Stanley Kubrick, the phantom filmmaker known only in a handful of photographs. The images were oddly appropriate even though they were all the same, because every photo betrayed the concentration behind those eyes, and there was little to read on his face apart from a demanding intensity and a slight bemusement. He’d get older, a bit heavier, now sporting a beard, but that was always the expression. It matched everything we read about Kubrick, including that epochal statement, “I wouldn’t agree or disagree with your interpretation or any other. I believe the film speaks for itself.” The films spoke for everything. All Stanley would leave you with would be that gaze, that soft focus grin.

Now Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother in law and producer, presents us with new images of Kubrick in his documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. The documentary has screened at film festivals and is now available in the Stanley Kubrick Collection, Warner Home Video’s reissue of the DVD box set, this time featuring supervised high definition transfers and a whole host of enhancements that goes some way towards silencing the much deserved scorn poured on their first attempt at a box set. Although I’d go as far as saying that everyone who gives a two cent damn about movies should have this collection, Harlan’s film alone makes the box set worth its price if you have any interest in moviemaking as an art.

Harlan gives us one more image to add to our collective consciousness, just as singular and iconic as anything Kubrick dreamt up. It’s the image of a young boy, smiling, cherubic; those eyes luminously declaring the intensity of their curiosity upon the world. Stanley Kubrick a child, who would’ve thought? But like so much else with Kubrick, there’s the overwhelming sense of possibility in that image. Someone has finally come to right the misconceptions and silence the critics, to drown them with actual footage and remembrances from those who in years past have criticized him. But I have a feeling that it won’t be easy, that it will be next to impossible, because Stanley Kubrick stands as a threat to the common currency of art in America: mediocrity. And facing up to an honest portrait of him, humanizing him and understanding that everything we know about any public figure is probably wrong is more terrifying than facing up to the enormous challenge he has set for us.

Confessional autobiography makes a point of continually noting firsts. A litany of virginities lost, innocences forsaken. First sip of alcohol, first glimpse at porn, first time you recognized death was going to claim you. Kubrick admirers share a first – the moment their cinematic cherry was popped, their first close encounter with art. Art writ large, untainted and mysterious, transcendent and sublime. To make it short, then: sitting in my parents bedroom, KING FM broadcasting the soundtrack simultaneously so that home viewers could witness 2001: A Space Odyssey in stereo, because mono was just too mundane for something like this. The sound out of the Radio Shack FM radio must’ve been rattled and distorted, because my parents told me to turn it down. I was trying to saturate my senses through overkill amounts of input. I was seven or eight years old.

Time lost meaning. I was sitting in my parent’s bedroom (and it’s funny what you remember, what banalities are crystal clear but the really important things distort and shape shift. The magazines on my parent’s dresser. The flower pattern on the blanket. The Formica television standee). But I was also in Africa 15 million years ago, I was in a future that to some degree has happened or will still happen. And then I went to the place, some place Jung knew existed and hunted for. Dave Bowman in the hotel room of infinity, watching himself grow older until…

I love movies, I love them bad or good, incompetent or brilliant, and that’s the truth. I’ll sit through any old crap. I still, now numbed by the sheer mass of commentary and reportage and stupidity and marketing, can find a moment in a movie that transports, or aspires. But there’s never been another moment in any movie since that one with the same effect. It would be impossible, because it was the first; it was the moment when I would forsake drugs, religion, a normal life. I wouldn’t need them. It was the moment that marked out my obsessions, made them run concurrent; my awareness of the possibilities life possessed. There would be so much to find out, so much to question, so much to learn. Beyond the infinite beckoned.

… Dave Bowman died. He transcended.

My heart soared.

My soul seared.

So the year 2001 comes along and I’m running down a street in London to catch the last showing of a new 70mm restored print of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m running a fever, some nasty virus percolating through the city. It doesn’t matter. I’m here to revisit, and I don’t think there’s another filmmaker who invites repeat viewings more than Kubrick, who demands it. Sometimes it’s love at first sight. Sometimes it’s problematic and you go away puzzled, conflicted by the morass of complex emotions and thoughts (and emotions in filmmaking are easy, they say. But how many can you think of actually made you think?) you’ve swallowed. Life and time changes you and you reconfigure the stories to fit into your own experience. I went to revisit those moments in my childhood, because like most in my generation my first experience with the great movies was through television or video.

We take our seats and a voice intones over the P.A. that there will be an intermission lasting one minute thirty eight seconds. Could anyone be behind that exactitude other than Kubrick? They have restored the overture. Ligeti fills the enormous theater. The lights dim so slowly that you dissolve from the world of traffic and noise outside, immersion into a body of water. Just as real darkness comes and you can almost feel your pupils expanding the movie begins and the planets align.

