Quai to the Kingdom

TEARS flowed freely at last week’s press preview of the landmark Aboriginal art commission at the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in the heart of Paris dedicated to non-western art. Surrounded by the media and basking under the artwork that has colonised the ceiling of one wing of the complex, East Arnhem Land artist Gulumbu Yunupingu broke down as she contemplated the moment. “I can’t believe I am here in Paris, underneath this, my gift to you. My painting brings us together and brings us healing; I am proud that you people here in Paris recognise my painting ... We standing here together. We are standing here strong.”

It was a cathartic moment at the end of a four-year journey that began when French President Jacques Chirac personally petitioned Prime Minister John Howard to join in his pet project on the Seine: a museum, a paean to the diversity and creativity of the world’s people, a project that could not be complete, implored Chirac, without a cultural contribution from Australia’s first people.

The $398m project, the first major museum to open in Paris since the Musée d’Orsay in 1986, attracted controversy from the outset. First due to its origins in two vast state collections of art and artefacts (some 350,000 objects) pillaged primarily from France’s former colonies, and secondly for its self-serving function as Chirac’s bricks-and-mortar legacy in the city where it all began for the former mayor.

In a multicultural nation recently racked by a rioting immigrant population drawn from former colonies, Chirac said the museum was an homage “to peoples who have suffered conquest, violence and humiliation”. Curiously, no solidarity with such black-armband sentiments was forthcoming from the large Australian contingent of benefactors, bureaucrats, curators, artists and their representatives in Paris to celebrate the product at hand, the $1.4m Australian Indigenous Art Commission at MQB.

There was much talk about this being the largest ever Aboriginal art commission, about the respect in Europe for Aboriginal painting, that it was finally being recognised in the cradle of modern art as one of the great movements of the 20th century. All of which is true, but the tone was hollow. As one local dealer in Aboriginal art complained, it was a story not underpinned by cultural cringe but overlaid with “cultural arrogance”. Another local said it had been “a difficult collaboration from the French side. The Australians seemed to think because they were paying for it, they could dictate to us.”

Official claims from both camps that the project puts “Australian indigenous art at the heart of the architectural project” are overstated if not inaccurate. The Australian artists’ efforts augment not the museum proper but its administration block: an ancillary, conventional modern office building which bears no immediately apparent relationship to the striking, unique structure housing the main collection. Putting architect Jean Nouvel’s protean reputation to one side, rather than a meeting of media, it appears the art has been accommodated into an already designed structure.

This accommodation, overseen by Sydney architects Cracknell & Lonergan, has nevertheless installed a visually stunning result, melding the designs and motifs of the eight artists into what are essentially typical workplaces, and avoiding what could easily have been a lapse into mere décor. The works, by artists of such standing as Yunupingu, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, and John Mawurndjul, are elegantly transposed onto the building’s surfaces using the structure as a gigantic framing device. As co-curator Hetti Perkins noted: “It is finished and it is good.” However, while the ceiling designs have been installed to be seen by passers-by from the street, the public will not have unfettered access inside. The permanent exhibition of Australian indigenous works in the MQB suffers for being tucked away and hung in relative obscurity, doing an injustice to the works on display, headed by a selection of barks acquired in the 1950s arranged floor to ceiling as if in a fin-de-siècle salon.

The Australia Council has attracted criticism for jumping at high-profile overseas opportunities which play well at home but leave no lasting footprints. This may be changing, with the announcement of a three-year program to promote indigenous art overseas, of which the MQB is the first project.

And when arts-loving adman Harold Mitchell was approached by the AC to donate $350,000 to secure the project to completion, he had long-term caveats. “We were excited by the project but suggested they take it a step further. So we pitched in another $150,000 for a publications program for 10 years and set up our young curators’ program.” Each year a young indigenous Australian curator will take up a residency at MQB and develop a project in conjunction with the museum.

Ironically, Mitchell admitted he doesn’t collect Aboriginal art himself. “Bugger me, I just don’t,” he told The Bulletin. “But I will now. I actually just believed in this project – I reckon it will be very good over the long term both for Aboriginal people and Aboriginal art. And we’ll be going up to some of the art communities later this year and we’ll make sure we pick up some pieces then.”.
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First published in The Bulletin

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Death on a Wing

A flu pandemic that could strike without warning and kill millions is on its way.

With the world economy locked into open trade and globalisation, and security wracked by terrorism and fundamentalism, you could forgive the planet’s leaders for being distracted. It’s hard to conceive of anything so tumultuous that it could deliver us beyond the post-September 11 era of suicide bombers and chronic poverty, religious fanaticism and rampant militarism, of record profits and jaded celebrities, cosmetic surgery and low interest rates.

Nothing, except a global influenza pandemic. With the conditions ripe and the world overdue for another global outbreak, government and corporate decision-makers have been jolted in recent months to consider the consequences.

Human flu pandemics spread quickly to all parts of the globe and typically infect more than a quarter of the total population. They deliver high levels of morbidity and mortality and cause major social disruption. There were three pandemics in the 20th century: in 1918, 1957 and 1968. In 1976, governments planned for an outbreak that never came. And there have been false alarms, where novel strains of the virus have been identified but have ended in few cases and limited human-to-human transmission. But in January 2004, health officials became alarmed at the outbreak in humans of a new and dangerous strain of the virulent H5N1 virus, better known as avian or bird flu in Asia. Officials believe all the prerequisites for the start of an influenza pandemic have been met save one: the establishment of efficient and sustained human-to-human transmission of the virus.

After H5N1’s first appearance in humans, in Hong Kong in 1997 when six out of 18 confirmed cases died, the spread ceased after authorities culled Hong Kong’s entire chicken population of 1.5 million. But the virus itself did not disappear. It simply retreated to China’s southern Guangdong province, where it had first been identified in ducks. Between 1998 and 2003, H5N1 evolved through 17 strains at high speed, becoming more pathogenic and resilient, hopping hosts from wild to domestic birds, and to mammals such as pigs and, since 2004, to humans again. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation says 140 million birds have died or been destroyed and the combined losses to gross domestic product are estimated at $US10bn to $US15bn ($12.97bn to $19.45bn). Since the first case in Vietnam in December 2003, there have been 111 laboratory-confirmed human cases of avian flu, with 57 deaths in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and now Indonesia. What has virologists worried is the potential of H5N1 to recombine into a virulent new human-to-human strain, capable of unleashing an unprecedented contagion around the world that would kill millions.

With the first official instance of human-to-human transmission reported in September 2004 in Thailand, the World Health Organisation declared the world had now “moved closer to a new pandemic than it has been at any time since 1968”. In February this year, WHO announced it had entered the pandemic alert period – phase three in its six-phase alert scale, where there are incidents of human infection with a new strain but as yet no human-to-human spread. Some experts believe we have already moved to phase four, with confirmed clusters of cases of human-to-human transmission in Vietnam and China and, last month, in Indonesia. More recently, the fact that migratory birds had spread the virus from western China to Russia’s European frontier in just three weeks – spurring five suspected human cases in northern Kazakhstan – have pushed consensus on the near-term probability of a pandemic from “if” to “when”.

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SHE’LL BE RIFE
How the pandemic would devastate Australia. If a pandemic with an attack rate of 25% (one-quarter of the population affected) were to occur again in Australia and there was no vaccine or treatment available, over a six-eight week period it could lead to:
* 13,000 to 44,000 deaths
* 57,900 to 148,000 hospitalisations
* 2.6 to 7.5 million outpatient visits.
The figures are estimates only and the likely outcomes associated with a pandemic will depend on many factors such as the transmissibility and virulence of the virus, and the availability and success of health and social interventions.

(Source: Australian Government Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza)

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With the virus permanently established in birds in large parts of Asia, “the threat to human health will persist as long as the problem persists in animals”, says Dr Peter Horby, public health expert with WHO in Hanoi. Alarmed by the inadequacy of national and international plans to cope with such a global health emergency, two respected American journals, Foreign Affairs and Nature, in a co-ordinated effort devoted their July issues to “The Next Pandemic”.

In the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, 400 million people were clinically infected and more than 40 million people perished, out of a global population of 2 billion. A pandemic of that order today would kill between 180 million and 360 million people within 18 months. World trade and international travel would be brought to a standstill, plummeting productivity would usher in economic depression, and the short supply and unequal distribution of effective drugs, coupled with overwhelmed public health facilities, quarantines and restrictions on the movement and association of citizens, would lead to social unrest that would destabilise governments everywhere, notwithstanding the exponential increase in security threats from insurgents and terrorists. Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious disease expert for the American Department of Homeland Security, writes in Foreign Affairs: “The reality of the coming pandemic ... cannot be avoided. Only its impact can be lessened.”

That’s the worst case scenario we should prepare for if we are to heed the warnings of respected health experts. The messages are getting through. In recent weeks, governments, international agencies and corporations have taken steps to brace for the coming calamity. Scientists, while alarmed, still cannot tell us when the pandemic will occur — it could be tomorrow, in six months or six years. But they have told political leaders it’s time to scramble, to begin planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

Still, no politician wants to risk being called Chicken Little. Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott told reporters last week: “There’s a fine line to be trod here between scaring people over something that might never happen and alerting people to something that may very well happen.” The federal government has walked that fine line in recent months, implanting the notion of pandemic preparedness into the public’s brain stem, while emphasising that we’re still in a “no worries, she’ll be right” phase.

Following WHO’s lead, Australia in March went to “Overseas Three” in its own six-step pandemic scale. In June, the government’s “Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza” was launched, along with a new slogan: Prepared and Protected. Abbott laid out Australia’s game plan: “The initial objective would be to attempt to prevent its appearance in Australia for as long as possible. Once there was a case in Australia, we would be determined to limit its spread within this country for as long as possible. And once there was a widespread outbreak, treatment and prevention, prophylaxis, would be our principal objective.”

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THE SPANISH FLU
Estimated deaths
* 1918 pandemic 40 million
* World War I 8.3 million

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With WHO estimating at least a six-month lag from outbreak to the development of an effective vaccine, much has been made of the efficacy of the key anti-viral agent oseltamivir, with the tradename Tamiflu. Recent reports that the government has “cornered the world market” in Tamiflu ignore conflicting evidence that many of those infected with H5N1 who took Tamiflu still died, often from the secondary pneumonias that take the heaviest toll in such pandemics. “In responding to a pandemic,” Osterholm notes in Foreign Affairs, “Tamiflu could have a measurable impact in countries with sizeable stockpiles.” Like Australia. But there is “no evidence” that Tamiflu helps if the patient develops the “cytokine storm that characterises the recent H5N1 infections”. Here the immune system fights the virus with such ferocity that the lungs in a sense melt and the patient suffocates.

Public statements from all sides of politics in recent days reflect a lack of engagement with the nature of the threat identified by experts. Greens senator Bob Brown has called for Tamiflu to be sold over the counter, instead of only by prescription. The distinction is moot if there isn’t enough to go round. If the pandemic obliges by striking when we are ready, there will still only be one dose available for every five Australians. Latest clinical trials indicate the effective dose of Tamiflu is much higher than previously expected, meaning even less of the drug to go round. As for vaccine, Osterholm predicts it “would have no impact on the course of the virus in the first months and would likely play an extremely limited role worldwide”. And the government’s agreements with two overseas vaccine manufacturers may come to nothing should their host countries nationalise vaccine production in the event of a pandemic, as the US did in 1976 when it refused to share vaccine for the swine flu pandemic it was expecting but never came.
In a speech to the Australia Indonesia Business Council on August 1, Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd identified “one of the key challenges in the early detection of bird flu was the reluctance of poultry farmers to report the disease for fear their entire flocks, and livelihoods, would be destroyed”. It may be a challenge in China, but for Australia the more pressing concern is when the human-to-human transmission takes hold and the disease sweeps in like any of the “normal” seasonal flus. In this situation, border protection becomes immaterial. According to Foreign Affairs’ Laurie Garrett, “No nation can erect a fortress against influenza ... national policy-makers would be wise to plan now for worst case scenarios involving quarantines, weakened armed services and dwindling hospital space and vaccines.

“The greatest weakness that each nation must individually address is the inability of their hospitals to cope with a sudden surge of new patients ... the potential for pandemic comes at a time when the world’s public health systems are severely taxed and have long been in decline.”
In this context, last week’s announcement by Abbott and state health ministers that they would stage a “mock outbreak” in December to test hospital capacity will be scrutinised – that’s if we get the luxury of having a trial run. The government’s worst case estimate is that in the event of a pandemic, 2.6 million people would need medical attention, with up to 148,000 hospitalised. We should expect that these numbers will be put to the test.

