The "Directorial Style" I choose to immolate for this project is the distinctive style of Stanley Kubrick. His best works in my opinion are A Clockwork Orange, Fullmetal Jacket, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paths of Glory, The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, Spartacus, and The Killing. I still have yet to see Eyes Wide Shut, Lolita, Killers Kiss, and Barry Lyndon. The reason why I chose Kubrick is because he is considered by many directors to have a very distinctive in your face, hypnotic, surreal, and beautiful style of film-making.
Many of the stylized traits in his movies include but are not limited to:
- Slow and elongated shots.
- Shots are often symmetrical and picturesque.
- A 2001: A Space Odyssey and Killers Kiss there was a scene of odd colorful imagery and void.
- Booming classical music.
- When a group of people are having a conversation, the shot has a cool and distant feel.
- Beautiful and expansive sets with excellent mood lighting and bright colors.
- The lighting and look in each of his movies differs from the other, for example in A Clockwork Orange there are so many bright contrasting colors along with sexual shapes and imagery often taking place in futuristic looking, artificially lit locations. Whereas in The Shining the hotel in the movie is filled with different rug and wall patterns having little artificial light and only being lit by natural light coming through windows.
- In some of Stanley's films like Fullmetal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange the violence is blatantly put on screen for the audience to experience. Its not necessarily that he is celebrating it, he's simply telling an honest perspective of how sick this world can be.
- Stanley often had sexual imagery or a sense of sexual risqué in his films. In A Clockwork Orange one of the reasons why it was so controversial because of the few rape scenes it showed and raised several questions on what was ok to even show onscreen in a theatre. In Lolita the plot involved a romantic relationship between a man and a considerably younger girl. Fullmetal Jacket showed the graphic nature of the Vietnam war of prostitutes selling themselves to the soldiers. In Eyes Wide Shut it showed several scenes of what looked like people dressed up in masquerades and performing rituals of sex.
- In all of Stanley's career each and every one of his movies was so different from the other ranging from the genres of science fiction, political satire, noir, historical movies, horror, and black comedies.
Overall, Stanley Kubrick was a man who wanted to explore the outer limits of society, censorship, and the universe and he chose to do it through the medium of cinema.
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