10 Unapparent Heirs to Stanley Kubrick in Film

Stanley Kubrick died on March 7, 1999. His death and the release of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, in the same year, in a sense summed up the history of 20th-century cinema. Yes, the old cinema ended quickly, but both viewers and filmmakers willingly took Kubrick’s filmography into the new millennium. His reputedly cool outlook (or the opaque sense of his cinema), his technological sophistication and tireless innovation, his genre variety, as well as his wit and desire to stay in control, have become benchmarks for a number of key auteurs who have become classics in the beginning of the 21st century. So it can be argued that Kubrick (with reservations, of course) continues to film 25 years after his death. Here are at least 10 directors who can be convicted of conscious or unconscious Kubrickianism.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

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Christopher Nolan

(“Interstellar”, “Oppenheimer”)

Christopher Nolan, who presented a restored 70mm copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey at Cannes in 2018, has long been suspected of being obsessed with Kubrick’s cinematic legacy, but he is less an heir than a sincere admirer, paying tribute not so much to content as to scale. At the same time, of course, certain elements of Kubrick’s universe are easy to detect in many of Nolan’s works. If Interstellar brings together Tarkovsky and Kubrick in arbitrary proportions, then Oppenheimer seems to draw thematically on Dr. Strangelove (putting on a straight face), and Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight is impossible without Alex from A Clockwork Orange. . The technological innovation of Nolan’s big auteur thrillers and the author’s pretentiousness mark him out as a diligent viewer of The Shining, a film in which clever form drapes dietetic content. By the way, just recently the director announced his desire to make a horror film.

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Lars von Trier

(“Breaking the Waves”, “Nymphomaniac”)

A common quote from a long-ago Lars von Trier interview: “Watching Barry Lyndon is pure pleasure, like eating very good soup.” As one of the wittiest, most consistent and influential directors of the last 30 years, the postmodernist Trier has too many cinematic fathers for the author of Barry Lyndon to be said to have been a decisive influence. Bergman and Tarkovsky are perhaps much more important. But Stanley Kubrick made a great Sunday dad. With him, Trier was able to share his love of 18th-century literature, learning soft, caustic irony and visual sophistication. The main and obvious evidence of the influence of “Barry Lyndon” on Trier is the Dane’s habit of dividing films into chapters, prefacing them with baroque voice-over annotations, as was the case in “Breaking the Waves” or “Dogville”. Or the advertising colorfulness of the depressive trilogy “Antichrist”, “Melancholia”, “Nymphomaniac”.

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Paul W.S. Anderson

(“Shopping”, “Through the Horizon”)

Usually, other Andersons are named among Kubrick’s direct heirs: Wes Anderson, who loves symmetry so much, or Paul Thomas Anderson, the author of There Will Be Blood and The Master. But heritage, when it comes to art, is rarely transferred by right – most often it is taken without asking. Director of Mortal Kombat and the great trash series Resident Evil, husband of Milla Jovovich, Paul W.S. Anderson is the perfect example of this. A native of the outskirts of Newcastle came from television to big cinema with his debut “Shopping”, in which young hooligans honestly cosplayed the characters from “A Clockwork Orange” (Jude Law portrayed someone like Alex). And Anderson’s “Through the Horizon” seems to be a curious and at the same time effective mix of “A Space Odyssey” and “The Shining” – Sam Neill in his madness is no worse than Jack Nicholson. Yes, Kubrick’s cheerful self-proclaimed nephew did not declare his deep spiritual kinship with him, but he was never shy about using his silverware.

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James Gray

(“The Lost City of Z”, “To the Stars”)

The well-educated, intelligent Brighton Beach singer, patriarchal values ​​and family contradictions, at first glance looks almost nothing like Kubrick. His key films are quiet family stories, buried in the urban environment that the director knows well: the main events in his films happen in the neighborhood or in the kitchen. However, two works stand out significantly from the series of these home stories – an account of a journey to the edge of the ecumene from the beginning of the 20th century, “The Lost City of Z,” in which Gray tells the story of British explorers who disappeared in the Amazon, and the grandiose space adventure “To the Stars,” where the hero Brad Pitta travels to the edge of the solar system to meet his father. Both films’ routes reference A Space Odyssey. Before putting his science-fiction film into production, Gray confessed his love for Kubrick’s masterpiece, citing Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” as the primary source. Is it any wonder that the real “black obelisk” in his version is the soul of another person. It’s still dark.

