hollywood because of its brutal management methods, he himself frequently resorted to similar methods. According to Herr, Kubrick knew people thought it was a great privilege to work with someone like him and took full advantage of this. Herr himself refused to polish the screenplay for "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), because he understood that Kubrick thought he would not have to pay him.
In their last phone conversation (one hour), Herr reports, Kubrick talked about the prose style of Ernest Hemingway and suggested that he come to watch "Eyes Wide Shut" and interview him for "Vanity Fair" (the film was released after Kubrick's death). Kubrick told Herr about a friend of his, the director of a studio, who bought an apartment in New York and thus became the first Jew to be approved by the other tenants. Kubrick was astounded by the story.
Did he think about death?
"Stanley believed in superstitions and I would laugh at him. He knew it was stupid, besides which he was a total unbeliever. After all, all his thoughts in `Space Odyssey' revolved around the question of what's out there. The girls and I used to tease him by saying that his body language was like that of Tevye the Milkman - he would clasp his hands and sigh. He apparently grew up in a milieu where there were religious Jews and from them learned to sigh with a big `ochhh' while looking up toward God with accusation and melancholy. We imitated him and laughed. I told him it was bad luck to believe in superstitions."n |
'année 2005 aura été particulièrement faste pour les tournages de films hollywoodiens en France. Quatre longs métrages - Marie-Antoinette, de Sofia Coppola, Da Vinci Code, de Ron Howard, Munich, de Steven Spielberg et A Good Year, de Ridley Scott - ont accumulé plus de quarante semaines de tournage, ce qui représente quelque 50 millions d'euros de recettes directes (pour les professionnels du cinéma) et induites (en incluant les frais d'hôtel, de restauration et de transport). Ces chiffres sont donnés par Olivier-René Veillon, directeur général de la commission du film d'Ile-de-France, qui s'appuie sur une étude encore confidentielle. 
