Reel Politique: Book Review, On Kubrick
Like every self-respecting genre specialist across the land, I’m making my way through Tim Lucas’s 1000-plus page book about Mario Bava, the innovative Italian director. It’s an elegantly written and detailed book, and an enriching experience to read.
However, books march on, and since receiving the Bava I’ve been inundated with others, including the much-longed for On Kubrick, by one of my favorite film writers, James Naremore. A full review of the book will follow in a few weeks, but I played hooky on Bava today with Kubrick. Every page has some new insight about Kubrick and his films, some connection that links career from one end to another.
Yet reading the two books in tandem may prove to be a good thing. While looking through Mr. Naremore’s Kubrick book amid the pervading residue of the Bava book, I began to detect some visual cues in Kubrick’s films that have a distinct Bava quality. Bava doesn’t appear in Naremore’s index (nor Kubrick in the Bava book’s index), and I know of no mention of Bava by Kubrick in any interviews, so it may be a coincidence but there are a number of links between and visual motifs shared by the two directors.
If you look only at Bava’s credited films, the two made roughly the same number of feature films (although Mr. Lucas makes it clear that the workaholic Bava had a much more vast filmography than previously known). Each dabbled in a plethora of different genres. But more important there are visual similarities. Bava didn’t appear to be as addicted to the tracking shot as Kubrick, but in Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, there are numerous echoes of Bava’s visual techniques. Mr. Naremore likens some aspects of Eyes Wide Shut to Kubrick’s lifelong interest in and influence from Viennese culture and European modernity, but Eyes Wide Shut’s use of color gels, masks, uncertain identities, and treks through ominous cityscapes, it feels very much like a Bava film. The similarities are definitely there, but is it “influence”? The greatest similarity is that both work in the field of the grotesque, which is easy to see in Bava’s output, but less obvious in Kubrick’s. Early in his book, Mr. Naremore makes a case that Kubrick was a practitioner of the art of the grotesque, a long and subtle argument that enriches Kubrick’s work and addresses the issue of his supposed “coldness” and hyper-intellectualism. Seen in that light, Kubrick’s films are even less distance from Bava’s. The confluence of these two books reminds us that Cinema is a vast evolving network where new connections constantly reveal themselves, and excavations in its terrain will never be over.