In the event of a pandemic, the flow of free and accurate information will be more than an ethic; it will be a matter of public health and safety. The last time the spectre of 1918 was invoked was in 1976 when US President Gerald Ford put the nation on alert. Swine flu never materialised, and Ford and confidence in the US public health system were damaged.

Chinese authorities were heavily criticised for suppressing news of the SARS outbreak, and then minimising its seriousness. Now there are worrying signs again from China. In July, a Hong Kong laboratory had its research on the H5N1 strain suspended by China’s Ministry of Agriculture. The ministry also dismissed research by the lab on the recent H5N1 outbreak among migratory birds in western China. The WHO has complained that China is not sharing samples of the outbreak strain.

All this highlights the need for international organisations like the WHO to be free to monitor any pandemic impartially. However, such organisations are critically under-resourced. The WHO has an annual budget of just $400m, and can intervene only when invited by a country.

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THE BUG PICTURE
* H5N1 has found a new ecological niche in poultry in parts of Asia.
* The virus is now more deadly in poultry and in the mammalian mouse model.
* New animals – cats and tigers – are becoming infected for the first time, suggesting the virus is expanding its host range.
* Domestic ducks are excreting large quantities of virus without showing symptoms.
* Viruses from 2004 survive longer in the environment than viruses from 1997.
* The virus is killing at least some wild migratory birds.
* These changes have created multiple opportunities for a pandemic virus to emerge.

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First published in The Bulletin

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Interview: Kidman on Kubrick and 'Eyes Wide Shut'

So just who was Stanley Kubrick and why should you care? What’s so special about this filmmaker that he commanded such awe and respect in the movie business and could indulge his cinematic vision like no other director before or since? Nicole Kidman spoke exclusively to Juice a week before the Australian premiere of her latest, and by far most eagerly anticipated movie, the late Mr Kubrick's sexual sayonara to the cinema, EYES WIDE SHUT.

We began by asking why do Kidman and husband Tom Cruise, two of the most sought after stars in Hollywood, give over 3 years at the height of their careers to participate in what is, despite the somewhat deceivingly raunchy marketing, an intellectual art film in the European mould?

"People have said 'How could you do this?'" says Kidman. "My answer, of course, was why not? I would have been mad to turn it down. There are very few times as an actor when you think I will be forever proud of this work - that it is timeless work - just in terms of the director. I can never be objective about my work. But I am so honoured to have been a part of Stanley's body of work. Full stop."

Based on "Traumnovelle", an obsure 1926 novel by an obcure Viennese novelist Arthur Schnitzler, the film stars Kidman and Cruise as two psychiatrists whose marriage is cast adrift when they embark on a series of torrid sexual adventures and experiments. Kubrick had held the rights to the novel for over two decades. In development for four years and produced under typically paranoid secrecy, it took 15 months to shoot in, according to Kubrick's biographer, "the longest continuous shoot in motion picture history."

From the opening scene of a naked Kidman, EYES WIDE SHUT is "truly the riskiest film of Kubrick's career", according to respected critic Janet Maslin, of the New York Times. "The man who could create a whole new universe with each undertaking chose the bedroom as the last frontier."

Less charitable commentators have dubbed the film "Eyes Glaze Over". The film relies heavily on the believe-ability of Kidman and Cruise's on-screen relationship, and Hollywood's hottest couple have a lot of credibility riding on the film's success. Past efforts don't augur well. The cars were more riveting than the acting in DAYS OF THUNDER while the most memorable thing about FAR & AWAY was watching the stellar pair struggle with working class Irish accents.
But the buzz is that it's Oscar time for Kidman at least. That she broke her schedule to talk to Juice testifies more to the weight of responsibility she feels to Kubrick and the film, than her own image. When the enigmatic auteur died just after completing the film, the burden of explaining to the public the master's intentions in the complex and dark project fell entirely to its stars. With an evangelistic zeal, she appears to be reveling in the task.

"Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini - they were the great masters of the cinema - and anyone who is interested in films thatchallenge the way they think should see this film. You know Scorsese, (Sidney) Pollack and Gus Van Sant all saw the film thesame night and each of them came up after and hugged us. Scorsese said 'Can I hug you nowbecause you worked with the master and you have made one of the great films' -and coming from Martin Scorsese - also one of the great film makers of ourcentury - I thought 'Wow!'"

