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“I haven’t come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.” Stanley Kubrick

The audio is selections taken from several interviews of Stanley Kubrick talking about one of his ambitions for the cinema experience. Combined with footage from silent films by Fritz Lang, Abel Gance, and Sergei Eisenstein. Combined with footage from television commercials from Michael Gondry and Johnathan Glazer. I wanted to include more, but in the end it looked better retaining a consistency of black and white.

The audio is my edit and the video presentation is mine also. I've long been fascinated by this idea. I've had the audio clip on my phone for a years because it inspires me a lot. In many ways, I think Eisenstein encapsulates much of what Kubrick is speaking of here. But we can also point towards Sergei Parajanov, even aspects of the films of Wong Kar-Wai, and even Nolan's Oppenheimer.

Kubrick is here emphasising a script for film that is comprised of 'statememts' instead of scenes. There's an assumption that scenes hold together the various lines spoken within it, or the various edits assembled across it, in order to sustain a comprehension of 'whats going on', and if you take away the scene then it all becomes noise and nonsense. There are many examples of this not being the case. The influence of the novel and theatre on cinema plays a large part in why it's assumed so. The novel relies on exposition, scene, and digression. Theatre still relies heavily on scenes comprised of a clear beginning, middle, and end.

“I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality." Stanley Kubrick

This habit coincides with Kubrick's statement that the biggest failure of 20th century art was its obsession with subjectivity. The kind of cinema he's suggesting is a more objective one than the cinema we're very familiar with. Not at all in a lack of sensitivity or humanity, but instead of trying to dive into the individual emotional state of a single character in a crowded room, we might look at the image and perceive something about where they are in life, we might look at it ironically because of some information to know about them, we might look at what it says about society.

So this is also relating to music of course. How music was used in silent film compared to how music is used in modern film. Kubrick's curation of music for his films is one of the very highest in
“The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it’s simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.” Stanley Kubrick