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Jonathan Glaser

(“Be in My Shoes,” “Zone of Interest”)

Jonathan Glazer came to big cinema from advertising and music videos. Filmed for Radiohead, Massive Attack, Nick Cave. Perhaps this can explain the spectacular impenetrability of his work. Glazer’s stylistic dependence on Kubrick began to be discussed seriously after the release of Walk in My Skin, a surreal story of a seductive alien procurer of human protein wandering around England in search of unattached men. There are not many formal reasons to compare the styles of Kubrick and Glaser, but both are united by the ability to magnetize and hold the viewer’s gaze—an abstract sense of the strange that their cinema conveys. The scene of the alien’s birth performed by Scarlett Johansson in its psychedelia is quite comparable to astronaut Bowman’s journey through the Star Gate in the finale of “Odyssey”. If we talk about plot and thematic roll calls, we can’t help but recall last year’s Glaser’s film “Zone of Interest,” which tells about the daily life of the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp. Kubrick probably could have filmed something similar if he had not closed his project “The Aryan Papers” after the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.”

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David Fincher

(“Gone Girl”)

Another newcomer to cinema from the world of music videos and advertising, David Fincher, like Kubrick, always dreamed of complete directorial control over his works. And, importantly, he often achieved this control, despite the opposition of large studios. Of the modern directors, Fincher most closely resembles Kubrick as a fierce perfectionist. However, it is not only visual care, the ability to work with literary primary sources, or an obsession with power on the set and in the editing room that allows us to see Fincher as a successor to Kubrick. There is continuity here at the level of tone, especially when it comes to depicting love affairs. With their intonation, the scenes from married life in Gone Girl are noticeably reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut or even Lolita – perhaps none of the modern directors manages to talk about black holes in the place of extinguished passion with such icy ruthlessness.

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Sam Mendes

(“Marines”, “1917”)

You don’t have to be a movie buff to recognize echoes of Full Metal Jacket in Sam Mendes’s Jarhead. Both films have a two-part structure that divides the narrative into virtually equal chapters – training and war (a little later Fyodor Bondarchuk will construct his “Ninth Company” in a similar way) – both force the main characters, Marines, to recite idiotic chants about their native rifle, both are only partly a political statement (in both cases, incorrigible human nature is more important than the current political situation). The inventive Mendes is clearly delighted with Kubrick’s style. This was confirmed by his other film about the war – shot in a simulated single shot, “1917”. Kubrick, who was later obsessed with the Steadicam in the late 1950s, of course, could not even dream of modern camera technology for his “Paths of Glory,” which, however, does not prevent this film from remaining today one of the strongest statements on the theme of the First World War.

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Quentin Dupieux

(“Change your face”)

An American schoolboy with the French name Blaise, who served seven years in a mental hospital for the murder of his classmates, is released. A friend meets him at the gates of the correctional facility, who explains that life has changed fantastically over the past years. Now street hooligans drink from 0.33 bottles not beer, but milk; the baseball swelled and became square; and in order to be a normal guy, Blaise will have to change his face – fix his chin. It is difficult to say with certainty whether Dupieux read Burgess’s novel or watched Kubrick’s film, but the influence of A Clockwork Orange on this film by the French absurdist is undeniable. But even if “Change Your Face” had not been in Dupieux’s filmography, the master of conceptual comedy would definitely have found a place on this list. Dupieux’s inherent paradoxical sense of humor smacks too much of Kubrick. If it were possible to imagine a remake of Dr. Strangelove in modern circumstances, then the director of Mandibles and Smoking Causes Cough would be the one to make it.

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Alfonso Cuaron

(“Gravity”)

Mexican Alfonso Cuaron is a director of an incredibly wide range and in this sense is comparable to Stanley Kubrick. He can easily handle both compact human stories and large-scale fiction. But “Gravity” is a special story. The dialogue, or rather, the argument with “A Space Odyssey” is already laid out at the level of the title: Kubrick’s film is about the path into the unknown, and Cuarón’s is about the umbilical cord of gravity, which reliably pulls a person to the Earth, where he belongs. The visual rhymes are countless; The ending is especially spectacular, in which Sandra Bullock’s character crawls out of the water like some kind of ancient lobe-finned fish. The technological innovation of Cuarón, who made his film for the then fashionable theatrical 3D, also looks like a touching homage to Kubrick.

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Nicolas Winding Refn

(“Bronson”, “Drive” and “Valhalla: The Viking Saga”)

The emotional frostbite inherent in all of Refn’s heroes, without exception, certainly brings his works closer to “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Shining” and “A Space Odyssey.” It’s probably not worth talking about Refn’s inherent visual sophistication. Yes, by successfully peeling away the thin layer of humanity from his characters with the help of neon, glossy pictures and a synthetic soundtrack, Refn is in some ways likened to Kubrick the entomologist, but something tells me that the Dane’s nods towards the classic do not carry an essential load. Refn is more of a poser and a fashionista, and his Kubrickianism is nothing more than an element of the general cargo cult, the members of which are almost all modern directors, maniacally working to make a deafening impression on the viewer. Sometimes it seems that if you shoot like Kubrick and regularly send greetings to his fans, you can one day climb onto his high pedestal. This is a touching, warm, human delusion in its own way.

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