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Stanley Kubrick was born into a on July 26, 1928, in the Bronx. A brilliant but bored underachiever at school, Kubrick got his first break at 17, scoring a job as a still photographer for Look magazine. But the cinema was always where he was headed and between 1951 and 1953 he set about producing, directing, writing, shooting and editing three short documentaries. A brilliant chess player, he financed the films by hustling on the streets of New York, plus a relentless pursuit of the funds of friends and family. He would later say that making a movie is like chess: "It is a series of steps that you take one at a time, and it's balancing resources against the problem, which in chess is time and in movies is time and money."

One-time beatnik, jazz drummer, and self-appointed expert on every subject from flying to poker to making hamburgers, it was Kubrick's know-all personality that set him on the road to filmmaking. "I didn't know anything about making films, but I knew I couldn't make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing," quotes John Baxter in his excellent Stanley Kubrick: A Biography.

His uncompromising one-man-band approach would only realise 13 feature-length films over the next 40 years, but, apart from SPARTACUS (1960) where he was brought in to take over directing after shooting began by executive producer and star Kirk Douglas, each film has the irrefutable mark of its director. Film is a collaborative medium but with a Stanley Kubrick film, it is the director who is always the real star. But while his films - to date - have won 8 Oscars, none were for Best Director.

In 1954 Kubrick teamed up with producer James B Harris and moved to LA where the pair would make the three films which would establish Kubrick's reputation as one of Hollywood's brightest and most daring talents: the noir racetrack heist, THE KILLING (1956), the moving anti-war drama PATHS OF GLORY (1957) and the controversial LOLITA (1961), Nabakov's dry tale of illicit sexual obsession. LOLITA begins Kubrick's most successful quartet of films. The black comedy, DR STANGELOVE OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), released in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, is the ultimate expression of Cold War nihilism in the form of high farce. It ends with images of the atom bomb accompanied by Vera Lynn's wartime standard, "We'll Meet Again." The film was branded by the New York Times critic of the day as "beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across". With Peter Sellars in three roles, it was a huge hit.

In 1968 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was also panned by the critics on release as just a ponderous light-show with a few futuristic riddles thrown in for diversion. It too went on to box office glory, lauded in the age of psychedelia as the ultimate trip movie, a hyper-philosophical mind fuck.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) opens with a youthful Malcolm McDowell kicking a drunken tramp to death while giving a caustic rendition of "Singing In The Rain". Orange is arguably the most subversive youth culture movie yet made, and certainly a most prophetic vision of aliented urban youth which predicted the punk revolution by at least 5 years. David Bowie said that with Ziggy Stardust he "wanted to 'deviolence' the look of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE." Meanwhile The Times was holding Kubrick personally responsible for the unravelling of Britain's social fabric: "The cases of rape, murder and beatings attributed to the film's influence are too numerous to be dismissed as tabloid hyperbole. Tramps were killed, girls were assaulted and beatings were dished out as Kubrick's symphony of violence rang in then head of the perpetrators."

Kubrick was always mistrustful of Hollywood and had settled permanently in England in 1974. But he wasn't doing the Welles thing; he wasn't banished or in some self-imposed exile. He just liked England better. But after the violent reaction to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, he became so reclusive for a period that an Englishman impersonated him for several months before being discovered.

In another recent biography, Vincent LoBrutto pins down all the essential elements of the Kubrick myth: "a cool, misanthropic cinematic genius who obsesses over every detail, lives a hermetic existence, doesn't travel and is consumed with phobic neuroses."

As is usual with myths, Kubrick the man was something quite different. "People always think he was this idiotic dictator," said Christiane Kubrick, his third and last wife of 40 years, after his death. "But he was always asking everyone's opinion on most things. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? Do you think I should have done this different?"

It's true he demanded take after take from actors, sometimes running to over a hundred takes. The reason? Because actors didn't know their lines. "If people don't do their homework, the only thing I can do is spend time doing multiple takes while they learn what their job is supposed to be." Aperfectionist to the last, but as Kirk Douglas would say to him after SPARTACUS: "That doesn't make you perfect!"