I will spare you more descriptions of my love for the movie. What I got this time had little to do with the movie itself, which was every bit as potent and visionary as I remembered. What I got this time was a sensation about death, about the passage of time. Kubrick’s death intermingled with something we’ve lost with movies. A death of sensation.

We have utterly forgotten the sheer power of movies as a cultural force.

Now, I’m not joining any trendy intellectual and pathological school of criticism that says movies are dying, oh lordy, oh respected cultured peoples, save us from the encroaching specter of changing technology and just look at the crap they shovel at us these days. They’ve been saying that since the fifties. Most movies suck royally. They have since Muybridge started putting together one picture after another. Movie lovers are tainted by a curse, because when they’re good, they’re oh so good. But most of them are bad. We move along, fix to fix, hoping we’ll mainline the really good shit. It just happens that the major cartels seem to have a lot of bad shit out there. That has never changed, because no matter what doom rings out from the critics, every year you’ll find a few movies that are worthy of praise, and that’s a minor miracle in itself.

What’s changed is we as an audience. No one spoke during the movie. No one snickered to show their detached irony and understanding of camp, how above they were the lofty pretensions (and yes, 2001 is full of them, but the best kind). Not one mobile phone bleeped or chimed, there to remind us it’s only a movie. The audience held its breath collectively, maybe uncomfortably at the silence. We dreamed consensually, communally. That’s what has died. Movies are like gods and religions, they founder without belief and conviction. The process has become so scrutinized and become a part of the marketing of movies that there is no mystery, no more seizures of how-did-they-do-that wonder. Before a movie is released it seems to have been judged by geek jury on the Internet, the making of special has been taped for forensic analysis later, and we’ve been taught to carry so much baggage into the theater, so much prejudice. I wouldn’t want to go back in time and take back anamorphically enhanced DVDs from ever appearing, because time marches on and things do change. Maybe there is a form of nostalgia that isn’t sentimental but rather angry because good things do vanish. It is much more economical for me to watch movies at home where no one’s going to talk with my calibrated Dolby Digital sound system, but…

(Did you know that when you watch movies projected on film you spend half the time in darkness? Because of the shutter speed of the projector, for every frame you see you see a concurrent frame of darkness. There are studies that suggest the effect may produce alpha waves in the brain. It may be more like dreaming than we think.)

What’s changed is our level of cynicism, which I refuse to accept is Hollywood’s fault. It is our own, the assignation of blame lies squarely with us, because it is indicative of our attitude to culture and art as a whole. It is our own stupid choices that have reinforced what has happened to movies today and what we lost with Kubrick’s death – the marriage of the mainstream and the work of art. We have reduced box office tallies to something akin to baseball box scores. We hate a movie if it cost money, if it doesn’t make any money, if it makes a lot of money. Our film journalists go to junkets and discuss money, and write about money.

William Gibson, the novelist, once told me something that I could never get over, because he had nailed in one single Qwik-E-Mart transaction the essential sea change between movie viewers today and those in 2001’s heyday. Back in the early 90s, he was in Los Angeles, caught in the minor circle of hell that was dealing with studio executives to make the film adaptation of his short story Johnny Mnemonic more accessible to “the Gibson-impaired audience,” as one suit put it. He wandered into a convenience store for whatever, and a teenager behind the counter recognized him. Couldn’t have been more than 17 years old.

As someone who had written science fiction, this isn’t too unusual to be recognized. Science fiction fans tend to be obsessive and form a close knit, otaku-ized bunch. And Gibson has his obsessive fans, borderline stalkers. I’m sure he considers me one of them. But then the kid comes out with:

“William Gibson. You wrote Johnny Mnemonic. So how many gross points did your agent net you on that film deal?”

Hence, even the seventeen-year old convenience store clerks had been drilled enough by Entertainment Weekly and Entertainment Tonight and endless Entertainments devoted to making you feel like a part of Hollywood, that even they spoke like studio moguls now. And it makes me unbearably sad; in a way I’d be more comfortable with all the seventeen year olds in the world wearing out videotapes of Star Wars and Close Encounters, trying to find within the movie that had touched them in some way the intangible essence of it all, using their imaginations to figure out how storytelling and putting one picture after another works. But instead, they’ve become players, capital P Players, participants in the bullshit side of Hollywood, making bullshit artists of us all.

