Although more than ten years since his death, film-maker Stanley Kubrick retains a mythical status in cinema. His films span a variety of genres, locations and eras. Lolita, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket are all milestones of film. Yet, since 1962, all of his films were made in Britain. The project is a visual archaeology of the landscapes and architectures that Kubrick transformed for incorporation into his films. The locations are presented as...
more »Although more than ten years since his death, film-maker Stanley Kubrick retains a mythical status in cinema. His films span a variety of genres, locations and eras. Lolita, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket are all milestones of film. Yet, since 1962, all of his films were made in Britain. The project is a visual archaeology of the landscapes and architectures that Kubrick transformed for incorporation into his films. The locations are presented as empty stages waiting for ghosts of the cinematic past to restore them to life.
A fear of flying (despite having a pilot's license) and a dislike of Hollywood meant that whether his films were set in Asia, America or the future, Kubrick made do with locations only a short distance from his adopted home of St Albans, Hertfordshire. Famously, Beckton in East London doubled for Hue in Vietnam in Full Metal Jacket. Equally fascinating is his choice of 1970s London architecture, which was transformed into the setting for a dystopian nightmare in A Clockwork Orange. His choices turned the mundane into the sublime - a collection of disparate corners of Britain united by one filmmaker's vision.
This is one of the most detailed presentations of Kubrick's film locations, undertaken over a number of months and utilized extensive research from Kubrick's own archive matching on set photographs, call sheets and other original material. It shows interiors, buildings, architectural details and landscapes Kubrick incorporated into his vision. The choices were not arbitrary. The project shows the painstaking effort Kubrick put into his location choices. For A Clockwork Orange (1971), Production Designer John Barry and Kubrick spent two months agonising over ten year's worth of architectural magazines selecting appropriate locations. For his 18th century-based masterpiece Barry Lyndon (1975), Designer Ken Adam nearly had a breakdown, so demanding was Kubrick's pursuit of perfection
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