If you had to pick a single figure to represent the concept of the film auteur, you could do much worse than Stanley Kubrick. That’s not to call him the greatest director who ever lived, nor even to call his body of work the greatest in cinema. But no filmography more clearly bears the stamp of a single presiding intelligence across various eras, genres, and styles. On one level, Kubrick never made the same movie twice. On another, each is but a facet of the larger project of rendering on film his ever more aesthetically immaculate, ever less comforting worldview, one that encompasses both Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, both Lolita and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For that and other reasons, Kubrick’s filmography has long occupied a peculiar position in cinema culture. Despite having provided generations of moviegoers their introduction to the “art house,” it also repays the most serious degrees of engagement and scrutiny. Somehow, as Lewis Bond puts it in the recorded Twitch stream above, Kubrick has remained both cinema’s gateway drug and its “final boss.”
You may know Bond’s name — or more likely, recognize his voice — from the many film-related video essays of his (under the banners of Channel Criswell, The Cinema Cartography, and now The House of Tabula) we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, including an exegesis of Kubrick he made nearly a decade ago. It says something that even someone as auteur-obsessed for as long as he’s been can’t resist another trip to the well.
Over the two-hour course of his stream, Bond discusses each and every one of Kubrick’s films while ranking them against each other. It will hardly provoke much controversy that he starts at the bottom with the ramshackle thriller Fear and Desire, the debut feature that even Kubrick himself attempted to strike from the record. What really gets cinephiles talking are the relative merits of the pictures higher up the list: Does The Shining transcend horror, or Dr. Strangelove transcend comedy? Is the sensationalism of A Clockwork Orange or the stateliness of Barry Lyndon to be counted for or against those films? Is Eyes Wide Shut a late masterpiece or, as some thought in 1999, a late mess? Bond jokes that his is the objectively correct ranking of Kubrick’s filmography, and perhaps it does align with critical consensus on many points. But few film-lovers will be entirely free of the temptation to watch through it and judge again for themselves.
Related content:
How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hardest Film Kubrick Ever Made”
Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective
Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films: The First and Only List He Ever Created
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
