Stanley Kubrick: Early Photos and New York Noir

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) would have turned 90 this coming Thursday, July 26, 2018. Known for such works as PATHS OF GLORY, DR. STRANGELOVE, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, THE SHINING, FULL METAL JACKET and EYES WIDE SHUT, he began directing features in 1953, but started working as a photographer doing human interest stories for Look Magazine eight years earlier while still a student at Taft High School in the Bronx. He eventually directed three documentary shorts, the first of them, “Day of the Fight” (1951), based on a photo story about a boxer he’d done a couple of years earlier.

The Museum of the City of New York is currently offering an exhibit of Kubrick’s early photographs under the title, “Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs,” which runs until October 28, 2018. The exhibit gives us a chance to see what interested Kubrick in his formative creative years and how he chose to frame it. It also looks forward to his first “real” movie, KILLER’S KISS (1955), which he made on a shoestring on New York locations, drawing on his experience as a street photographer. He then went to California to make THE KILLING, a full-fledged Hollywood crime thriller with a cast of name actors (topped by Sterling Hayden) and the rest, as they say, is history.

In Glorious Black-and-White

Recently, a thread on the Home Theater Forum asked participants for their “all-time favorite movie process.” While others picked things like IMAX, 3-D, Cinerama, Todd-AO, Vistavision, Ultra Panavision 70 and the like, I was the only one to declare Academy ratio black-and-white as my favorite “process,” although “format” would be a more appropriate term. Here are the images I posted:

The Academy ratio of 1.37:1, sometimes referred to as 4:3, was the standard ratio for the motion picture frame from 1932 right up until the conversion to widescreen began in earnest in 1953, after which wider aspect ratios were used to give audiences a sense that they were getting something they couldn’t see on television. Television had adopted the ratio of 1.33:1, which had been the standard for movies before 1932 and was close enough to the Academy ratio to allow movies shot in that ratio to air on television without necessitating cropping (not that the full image was ever exactly shown, but that’s another story).