It is that same cynicism that informs our perceptions of Kubrick. His refusal to be a celebrity led to the birth of a separate celebrity, a doppleganger Kubrick that he seems to have been amused by, a creature of confused myth and misconception. We needed to reduce a complex figure into something more palatable, more in tune with our need to categorize. We’ve turned culture into an enormous high school with cliques and boundaries that mustn’t be transgressed, and Kubrick had to get in line. The real problem with Kubrick is that this thinking has pervaded what passes for film criticism today, and those who are supposed to be on the side of art cannot figure out what to do with him, other than scratch their heads at his movies and trade anecdotes about his lunacy (never, ever forget that for someone with such an enormous reputation Kubrick has consistently had a bad time with American critics). Watch them recoil in horror as Kubrick says privately and publicly that he believes filmmakers should strive to make successful movies that earn their money back. Watch the film snobs turn their noses up at the idea that Kubrick would ever associate himself with such a colossal sellout like Spielberg (yet they will go to see all his movies). Watch the scholars scurry for cover as they witness a filmmaker ban their own film (A Clockwork Orange was pulled from distribution in the UK and Ireland for 30 years, at Kubrick’s own insistence. He was disturbed by copycat crimes, press attention, and threats directed at his own family. The film society at my college in Ireland attempted to screen the film. The police turned up and confiscated it. The prohibition on the film has since been lifted following his death. It was hard for us as uppity college students to recognize that the filmmaker had a problem with it, not The Man).

Months before Kubrick’s death in 1999 all of London’s film scene was abuzz with innuendo and secondhand information about Eyes Wide Shut. A major newspaper ran a story about how Kubrick was having himself driven by a chauffeur to the set at 30 miles an hour, necessitating delays in shooting.

In 1984 Kubrick did his last public interview with Rolling Stone magazine. The writer was surprised to find that he drove a white Porsche. Kubrick remarked that he had heard the stories about his chauffeur, and even one that had him wearing a football helmet in the backseat. The story had been around in various configurations since the 60s, reiterated as evidence of his madness.

Nasty rumors made it across the Atlantic. As ridiculous as this sounds now that we’ve seen the movie, a story did the rounds that Harvey Keitel was replaced because he literally came on Nicole Kidman during a simulated sex scene. At least that one was ridiculous enough to never be mentioned again. I only bring it up to embarrass those film journalists who were stupid enough to print it. It goes a long way towards explaining the cold and confused reception to Eyes Wide Shut, which for my money was dismissed by most critics in the US for not being pornographic enough; which was entirely missing the point.

Hardly anyone said that the film was taking such a long time because Kubrick wanted to make things perfect; time is the greatest commodity and luxury when making a film, and instead of being in awe that an American filmmaker working in the studio system was allowed it, we were to view it as suspect, a sign of inhumanity.

The stories go on. They will be repeated in perpetuity. As Chrstiane Kubrick states in the film, he was ready to finally give some interviews, to address the ridiculousness surrounding him, just before his death. But I doubt that anyone would’ve paid much attention to what he would’ve said. I cannot imagine Kubrick fitting into today’s configuration of movie publicity, a massively engineered PR construct that doesn’t want any seriousness or admission that what’s being done is an enterprise other than simple entertainment and success. We were much more comfortable with the thought of Kubrick as HAL, a machine who attained such lofty heights through mechanical precision rather than dedication and humanity. I believe this is because it avoids a truth that’s hard to swallow. Kubrick’s work shows us just how lazy most of us are, content to let things slide, to accept half truths that are easy rather than admit the complexity of the world and comprehend how difficult it will be to make sense of it, how much hard work that entails.

Most of our great intellectual movements today, and the ones we recycle, like existentialism, suit us because they are fashionable and limited. They don’t ask too much of us other than to ascribe to a singular simplification of existence. Sartre remains trendy reading in cafes because he goes along with a look and a lifestyle, unfiltered cigarettes and public admiration. There is little to differentiate him from a style of pop music. Camus remains problematic, and taught in high schools (which is fine by me) because he refused to be labeled an existentialist, because he said suicide and capital punishment were intrinsically wrong. It’s the thinkers like that in the twentieth century we need to make absurd and reduce, because we can’t slip on their thought patterns like a leather jacket, the equivalent of buying our philosophy in one stop at Hot Topic.

Here is an artist who deigned to admit that war could be beautiful, that some of humankind’s greatness was derived from violence and conflict, that there will someday be an end to everything, that evil hid in the most innocent of facades, that nuclear annihilation was so ridiculous as to be funny, that the pathology of politics was every bit as twisted as the mind of a psychopath. None of these are easy truths to accept. I can’t remember where I read it, and I wish I did, because now I’m going to paraphrase badly: Kubrick once said something along the lines of we won’t get any better until we admit we have an intrinsic dark side. That Jungian shadow self absolutely existed, and we had to come to terms with it if we were ever going to get any better. But he also dared to say that you could come to terms with it, that monogamy was worth fighting for (which means true love exists, not the storybook kind, but a real kind that you have to work at and talk about a truly terrifying thought), that humanity was capable of extraordinary achievement and awareness, that the world was sooooooo worth looking at and experiencing.