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To cinephiles Kubrick is the director's director, certainly one of the key artists of the cinema's second 50 years. Ever since the furore that greeted the release of Lolita, every new Kubrick film has been greeted as a landmark cultural event. But while he made seven features in his first decade, he took over 30 to make the final six. Many reading this may not have seen any of his films.

icole Kidman is right to think Marty Scorcese makes a fine contemporary referee, but Hollywood hugging aside itÕs been twelve years since Kubrick's last film, the searing Vietnam War drama, FULL METAL JACKET (1987), briefly burnt up the screen then was pretty much forgotten.

You have to go back another seven to find THE SHINING, Kubrick's chilling adaptation of a Stephen King horror story and his most openly commercial film, but then clearly the work of a director treading water. Go back five years more and you hit BARRY LYNDON, a beautiful but boring 18th century period drama which picked up four Oscars (for music, cinematography, art direction, costume design) but recouped only $9.5 million of its $30 million production cost.
So it's still not surprising that Variety tagged EYES WIDE SHUT as having "questionable appeal for under-25s". It will "captivate older audiences more than it will mainstream Tom Cruise die-hards", said the movie industry bible. Bums on seats at EYES WIDE SHUT have more cellulite per square centimetre than those that sat through, for instance, AMERICAN PIE, the latest hit teen sex comedy which EYES WIDE SHUT ironically displaced from No.1 when it opened in July with a first weekend box office of over US$21million, a record for any Kubrick film.

Both films were rated 'R' in the US, for "strong sexual content, nudity, language and some drug-related material", but while American Pie is a funny but forgettable farce about "losin' it", EYES WIDE SHUT is an art film in the European mould which Variety called "a deeply inquisitive consideration of the extent of trust and mutual knowledge possible between a man and a woman."

Thus for Juice, Kidman is keen to dispel the vibe that this is 'adult fare' that's not really gonna be 'dope with the kids'.

"To underestimate the intelligence of a younger audience is patronising," counters Kidman. "I know when I was 16, l8 and l9 I remember seeing DR. STRANGELOVE, then LOLITA and then 2001. Then, when I was twenty-one, I saw A Clockwork ORANGE and it really shocked me and awed me - you know? All of Kubrick's films have that ability to shake the groundwork that you have, to shake it up and challenge you philosophically and I think young people today desperately want to see that - it's just they aren't given it that often.

"Kubrick was oneof the masters and this is his last film and I think young people are interested. Anyone who is interested in sex, jealousy andobsession will relate to this film, so of course it is a film for youngeraudiences as well as older audiences."

In the US, the film was heading for a dreaded NC17 rating which translates roughly into Box-office poison. In order to secure a R rating Kubrick agreed to alter 65 seconds of the orgy scene which is the centre piece of the film by adding digitally created figures to obscure the 'action'. Kubrick wasn't averse to such compromises, having gone through similar negotiations with censors on both Lolita and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Still The Los Angeles Times put to Tom Cruise that if Kubrick was such an uncompromising filmmaker, why didn't he have the courage to say with Eyes Wide Shut: "this film is unsuitable for a 15-year-old kid".

"Stanley knew he had to deliver an R-rated film," Cruise replied. "And he didn't think it hurt the integrity of the film. If I was 15, I'd like to have the opportunity to see the movie, even if I didn't comprehend everything.

"I don't think it's offensive to see people having sex, but that's just me."

The final irony is that although the uncensored version is screening in Australia, an R rating here means only 18 year olds and up can view the film without risk of prosecution.

