Poster Gallery - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) / 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

US POSTER - This artwork or variants of it  was also utlised in Italian, Danish, Japanese, Australian, Greek, Spanish, Yugolsavian, West German, French and Swedish promotional campaigns. 

US POSTER #2 - This artwork or variants of it was also utilised in British and Spanish promotional campaigns. 

US POSTER #3

US POSTER #4

Lobby Card Collection - Barry Lyndon (1975)

 

Lobby Card Collection - A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Lobby Card Collection - Lolita (1962)

This latest instalment of the Lobby Card Collection features Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladamir Nabakov's scandalous Lolita  I was only able to find one set of lobby cards for this film on my travels, nevertheless I hope you enjoy them.

 

 

Lobby Card Collection - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece needs no introduction from me. Kubrick is a true celluloid hero of mine, and his epic grandiose tale of the origins of mankind remains a landmark in cinematic history. Here is a selection of lobby cards released to promote the film in cinemas.

 

Stanley Kubrick - Title Screens

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Dir: STANLEY KUBRICK
Country: UK/USA

aka:
Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

I should start this review by saying I’m not a fan of Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, which was first published in 1962. I first encountered it as an impressionable seventeen year old at college (this experience seems to be a very common rites of passage, at least in the UK) and I found it to be a reactionary and highly conservative work of Orwellian propaganda. Beneath the layers of linguistic game playing (his use of slang language for the delinquent gang is more irritating than anything else) there beats a right wing heart. This element never totally leaves Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay, especially in the camera’s adoration of the narcissistic fascist pretensions of the films anti-hero Alex. The politics of the film are more ambiguous than the novel though, but both share an interest in stylistic radicalism. In both film and book this helps to mask the socio/political intensions of both authors. However the synergy between Kubrick’s visual and aural experimentation provides a resonance that makes certain set piece sequences far more troubling than anything that appears in the novel.

Stanley Kubrick Poster Gallery

Stanley Kubrick is one of the few (if not the only) filmmaker to make me feel stupid and intellectually inadequate. My first encounter with his films as a 16 year old weened on a steady diet of mindless Hollywood blockbusters and dumb franchise horror made me aware for the first time of the intellectual potential of cinema. The film was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and never has a film made me feel so small and insignificant. The sense of space and the eternity of the stars was somehow deeply disturbing too me, and the philosophical propositions only something I could feebly grasp at. The questions the film raised, its formal audaciousness, its method of storytelling, were all things that would eventually lead to me studying film up to and including post-graduate level. I only have a phd left, and I have Kubrick's film to partly thank for this. I could also lay my student debt at the pod bay doors of The Discovery, but I dont think I'll get much financial assistance from HAL. For doing this once I admired Kubrick greatly, but he did it again many years later. In my late 20's I found myself buried deep within a dissertation for my Masters.  I was in Nottingham, it was grey and bleak and the rains were unending it seemed. I'd ran out of Malt Whiskey, my internet connection was on the blink and my motivation had vanished into a black hole. I then did something I'd been putting off for over ten years...I watched Barry Lyndon (1975). This was a major undertaking for me because the film runs for 180 minutes (my perfect film length is 100 minutes). I was once again captivated, but this time by the stillness and beauty of the images - each shot like a gorgeous painting. I once again felt small, but this time it was history and the fleeting passage of time that disturbed me. Suddenly my dissertation become an insignificant irrelevance, and I realied that more value lay within a single composition in Barry Lyndon than anything I could write about it. This poster gallery celebrates the films of Stanley Kubrick - a director who will forever be a part of the cinematic landscape I tread...Enjoy!

Fear and Desire (1953)

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The Shining (1980)

Dir: STANLEY KUBRICK
Country: UK/USA

I will open this review by saying that I don’t like Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977). It is held in very high regard, and I can understand to a certain extent, why that is. But to compare it to Salem’s Lot (1975) the novel that preceded it and The Stand (1978) the novel that followed it is like comparing horse manure to ice cream. I think even at this point it was possible to see through the pop culture murk to what lay beneath - in this case a pretty standard haunted house narrative. The key difference here is a lack of restraint in plot construction and an over-reliance on generic tropes. Although King’s novels have always suffered from this, I feel The Shining suffers more than most - it is King’s most accessible novel, and as a result his least adventurous. ESP, ghosts, and haunted buildings are the clichéd pegs King chooses to hang his principal themes of parental/patriarchal failure, family, and alcoholism on. The family unit in King’s novel is challenged, but it essentially survives the threat. It emerges at the end redeemed, but not without a note of caution. In other words this is essentially a tale of familial conservatism. By contrast Stanley Kubrick (who along with co screenwriter Diane Johnson improve upon the novel immeasurably) constructs a vision that is far more bitter and cynical. The family doesn’t survive the events of The Overlook Hotel. Instead a broken family wearily trudge through the snow to an uncertain future. Kubrick and Johnson offer a more radical take on the material and use the iconography and conventions of the horror genre to subvert and challenge one of our most scared ideological institutions.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Dir: STANLEY KUBRICK
Country: UK/USA

The very nature and fabric of science-fiction is visionary, and as such it is a genre with an inbuilt sense of spirituality. This vision refers not only to the awesome cinematic spectacle rendered by advances in special effects, but also highly symbolic and allegorical visions of future or alternative worlds. Worlds that more often that not dramatise the effects of our behaviour in contemporary society. Science-fiction films may feel far removed from our reality, but they are implicitly connected to the here and now. Whether it be utopian visions, or dystopian (my personal favourite) it becomes very important in cerebral science-fiction to marry the visual and stylistic spectacle to the allegorical underpinnings of the plot. The necessity is for a seamless connection. It’s essential to create a set of meanings and values that work within the spectacle to such an extent that the audience does not question the reality of the future vision.