7 ms·

Stanley Kubrick held his own camera, so why shouldn’t you?

74 points by maccman 14y ago

aidenn0 14y ago
I think Kubrick would have been happy to hand off the camera to another operator so he could be free to scrutinize other things. He very obviously did this with many other jobs on the set. However, there was a lack of ability to communicate with precision what he wanted done. Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible. In any event things like this are failures to communicate, and any time you have to do this, it should be treated as so. Sometimes it is more efficient to do something yourself than to communicate it to someone else; if that is the case more often than not, the most efficient thing to do might be to improve your communication skills.
- williamcotton 14y ago
  You're missing something, and it should be pretty obvious, because you're criticizing an incredibly talented and successful movie maker's ability to communicate. Art is all about communication. Stanley Kubrick is a fantastic communicator. He knows that things are always lost in translation. He knows that his priority is communication between him and his audience. Therefore, it makes sense for him to want to have direct control over an aspect of filmmaking that he finds incredibly important, that is, dictating the what is shown to the audience by manipulation of the camera. Put another way, his insistence on operating the camera is not a failure of communication on his part, rather an elevation of his ideal way of communicating to an audience. Don't try and criticize art using only ideas from business management.
  - TWAndrews 14y ago
    Didn't the quotation from Kubrick in the original piece say exactly this? That it was nearly impossible to communicate what he (Kubrick) wanted to "even the most talented and sensitive camera man?
  - aidenn0 14y ago
    I think I specifically addressed this with the following quote: "Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible." Also the original article mentions that he couldn't communicate this to even the best camera operators. That is a failure of communication. Saying that someone failed to do something that is impossible is not a criticism.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Why didn't hey sew is own costumes and paint his own sets? Surely the content of the film is as important as the angle it is shot from.
llambda 14y ago
First off it seems like there is a strange, specious simile the OP is trying to draw between a director doing some camerawork (note: Kubrick in that particular interview cited is only speaking of /handheld/ camerawork specifically because it's difficult to communicate the framing and such) themselves and an individual being able to do everything (within the scope of some discipline) themselves. Let's clear something up right now: directors who do some or all of their own camerawork are NOT tantamount to directors making a film by themselves. There is so much more that goes into making a film besides the raw camerawork. Even your average Joe will know this by proxy as big events like the Academy Awards highlight the complexity of big Hollywood productions and the many roles that individuals have mastered. Directors, e.g. Lars von Trier, will sometimes oscillate between doing all camerawork themselves and none of it. (In Trier's case he even experimented with allowing a computer program to compose shots in a completely automated way!) However none of this backs up the apparent assumption that this is equivalent to making the film wholly yourself. That said I think this is a pretty weak and misleading analogy! We can give the OP a break here and say, "Sure I know what you're getting at." However, if you really want to get a strong point across, use a better analogy. Finally, let me dwell on one passage in the posting that I find troubling: > Lately it has started to feel like our society respects “vision” more than the actual craft of execution. What is going through the OP's mind here? Execution is definitely the only thing that has ever mattered.
- nateberkopec 14y ago
  That's not really specious if you understand the rest of Kubrick's reputation and work history. Kubrick was well known for pretty much running the editing room (a big deal, since editors are usually given at least a degree of independence on the first cut) and also wrote the screenplays for most of his films. A single person taking the role of director/editor/screenwriter is pretty much unheard of in the industry.
  - wahnfrieden 14y ago
    Fassbinder, Gaspar Noe (sometimes), Mario Bava, Kurosawa, Coen brothers, Tsukamoto, etc. Kubrick had a DP but like many directors sometimes operated it (or one of the cameras) himself.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
I once read an interview with someone who had worked with Kubrick. He was talking about how deep Kubrick's knowledge of his tools went. It went something like this- Stanley knew everything there was to know about the lenses he used. But he didn't just know the lenses, he knew the man who designed the lenses. And he didn't just know the man who designed the lenses, he knew how that man's daughter was doing in school. He learned his tools thoroughly, often from the people who built them. And he knew the people, which is just as interesting in its own right.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  he knew how that man's daughter was doing in school. That's obsessive beyond creepiness...
  - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    Or he was a friend of the family, knew how to make small talk, and had discussion about things other than just lenses...
