I forgot about Stanley Kubrick

It's been about two years since I ventured into Robert Kolker's class on Stanley Kubrick. As a class we watched the entire collection from The Killing to Eyes Wide Shut, and it is in that process I learned to have a critical eye tow ards film; gathering patterns, aesthetics, and themes that I had not seen before.

Yesterday the National Gallery in Washington, DC held a special film series featuring Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and Eyes Wide Shut with professor Kolker and James Naremore, calling it "two views." Yet in the end there was not a separation of views, but almost an agreeing factor that Kubrick was a mysterious man with filmmaking techniques that looked nothing like the ways of any Hollywood hotshot.

In my second and third viewing of the films, the first time on the big screen, I got to experience them with new light and appreciation. Their mature stance on an adapted story and using actors as toys in a fictional world set to resemble our own, marveled in its ability to speak on politics, gender, fantasy and beliefs. A Kubrick film can be watched over and over again with new discoveries every time. I can't put a finger on how layers keep appearing over the celluloid that can be pealed back to new levels of meaning, new visual experiences, and new translations of words. For example, it was made clearer to me that Eyes Wide Shut is about fidelity and features Kubrick's strongest female character in Nicole Kidman.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to many years ahead of movie watching (and making), rediscovery, and exploration of what a film can encapsulate to entrance generations to come.