The anecdotes are countless, unfounded and ridiculous. Biography being what it is, there would be a way to couterpoint each one, and certainly a way to back up the claims. Biography without the central figure’s own words creates a person who was all things to all people.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to speak to people who worked with Kubrick, and I’m sure I’ve annoyed them with my endless badgering, my need to know of what he was really like. I’ve since thrown in the towel, because he’s been described to me with every adjective known in the English language. My defense of the man will admit that he was eccentric, stubborn, difficult, manipulative, reclusive. But not to any of the ridiculous extremes stated above. Yes, they say, he was an extraordinary pain in the ass, someone who could be very difficult to work with. He was, I have been told, especially difficult with actors. I doubt Kubrick had much time for the mental games actors take part in and reflexively need, that consistent need for approval, but he was also a master of mental games and so if they indulged they had to be prepared for tangling with a master of the headfuck, a chess master. He was always direct with his camera crew, ridiculously demanding, but direct.

The reason most movies are mediocre is because people give up, the enterprise is too massive and painful to endure. Film students ascribe to the myth of Kubrick by worshipping another misconception: that he stood on high dictating how everything should be done, that he attained greatness by taking control of everything and not listening to anything anyone suggested. The truth seems to be that what really grated Kubrick’s collaborators was his never ending barrage of questioning. He wanted to know EVERYTHING. Every option, choice, and technique available he would pursue. He would not give up until the possibilities were all transparent. In that sense he was a true collaborationist (albeit not a socially gifted one) rather than a dictator; and something odd to discover is just how organic his process was, how things were not set in absolute stone in his head before shooting commenced. He discovered the movie as he was making it, which only a few filmmakers have ever had a chance to do. It runs inimical to the studio system.

Some may accuse Harlan’s documentary of hagiography, but nearly everything else told and written about Kubrick (with the prime exception Michael Herr’s incredibly moving defense of the man in his Vanity Fair articles, now collected in his book Kubrick – but few listened to that one loudly enough) is so extreme that Harlan’s film gives you enough evidence that even if you think it’s being too kind, at least it gives us a different viewpoint. We see Kubrick the human. One who adores and dotes on his daughters and seems to want them to know everything he does, who found a partner he could share his entire life with. A playful, mischievous Kubrick who smiles and cajoles and jokes, who constantly asks his friends questions, the biggest, simplest questions, the ones we’re told to discard once we enter the educational system (he once called Stephen King at 4 in the morning just to ask him if he believed in God; King mumbled yes, he hung up). Christiane mentions how emotionally pained he became researching the Holocaust for one of his other never made films, The Aryan Papers, and we get a direct glimpse at the human, caring Kubrick. “How can I even begin to tell people what I know?” Kubrick admitting defeat and honest horror at man’s inhumanity. She says she was relieved when he gave up the project. We see a voracious reader, self taught (and there’s something that I suspect really gets under the skin of some academics). We hear his voice, stunned by its gentleness, its humor. To those of us who in years past have ascribed Kubrick a faux godhood, it sets everything right. He sounds like a man, “some kind of a man,” as Orson Welles had Marlene Dietrich say; another director who had the unmistakable mark of genius and misconception surrounding him, and who was torn apart by the critical and academic community in America. At least, we see in Harlan’s film, Kubrick didn’t have to suffer the disgrace that we saddled upon Welles. Kubrick, for all intents and purposes, looks like he had a happy, fulfilling life. We should be proud that our system did at some point allow someone to get away with it all, instead of envious or petty.

In Harlan’s film Martin Scorcese also briefly attributes one of Kubrick’s best qualities to the fact he was American. An array of ridiculous reasons have been offered to note why Kubrick moved “in exile” to England, but now Harlan offers us another reason. He wanted to find a center of film production that wasn’t situated in the bullshit of Hollywood, and he had come to realize that the New York he grew up in and loved had long since passed away. He also didn’t want to uproot his children, away from their friends and their education. Now it seems rational and compassionate, and whether or not you accept it, it makes more sense than the usual explanations offered.

