What a superb exhibition and tribute in fact to the obsessive genius that we have come to learn spared nothing in search of producing quality art. He was a masterful cameraman and editor, as well as a script~director and director.
All the original props are on show, including the Alaskan blue blouses of the twin girls at the Overlook Hotel in ‘The Shining’. I loved the exchange of letters between the two conspirators, Vladimir Nabokov and Kubrick, both unafraid of courting controversy if it was for an artistic cause.
It wasn’t just Lolita in 1962 that had Kubrick in trouble, and it wasn’t just in the Puritanical Mid-West. Famously, he felt he had to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from circulation after he felt Britain’s domestic ills were somehow being pinned on his 1971 film. But perhaps above all else in this neverending tour of cinematic greatness, were his annotated notes of his many books, scripts, and screenplays.
He would iterate and then obsess over these, and obsess about the need for perfect directorial judgement to the point he drove many of his collaborators – like Shelley Duvall – to a state of delirium and, one imagines, disrepair.
