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Written and produced by Jan Harlan. Associate producer Anthony Frewin. Edited by Melanie Viner Cuneo. 141 minutes. Warner Bros. 2001.
After seeing [A Clockwork Orange], I realized it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.
-Luis Bunuel
The image is memorable: Atop a 20-foot tall camera platform, at ease in a side-saddle perch, sits Stanley Kubrick. He's surveying the chaos below of yet another day's shooting of the epic Spartacus. Yet, high above it all, he's as cool and casual as if he were enjoying a tea-time break.
This photograph is just one of hundreds of still images, along with fascinating behindthe-scenes filmmaking footage in Jan Harlan's new documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, that reveal Kubrick as a wry observer of and patient participant in the madness that is the filmmaking process. Far from the adjectives that are constantly applied to him-"reclusive," "obsessive," and "eccentric" quoted from newspaper in the documentary's opening montage-this view of Kubrick emphasizes his identity not just as an admittedly relentlessly driven filmmaker (the viewer loses count of the number of images depicting him viewing the world through a lens viewfinder), but also as a devoted family man with a wife and three children and a soft-spoken friend and respected colleague of many. Apart from a few acerbic remarks from Shelley Duvall concerning tensions with Kubrick on the set of The Shining, there is scarcely a discouraging word heard from the galaxy of collaborators, friends. and relatives.
And who could dispute them? Intercut into a roughly chronological survey of Kubrick's life, narrated by actor Tom Cruise, are anecdotes and...