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      Or Kubrick was a past master at getting the upper hand in his directorial decisions Stanley, we really should shoot the Obelisk with this Panaflex No, use that one, it was ground out last year by hendrickson in June, when his daughter was doing well in her exams and he always does a better job when his daughter is happy (holy fuck how do I argue with that)
    - stephengillie 14y ago
      So was that anecdote a one-off, or was Kubrick that way with every part of the camera? Did he visit the summer home of the guy who milled the camera's metal bits? Did he play with the camera assembler's dog?
      - jankins 14y ago
nollidge 14y ago
This is just confirmation bias. Kubrick made great formalistic films, Robert Altman made great naturalistic films. Joss Whedon focuses on script and characterization. Christopher Guest focuses on casting and improvisation. Wes Anderson focuses on casting and tableau and music. They all make great stuff. By all means be a Kubrick if it works for you, but don't try to be something you're not.
- jankins 14y ago
  The problem is the vast majority of directors who fancy themselves a Kubrick, but whose ego trails somewhat ahead of their skill, and who thus succeed only in offending the DP and diminishing the quality of their film.
flannell 14y ago
There was an expo in Venice a few years ago featuring his photography work before he become a film director. The man really knew how to capture mood through his knowledge of light. His time in old New York City produced some fantastic pictures of people and their locations.
nateberkopec 14y ago
Kubrick also had an insane obsession with his tools. Most of Barry Lyndon was shot on F1.0 (EDIT: it was F0.7) glass, which, as far as I know, was only available from NASA at the time and probably can't be found at all today for film cameras. EDIT: f/0.7, thanks! Holy shit!
- jeffreylo 14y ago
  http://fstoppers.com/stanley-kubrick-films-natural-candlelight-with-insane-f0-7-lens http://fstoppers.com/stanley-kubrick-films-natural-candlelig...
fescue 14y ago
The elephant in the room here is the Auteur Theory [1]. Film is a uniquely collaborative art--a director needs to communicate his or her vision to a very large team with specialized technical skills. While tempting to do it all yourself, that doesn't scale. There's a direct corollary here with running a company. The craft, skill, and genius of great auteurs and entrepreneurs is inspiring a team with his or her vision to build great things together, not in doing it all him or her self. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur_theory
- MartinCron 14y ago
  While tempting to do it all yourself, that doesn't scale. Of course Kubrick didn't do it all himself. He deliberately picked things that he wanted extremely fine-grained control over and delegated other things to trusted experts. His brilliance, at least part of it, was knowing what he could delegate and what he couldn't.
mrschwabe 14y ago
Kubrick's quote from the article: "Yes, all of the hand-held camerawork is mine. In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it is virtually impossible to explain what you want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator." Kubrick might have benefited from doing a few runs with his camera, THEN showed his camera people that this is how he wanted it. I find this is a powerful technique in delegation. Ie- where most will outsource a task with a rudimentary set of guidelines, the results can be exponentially better if the 'delegator' simply rolls up his or her sleeves and literally does the task at hand, albeit a rough draft first attempt, and shares the results; uses that as the guideline. Like planting a seed with water.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  This article is supposed to be hero worship, but all I see is a famous director outed as a person who couldn't delegate properly.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    couldn't delegate properly Why delegate tasks that you enjoy doing? He was obviously a competent camera operator.
- tobyjsullivan 14y ago
  Yes, the article seems to entirely sidestep the possibility that perhaps Kubrick just had trouble communicating (at least with his cameramen).
leephillips 14y ago
This article might have been about something interesting. I don't know, because I stopped after this: "It was less a surprise to the extent that he, famously demanding and meticulous, had a specific vision which needed to be realized, but more-so a surprise I had never thought of him to do such a peculiar thing." I don't continue reading after it becomes clear that I'm looking at some kind of rough first draft. If you want it to appear that you have some respect for yourself and your potential readers, at least look over your output once quickly before sticking it on the end of a publicly-facing URL. You have some room. Try to be more articulate than a tweet.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
Off-topic: if you like kubrick's movies, do yourself a favor and watch this documentary right now: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278736/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278736/ It's exceptionally great. Kubrick himself would've been proud of it. I really can't recommend it enough. For me, it's almost Kubrick's 10th movie (not counting Spartacus, The Killing, Killer's Kiss and Fear & Desire, of course) - that's how great it is. Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNuzGlLqxNU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNuzGlLqxNU
- noisebleed 14y ago
  The accompanying coffee table book is pretty great too.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  That is exactly the kind of off-topic comment that HN needs more of. Thank you.
nnq 14y ago
isn't this a true gem: "Our surroundings have pressured us to believe that doing less and moving slower are negative characteristics, but I see them as a obvious advantages."...