Regardless, we see Kubrick as something other than an American, an idea I’m not comfortable with because I think it has more to do with a nationality wanting to own his genius and what it wants from that. There are many stories that demonstrate Kubrick often found himself at odds with the working methods of British film crews (and you’ll have to take my word for it that there is a difference, not one of worse or better, just a different hierarchy and attitude). As Kubrick himself once said to Michel Ciment, he didn’t consider himself as being Austrian as his lineage was as diverse and scattered as most Americans are, despite having most of his roots in Austria. I’d say Kubrick was, if anything, a Jewish kid from the Bronx, and that says about all of it. The pride and intellectualism combined with the sense of social exclusion, with a bit of street smarts for good measure. We seem to distance ourselves from him for not choosing to make his home in the US; yet here’s another shocking revelation that is at odds with what Kubrick should’ve been – we find out he was a sports fanatic who had American football games taped and sent over to him.

What I believe remains very American about Kubrick is, as Scorcese says, his very clear presentation of themes, the simplicity and directness that lays at the heart of the intellectual rigors of his work. It is strikingly odd that such a visual director who seems to have more in common with the great directors of silent cinema would choose to adapt books that were linguistically some of the most advanced novels of the twentieth century. But are you ever in any doubt that A Clockwork Orange is an examination of free will and the conditioning we attempt to pursue through political means? Kubrick never bludgeons you with his themes, but they are there plain as day, suffused and interwoven into the complete work. Though our lack of irony makes us easy targets for ridicule in Europe, I agree that it is one of Kubrick’s greatest strengths and a product of his being American. The reason mysticism surrounds Kubrick in England might just be because he never went native like most expatriates do, he was forever a foreigner, he never lost that Brooklyn tweak in his voice, and there was a need to decomplexify that. Not so for America. We need to tear him down for our own limited reasons.

The real problem with Kubrick in America is that he cannot be easily categorized, pigeonholed, deconstructed. He defies our need to classify, to find an extreme and singular vision of the man and his work. We deny him because it almost seems that he just cannot be, he contravenes all of our cultural processes.

But that’s not the problem. It’s the solution. Harlan’s film goes a long way towards redressing those labels we’ve attached to him. He may remain unknowable, multifaceted, ambiguous (and maybe he wouldn’t have had it any other way), but no longer do we have to accept and believe those secondhand visions repeated as fact that have him as a cold, humorless, isolated monomaniac. We can accept the harsh truths in his movies about our own human nature, and we can accept harsh truths about Kubrick as a human being rather than as a celebrity or a totem. And I think what really gets under our skin and denies those thoughts from ever occurring is that Kubrick poses a threat to all the assumptions we have about art and artists in America. My study of Kubrick and his films leaves me with only a few concrete facts, which I share with you now.

You can be an American. You can be an artist. You can engage with the mainstream in a mass medium. You can retain your integrity. You can be provocative, challenging, disturbing, hopeful, intellectual, emotional. You can remain happily married and devoted to one partner. You can grow and change in the course of your life, find new ideas to play with, admit where you were wrong, grow softer and stronger with time. You can find a way to remain devoted to your work and your children. You can be a master of both technique and artistry, the two are not mutually exclusive. You can use voiceover if you feel like it, you can avoid the committee mentalities and narrowness of Hollywood yet still make Hollywood movies. You can be uncompromising, unflinching, visionary. And you can do all of this without the need for celebrity, without the need for vacuous self-congratulation, without the approval of the worst aspects of our culture.

Harlan’s film negated everything I held true about Kubrick. Another first moment, then: the moment I realized it was time to grow up, to put adolescence behind and to realize that it’s better to try for those things than to sell out in the worst possible way. Not to sell out to a corporation or for money, but to sell out to mediocrity and banal clichés we have about art and America.

The documentary ends emotionally, with the image of Kubrick as a child again. And goddamn we should mourn him, we should mourn the lies about him and we should mourn the fact that we’ll never have another movie from him, and here comes angry nostalgia again. We should be furious that we’ve become complacent and need our filmmakers to be celebrities, that we buy into the myriad of lies about movies today. But yes, the times have changed and there’s no going back, so mourn them, too. Think about the next change, one where we might look at the standard he set and try to rise up to it.

Steven Spielberg touchingly told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that he didn’t consider himself an artist; but Kubrick - he was an artist. The cynics might guffaw, but what an enormous compliment that is, what an incredible self-admission of humility. I still love movies, find so much richness in them. But there are probably no more works of art in the cinema, and Spielberg’s damn right; he was the last artist we had, maybe the last for a long time. You can have your installations and media terrorism and stylish novels and those people who make movies no one sees that push boundaries that aren’t even there to begin with. I want movies that challenge everything we expect of movies, every bit as beautiful and mysterious and timeless. Two years on from Kubrick’s passing, then, I propose a toast. To Stanley Kubrick, the last artist we had. May we all hope that someday, someone will be as fearless.