Kubrick, in action

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Full Metal Jacket Diary

Matthew Modine

Rugged Land: 300 pp., $29.95

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The Stanley Kubrick Archives

Edited by Alison Castle

Taschen: 544 pp., $200

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Stanley Kubrick

Drama & Shadows

Photographs 1945-1950

Rainer Crone

Phaidon: 256 pp. $69.95

WHEN a friend heard that Matthew Modine had been cast in the lead of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” he presented the actor with an old Rolleiflex camera. He had heard -- erroneously, as it turned out -- that it had been the director’s instrument of choice in his early days as a photographer for Look magazine. (Actually, he preferred a Graflex, and there is at least one picture of the young photographer carrying a Leica.) When Modine showed up on the set with his antique, it engendered puzzlement from Kubrick, who was, as many know, a technofreak, always up on the latest tools of his trade (and frequently improving them). He had no sentimentality about gadgetry.

Indeed, as Modine would soon learn, he had no sentimentality for anything except his family and his menagerie of pets. But Modine got permission to shoot stills on the set, which form the photographic background of “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” his excellent and unsparing account of the many months he spent helping Kubrick make his excellent and unsparing movie. The book is among the best accounts of the nutsiness that goes into the making of most movies -- the delays, the tensions, the screw-ups -- and is, as well, probably the best portrait I’ve read of Kubrick in action.

Or perhaps I should say “inaction.” For it was his directorial habit -- attested to by others besides Modine -- to insist that his actors repeat lines or actions take after take, even if they were face down in the mud on a bitterly cold day, without offering the slightest hint of what he wanted. This method -- or non-method -- is why his films went wildly over schedule. Normal completion time for something like “Full Metal Jacket” might have been 90 to 120 days, but Kubrick shot it for 13 months, during which Modine accepted a part in another film, was forced to abandon it because Kubrick was not finished with him, then learned that the other movie had completed principal photography while “Jacket” was still inching along.

This is not to be construed as incompetence on Kubrick’s part. The essence of film directing is to make the performers appear utterly naturalistic, uncalculating. One way of doing that is to print the first or second take before actors have settled into their roles. The other way is to get them so befuddled and exhausted that thought and artifice are drained from them, and they’re freely, but persuasively, doing anything that might end the agony. This is the way Modine puts it:

“What has put us in this confused state of mind?

“Is it Stanley?

“Is it our choice or his desire?

“Is this part of his plan?

“Is this his intention?”

Kubrick never said. Instead, he insisted that all the delays were the actors’ fault. Perversely, in his view, they kept blowing their lines or actions and this forced him to keep shooting.

Did he really believe this? Hard to say. All we know is that almost every Kubrick shoot turned into a contest of unspoken wills (and sotto voce griping) that Modine so vividly captures. Eventually, something like the Stockholm syndrome would take over, with the captive players defending the mysterious brilliance of their captor-director. But there was more to the man than his enigmatic behavior indicates.

There was, for example, his rather peculiar relationship with language. He was capable of making verbally intricate films (“Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “A Clockwork Orange”), but he often used words not to clarify meaning but to miscommunicate and obfuscate, frequently to blackly comic effect. More often, he preferred to minimize dialogue (“2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Barry Lyndon,” “The Shining”) as he pursued an ideal many directors share -- telling his stories primarily through images, using actors more as design elements than as active carriers of ideas.

This was never shooting for shooting’s sake, as it is with, say, Terrence Malick. I think Kubrick, whom I knew slightly (and liked enormously), was deeply dismayed by the human race, found its capacity for evil both unfathomable to a rationalist (which is what he thought himself to be) and unable to be captured by conventional means. Hence, the gnomic qualities of his best work.

In “The Stanley Kubrick Archives” -- a book one can only refer to, not read, since it weighs more than 10 pounds and measures almost 3 feet across when opened -- he says: “The most important parts of a movie are the mysterious parts -- beyond the reach of reason and language.” That, very simply, is why he worked in such a maddening manner. (The search for the ineffable is never an easy one.) The same volume contains an invaluable collection of production photos as well as every significant interview Kubrick granted (more of these, and more intriguing, than you might imagine), although it is burdened by largely plodding essays on each film, many of them by Gene D. Phillips, a fan masquerading as a critic.

An account of “Full Metal Jacket” in “Archives” includes this note by Kubrick on his source novel: “I like the lack of a readily discernible moral attitude which is so familiar in a war story.” His movie was not to be an “antiwar” movie, for as he says elsewhere in this book, that’s a bore; even the generals are, when pressed, antiwar. He wanted it to be a Kubrick film, not a genre film -- and so, if it is “about” anything, it is about whether Modine’s character, Joker, who wears both a peace emblem and a T-shirt reading “Born to Kill,” will or will not lose his humanity by actually offing someone. As Kubrick put it, “We’re never going to get down to doing anything about the things that are really bad in the world until there is a recognition in us of the darker side of our natures, the shadow side.”

Which is why there has never been a Kubrick film containing a character in whom, as the Hollywood hacks say, we can take a “rooting interest.” Kubrick’s much-mentioned “coldness,” his inability to embrace the comforting humanism that is the motif of almost every “serious” American movie, was instinctive, an expression of a nature that preferred enigma to explanation: He may have understood that if he had allowed himself an open statement of his bleak beliefs, he would have turned off his audiences. He preferred to let his movies be (mis)understood as genre pieces (sci-fi, horror, comedic romps). On the other hand, the possibility of self-conscious aesthetic calculation cannot be dismissed.

That’s the argument of Rainer Crone, editor of “Stanley Kubrick Drama & Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950,” a collection of pictures the director made when he worked for Look. Crone begins by quoting Siegfried Kracauer, the film theoretician, to the effect that the photographer’s loyalty to realistic portrayal -- the most basic property of the medium -- is ever in conflict with his “formative” impulse, the desire to arrange reality to make a philosophical or aesthetic point. This creates an “alienating” effect in both the lensman and his work. This takes Crone toward a consideration of Bertolt Brecht’s famous pursuit of that effect in the theater. He held that audiences should not be encouraged to identify with stage characters but rather should be made to think of their activities with clarifying objectivity. I have no doubt that this theory influenced Kubrick’s movie practices (or fed his natural impulse toward chilly, minimal imagistic narrative), and his Look gig surely bent him in that direction.

Still, I’m dubious about Crone’s presentation of this material. I worked at Look as a writer a few years after Kubrick left, my job largely consisting of helping the photographers fake or distort reality by arranging and lighting pictures that demonstrated the publication’s fatuous slogan, “The Exciting Story of People.” What we were doing was making short, silent, motionless, unconscious parodies of movie documentaries. I don’t think we achieved an “alienation” effect on our readers -- rather the opposite, I believe, since we were always striving for the upbeat -- but the job sure alienated me; I lasted for only about two years.

Crone also insists that Kubrick’s work had a certain sociological import, which I also doubt. It is somewhat better than the Look average, but he still was shooting showgirls, movie starlets, racetrack habitues and teen lovers. These pictures have a certain formal interest, but they really don’t say anything useful about postwar America, since we were essentially creating lies about it. And by presenting these photos without their original text blocks or captions, which at least imparted a little narrative coherence, Crone forces them to be judged as abstract -- and, alas, routine -- compositions, unworthy of their pompous presentation in this handsome volume. Still, he does trigger some interesting reflections on the unsolved mystery of Stanley Kubrick, that self-made enigma. And that’s always a worthwhile occupation. *