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"I am in a world of shit," declares Private Joker (Matthew Modine) in the final moments of Stanley Kubrick's second-last film, the 1987 war drama FULL METAL JACKET. "But I am still alive. And I am not afraid."
Sadly, Kubrick ain't alive anymore. But when you look back at his canon of thirteen dazzling, incredibly diverse features, you find he wasn't afraid to depict thirteen worlds that are indeed full of shit. Lightning rods of the popular cinema they may be, but they span four million years of dubious progress of the human race.
It's not easy to be light and breezy about Kubrick. Variously regarded as a pefectionist, myogynist, nihilist, anarchist, genius and visionary, Kubrick isn't about providing easily consumed entertainment, despite the fact that his films are immensely entertaining. Instead he is about spectacle, seduction, voyeurism, horror, atrocity, indifference, hypocrisy, madness, obsession, lust, suspense, anxiety, emotion, and ideas. No easy answers in that list, only uneasy questions.
His films are populated with common criminals, sexual deviants, juvenile psychopaths, insane purveyors of mass destruction, even computers that kill. The Shining, about "an ordinary guy who just wants to murder his family" according to Jack Nicholson, is typical Kubrick fare. Not a frame out of place, not a plot-point astray, not a moment of suspense or horror wasted, not a punter in the house that isn't scared witless. Nicholson himself couldn't wait to get off the film: "Glad to be off that one," he said at the time. "That was rough duty."
Not merely powerful stories brilliantly told, Kubrick's films created new benchmarks in their use of advances in filmmaking technology. In production design and art direction, 2001 on the big screen today feels more like a documentary from the future than science fiction. Many interior scenes in Barry Lyndon, his picaresque tale set in Georgian England, are lit with candlelight.
More than a director or technician, Kubrick was the complete filmmaker who took meticulous control of every stage of production from script through to marketing. "I know how to do virtually every job on a movie," he said in an interview in 70s. "I can light, I can record sound, I know where mikes go. I don't know how to act. But I'll tell you this, we will get the best shot."
One of the few American directors who had the prestige to make big-budget movies while working outside the Hollywood mainstream Kubrick was "the one person in the film industry who knew how the industry worked in every country in the world, remembers one Warner Brothers executive. "He knew all of the dubbing people, the dubbing directors, the actors, he had relationships with foreign directors who would supervise his work because he couldn't be there to supervise himself. We had to go around to every cinema to make sure the projection lights were right, the sound was correct, the ratios were right, the screens were clean."
Warners have released nine of his features on home video to coincide with the local release of Eyes Wide Shut. All his major films are in the collection except for A Clockwork Orange, which the director decreed be exhibited in theatres only.
As we write Clockwork Orange was playing in its 234th consecutive week of late night weekend screenings at Village's cineplex on Sydney's George Street movie strip.
"About 18 months ago we had to replace the print," says George Livery, general manager of Village Cinemas. "So we had to apply to Stanley to get hold of a new print, and he gratefully signed off on a new one. Of course also he had to approve of us showing the film in the first place.
"We get a lot film students at the screenings. ItÕs been running so long I canÕt remember why we decided to bring it back in the first place, although itÕs been in repertory really ever since its original release."

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It's understandable that EYES WIDE SHUT has been hailed - like John Huston's THE DEAD - to be Kubrick's 'last will and testament', the crowning acheivment of an extraordinary career. But the one thing the cinema's most famous control freak couldn't schedule was the timing of his own exit and he never intended Eyes Wide Shut to be a swan-song. That honour was to go to AI (artificial intelligence), based on a Brian Aldiss short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". Wanting to top 2001, which he believed was his most complete film, Kubrick spent seven years this decade developing AI. Throughout the early 90s he wrote several drafts with Aldiss and made exhaustive use of George LucasÕs peak special effects house Industrial Light & Magic but with Kubrick calling on ILMÕs resources to conduct more and more obscure and intricate experiments, Lucas eventually called a halt to work on the project, telling Kubrick they were too busy working on another film called JURASSIC PARK.
Warner Bros had originally agreed to give Kubrick carte blanche on AI on condition that he first produce 'a quickie'.
Four years later that quickie - EYES WIDE SHUT - was in the can. Four days later, Kubrick died in his sleep in his English home.
But its clear that Kubrick has bought himself life after death - his films will remain to speak for him literally till doomsday. They will be there to remind us that movies can be more than just money making exercises in niche marketing, demographics, and manufactured entertainment.
Of course, with the exception for BARRY LYNDON, his films DID make money, which means he could keep making them. Kubrick proved that you can have it all - creative, critical and commercial success. His films have cost millions, made millions, and been watched by millions. But as he told his accountant after closing a lucrative deal with a major studio to make a picture: "You know, I'm glad they don't know I would do this thing for nothing if I had to."
Says Kidman: "He had a great belief in the cinema as an art form - so when you work with somebody like that, you say: 'I am willing totake the journey with you. I am privileged and honoured to take the journey with you.'"

- MICHAEL HUTAK

First published in Juice magazine

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