74 points by maccman 14y ago

I think Kubrick would have been happy to hand off the camera to another operator so he could be free to scrutinize other things. He very obviously did this with many other jobs on the set. However, there was a lack of ability to communicate with precision what he wanted done. Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible. In any event things like this are failures to communicate, and any time you have to do this, it should be treated as so. Sometimes it is more efficient to do something yourself than to communicate it to someone else; if that is the case more often than not, the most efficient thing to do might be to improve your communication skills.

williamcotton 14y ago
You're missing something, and it should be pretty obvious, because you're criticizing an incredibly talented and successful movie maker's ability to communicate. Art is all about communication. Stanley Kubrick is a fantastic communicator. He knows that things are always lost in translation. He knows that his priority is communication between him and his audience. Therefore, it makes sense for him to want to have direct control over an aspect of filmmaking that he finds incredibly important, that is, dictating the what is shown to the audience by manipulation of the camera. Put another way, his insistence on operating the camera is not a failure of communication on his part, rather an elevation of his ideal way of communicating to an audience. Don't try and criticize art using only ideas from business management.
- TWAndrews 14y ago
  Didn't the quotation from Kubrick in the original piece say exactly this? That it was nearly impossible to communicate what he (Kubrick) wanted to "even the most talented and sensitive camera man?
- aidenn0 14y ago
  I think I specifically addressed this with the following quote: "Perhaps this is because the degrees of freedom are so numerous in handheld camerawork that it was not feasible." Also the original article mentions that he couldn't communicate this to even the best camera operators. That is a failure of communication. Saying that someone failed to do something that is impossible is not a criticism.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Why didn't hey sew is own costumes and paint his own sets? Surely the content of the film is as important as the angle it is shot from.

llambda 14y ago

First off it seems like there is a strange, specious simile the OP is trying to draw between a director doing some camerawork (note: Kubrick in that particular interview cited is only speaking of /handheld/ camerawork specifically because it's difficult to communicate the framing and such) themselves and an individual being able to do everything (within the scope of some discipline) themselves. Let's clear something up right now: directors who do some or all of their own camerawork are NOT tantamount to directors making a film by themselves. There is so much more that goes into making a film besides the raw camerawork. Even your average Joe will know this by proxy as big events like the Academy Awards highlight the complexity of big Hollywood productions and the many roles that individuals have mastered. Directors, e.g. Lars von Trier, will sometimes oscillate between doing all camerawork themselves and none of it. (In Trier's case he even experimented with allowing a computer program to compose shots in a completely automated way!) However none of this backs up the apparent assumption that this is equivalent to making the film wholly yourself. That said I think this is a pretty weak and misleading analogy! We can give the OP a break here and say, "Sure I know what you're getting at." However, if you really want to get a strong point across, use a better analogy. Finally, let me dwell on one passage in the posting that I find troubling: > Lately it has started to feel like our society respects “vision” more than the actual craft of execution. What is going through the OP's mind here? Execution is definitely the only thing that has ever mattered.

nateberkopec 14y ago
That's not really specious if you understand the rest of Kubrick's reputation and work history. Kubrick was well known for pretty much running the editing room (a big deal, since editors are usually given at least a degree of independence on the first cut) and also wrote the screenplays for most of his films. A single person taking the role of director/editor/screenwriter is pretty much unheard of in the industry.
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  Fassbinder, Gaspar Noe (sometimes), Mario Bava, Kurosawa, Coen brothers, Tsukamoto, etc. Kubrick had a DP but like many directors sometimes operated it (or one of the cameras) himself.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

I once read an interview with someone who had worked with Kubrick. He was talking about how deep Kubrick's knowledge of his tools went. It went something like this- Stanley knew everything there was to know about the lenses he used. But he didn't just know the lenses, he knew the man who designed the lenses. And he didn't just know the man who designed the lenses, he knew how that man's daughter was doing in school. He learned his tools thoroughly, often from the people who built them. And he knew the people, which is just as interesting in its own right.

stephengillie 14y ago
he knew how that man's daughter was doing in school. That's obsessive beyond creepiness...
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  Or he was a friend of the family, knew how to make small talk, and had discussion about things other than just lenses...
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Or Kubrick was a past master at getting the upper hand in his directorial decisions Stanley, we really should shoot the Obelisk with this Panaflex No, use that one, it was ground out last year by hendrickson in June, when his daughter was doing well in her exams and he always does a better job when his daughter is happy (holy fuck how do I argue with that)
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    So was that anecdote a one-off, or was Kubrick that way with every part of the camera? Did he visit the summer home of the guy who milled the camera's metal bits? Did he play with the camera assembler's dog?
    - jankins 14y ago

nollidge 14y ago

This is just confirmation bias. Kubrick made great formalistic films, Robert Altman made great naturalistic films. Joss Whedon focuses on script and characterization. Christopher Guest focuses on casting and improvisation. Wes Anderson focuses on casting and tableau and music. They all make great stuff. By all means be a Kubrick if it works for you, but don't try to be something you're not.

jankins 14y ago
The problem is the vast majority of directors who fancy themselves a Kubrick, but whose ego trails somewhat ahead of their skill, and who thus succeed only in offending the DP and diminishing the quality of their film.

flannell 14y ago

There was an expo in Venice a few years ago featuring his photography work before he become a film director. The man really knew how to capture mood through his knowledge of light. His time in old New York City produced some fantastic pictures of people and their locations.

nateberkopec 14y ago

Kubrick also had an insane obsession with his tools. Most of Barry Lyndon was shot on F1.0 (EDIT: it was F0.7) glass, which, as far as I know, was only available from NASA at the time and probably can't be found at all today for film cameras. EDIT: f/0.7, thanks! Holy shit!

jeffreylo 14y ago
http://fstoppers.com/stanley-kubrick-films-natural-candlelight-with-insane-f0-7-lens http://fstoppers.com/stanley-kubrick-films-natural-candlelig...

fescue 14y ago

The elephant in the room here is the Auteur Theory [1]. Film is a uniquely collaborative art--a director needs to communicate his or her vision to a very large team with specialized technical skills. While tempting to do it all yourself, that doesn't scale. There's a direct corollary here with running a company. The craft, skill, and genius of great auteurs and entrepreneurs is inspiring a team with his or her vision to build great things together, not in doing it all him or her self. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur_theory

MartinCron 14y ago
While tempting to do it all yourself, that doesn't scale. Of course Kubrick didn't do it all himself. He deliberately picked things that he wanted extremely fine-grained control over and delegated other things to trusted experts. His brilliance, at least part of it, was knowing what he could delegate and what he couldn't.

mrschwabe 14y ago

Kubrick's quote from the article: "Yes, all of the hand-held camerawork is mine. In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it is virtually impossible to explain what you want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator." Kubrick might have benefited from doing a few runs with his camera, THEN showed his camera people that this is how he wanted it. I find this is a powerful technique in delegation. Ie- where most will outsource a task with a rudimentary set of guidelines, the results can be exponentially better if the 'delegator' simply rolls up his or her sleeves and literally does the task at hand, albeit a rough draft first attempt, and shares the results; uses that as the guideline. Like planting a seed with water.

stephengillie 14y ago
This article is supposed to be hero worship, but all I see is a famous director outed as a person who couldn't delegate properly.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  couldn't delegate properly Why delegate tasks that you enjoy doing? He was obviously a competent camera operator.
tobyjsullivan 14y ago
Yes, the article seems to entirely sidestep the possibility that perhaps Kubrick just had trouble communicating (at least with his cameramen).

leephillips 14y ago

This article might have been about something interesting. I don't know, because I stopped after this: "It was less a surprise to the extent that he, famously demanding and meticulous, had a specific vision which needed to be realized, but more-so a surprise I had never thought of him to do such a peculiar thing." I don't continue reading after it becomes clear that I'm looking at some kind of rough first draft. If you want it to appear that you have some respect for yourself and your potential readers, at least look over your output once quickly before sticking it on the end of a publicly-facing URL. You have some room. Try to be more articulate than a tweet.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

Off-topic: if you like kubrick's movies, do yourself a favor and watch this documentary right now: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278736/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278736/ It's exceptionally great. Kubrick himself would've been proud of it. I really can't recommend it enough. For me, it's almost Kubrick's 10th movie (not counting Spartacus, The Killing, Killer's Kiss and Fear & Desire, of course) - that's how great it is. Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNuzGlLqxNU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNuzGlLqxNU

noisebleed 14y ago
The accompanying coffee table book is pretty great too.
MartinCron 14y ago
That is exactly the kind of off-topic comment that HN needs more of. Thank you.

nnq 14y ago

isn't this a true gem: "Our surroundings have pressured us to believe that doing less and moving slower are negative characteristics, but I see them as a obvious advantages."...