On several occasions, always with the same argumentation, Stanley Kubrick was attacking Eisenstein: allegedly, the Russian master's films have a great style, but their content is 'stupid'. Why this deception strategy? What does Kubrick want to cover up here, what does passive aggression try to mask, what kind of relationship does he want to erase? A relationship of deepest recognition, fundamental matching, great familiarity.
Because, in many things, Kubrick is the closest to Eisenstein, in methodology, in conception mise-en-scène, first of all, in the absolute dominance of film as art, as a setting, as a visual spectacle, over narration, 'content' and external obligations, usually referential (which should not be narrowly interpreted in terms of the problematic nature of realistic description within strictly formalistic procedures).
As with Eisenstein, and with Kubrick mise-en-scène was put in the foreground (later it will be visible also in superiority authorsignature, the author's sign that determines the semantic component of films), he 'violently' inscribes scenes, he demands that all representation ultimately return to him in order to once again emphasize his competences, his reach. With both directors, mimesis is both depleted and enriched as it is made congenial with the autonomous process of cinematic inscription.
If we need to talk about the difference, it is found in opposing contexts: while Eisenstein's avant-garde intention, as well as not belonging to a commercially understood film, meant that the process would almost automatically be able to go to its 'unnatural' extremes and excesses postulated in the 'militant' (or revolutionary ) of the predominance of the frame as a spatial, topographical, iconographical and dramatic location, until then Kubrick's approach was more evolutionary and 'mimicry' impregnated, still realized within industrial imperatives.
In other words, the radicality of Kubrick's staging was reflected in the premeditative character of the framing, in the 'disciplining' of the material, in the signifying fullness of the image, even when the scenography was 'empty', reduced to the basic elements required by the shaping of fiction. The director's shot was 'perfect' and hence sterile, distantly cold, as there was always a distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic universes.
This, however, did not imply the impossibility for the viewer to "live" in what was shown to him (for example, the infinity of the cosmos in 2001 is palpable, the influence of horror in The Shining comprehensive, contemplation of melodrama in Barry Lyndon far-reaching, war hell in Full Metal Jacket visceral, sexual anxiety in Eyes Wide Shut permeating), but precisely the amplification and analytical sharpening of the awareness of transcription and translation (from one medium to another, from one author's worldview to Kubrick's direct possession) that the film must accomplish in its transcending intention.
With so much attention and effort, with so much dislocated, almost Heideggerian care about profile and visual completion mise-en-scène, how much space is left for human drama in the author's visualization?
Let's take for example how the traditional center of sentiments functions in the internal genre dialectic. In all three of the director's war films, the cathartic mediator for the accumulated internal contradictions is the figure of a woman, a sudden presence in the environment of internal and external destruction: in excessively masculinist universes, the feminine agent resolves the narrative flow, interrupts or ends the action to which it does not 'relate'. U Fear and Desire the captive offers, briefly, the possibility of romantic escapism and potential cultivation in a wild 'environment' only to be killed by the most vulnerable soldier, which materializes the imprisonment of the whole group within a fable that cannot have a positive outcome.
U Paths of Glory, on the other hand, is a German prisoner deus ex machina, a reminder that humanity has not (yet) been lost in war, an incredibly gentle reaffirmation of identification with the victim, recognition of one's own fate in another's (even without the help of the transparency of language), which ensures that violent determination can be interrupted, at least for a short time. But this conclusion, considering Kubrick's development of anthropological issues in subsequent works, simply could not survive. And that's why Full Metal Jacket, in a way, the director's reply to himself, a revision of previous optimism, a dark correction of an 'unnecessary' emotional 'excess': the helpless women from Fear and Desire i Paths of Glory, women who, among other things, represented otherness at least at the level of (failure) to communicate, ultimately transformed into a Vietnamese sniper who kills several American soldiers.
Kubrick's clinical 'aseptic' frames (scenography, design, modernist architecture, cold colors...) are also a reflection of his puritanical predispositions. In the director's films, sexuality is always under the sign of a negative description: it is linked to violence in Killer's Kiss, perverse in Lolita, the source of ideological hysteria in Dr. Strangelove, completely absent in 2001 in order to ensure a new beginning, indistinguishable from rape and aggression in A Clockwork Orange, an instrument of social advancement and subjugation in Barry Lyndon and the medicine offered ('Fuck' as an answer to marital and other problems) which may have been poison all along Eyes Wide Shut.
The author's stylistic 'coldness' implies that the ideality of the form will not be 'tainted' by transgressive content. If violence is one of Kubrick's obsessive themes, then - regardless of the SF framework - 2001 suddenly occupies a central place in the director's oeuvre. Here the destruction is given in its full (evolutionary) completion: violence is immanent in anthropomorphic apes (moreover, civilizational progress takes place by perfecting the ability to act violently with the help of tools), and artificial intelligence, i.e. technique and technology (computer HAL), as well as 'alien ' being with which it ends 2001.
The human condition is a labyrinth with no exit: wherever we go, in whatever direction we head, we come across a dead end. Kubrick's adaptation of the novel Anthony Burgessa, A Clockwork Orange, dramatizes this insight in a spectacular way, as an orgy of destruction and a cycle of aggression. Alex (M) is both the subject and the object of violence, the perpetrator and the one who suffers. The Shining is about the internal destruction of a family, but at the same time, perhaps even more, it is about architecture, about the space through which the camera circles and searches for an object of unspeakable horror, about the flood of blood that threatens to fill all spatial coordinates and thus the frame itself.
Kubrick's films are too symmetrical, too structurally focused on themselves, to even have time to fall under humanistic illusions, too compositionally focused to be burdened by the possibility of some kind of sentimentalistic recuperation.
In short, if we exclude the ending Paths of Glory and the death of the hero's son in Barry Lyndon, in the director's oeuvre, emotions are fundamentally lacking or absent, which are replaced by their most unpleasant counterpoints: irony, cynicism, an 'objective-distancing' view, a perverse delight in the numerous noted anthropological failures. Kubrick is a nihilist precisely to the extent that he implicitly compares art to life (whereby criticism i enjoyment become inseparable), in which he focuses energy on mise-en-scène which cannot but signal, indicate and embody the disproportion and imbalance between the film and the human condition. It's just in his aesthetics, the sequence of turning off the computer Hal - while he sings more and more slowly: Daisy, Daisy/ give me your answer do/I’m half crazy/all for the love of you - could be the most touching scene of the entire opus.
Bonus video:
