THE GAZE Kubrick once told Jack Nicholson, “We’re not interested in photographing the reality. We’re interested in photographing the photograph of the reality.”[2] Stanley Kubrick’s films are not fictions but psychic documentaries. Suspending our disbelief à la Hitchcock or Spielberg was never his priority. Nothing in a Kubrick film is supposed to feel like it’s happening in a physical world analogous to our own. Their setting is the mind itself. Kubrick’s work belongs to the Gnostic hyperreal; it aspires to direct cognizance of pure thought. As psychedelic tours of history’s dream galleries, his films are inherently political, dealing with power and the creation and destruction of values. Most importantly, their core is mystical, even shamanic. Kubrick was one of the few filmmakers to take up André Bazin on his famous ideal of the Holy Moment, which posits that the motion picture camera can extract a slice of space-time and enframe it in Plato’s hyperspace, creating a reality that supercedes the historical moment originally captured on film. Some of the most potent Holy Moments Kubrick filmed feature the Gaze, that uniquely Kubrickian device that appears in all of the films post-Strangelove, most famously in the first shot of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and in that one-shot scene in The Shining (1980) where Jack Torrance begins to slip over the edge. realitysandwich/149960/the-kubrick-gaze/
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 16:49:16 +0000
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