The Mystery of Stanley Kubrick’s Jacket
Stanley Kubrick was a man obsessed with many things, mostly banal in nature. In his final years, he’d collect stationary, just plain stationary, and compile archives of it at his home north of London. This is chronicled in Jon Ronson’s brilliant documentary Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. What was left out of that film though was Kubrick’s greyish-blue fur-trimmed jacket. By no means am I an expert on Kubrick but I always considered this jacket his most distinctive material presence. Personal iconography, especially within the world of cinema, is a celebrated tradition. Alfred Hitchcock’s profile, Charlie Chaplin’s moustache, Audrey Hepburn’s little black dress; these are all things that are immediately identifiable as signatures of their respective personas, often emphasised or singled out in attempts at imitation. With Kubrick? Well the majority of people wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up despite being able to tell you he was a very famous director.
I understand the mythology behind Kubrick is already overpopulated with conspiracy theories and crackpot hypotheses so I’ll try my best to avoid adding to it. My only question lies with where the jacket is now. I always wondered what happened to it. Kubrick was a man who never threw anything away, and that’s why Ronson’s documentary was fascinating. It filled in so many minor details about an enigmatic genius, but unfortunately, it left out the one question that I’ve had since I first became slightly more than a casual Kubrick fan.
From various behind the scenes photos, I worked out that Kubrick wore the same jacket over a minimum 28 year span while shooting on the set of at least five different movies; A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987)and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). it has been present at iconic moments in film. It’s a relic in and of itself. This jacket is a piece of clothing that has lived through cinematic history, and yet, it’s never discussed. Not once in all the documentaries, the soft-profiles, the critical essays, they never mention the jacket. The LACMA exhibition that opened last year had every major piece of Kubrick memorabilia, right down to his glasses, but still had no jacket.
Whether if there was just one jacket, or he simply purchased several of a certain style is unknown. There’s a lot that remained unexplained about Kubrick and that’s what makes him so captivating. He is a man who died before all questions could be answered. Speculation of hidden codes and secret messages are rife within the culture of his fandom. In Thomas Allen Nelson’s book Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, he quotes the director in saying “There’s something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.“
If I could ask Stanley Kubrick right now what happened to the jacket, I’m not sure he’d want to give me a straight answer. I think I like that. If I had to guess where it is, I’d say he was probably buried in it; surviving as just one of many secrets he took to the grave.
A couple of years ago, I made a post entitled ‘The Mystery of Stanley Kubrick’s Jacket’, and it has always remained my most popular post of all time, having been picked up by various media outlets.
The crux of my post was about the large parka that Kubrick was seen wearing on various film sets spanning multiple decades.
In my inbox this was morning was a note from drscreenplay and when I clicked through to his page there was this. An answer regarding how Kubrick’s jacket lasted so long and saw so many iconic moments in cinema history; there were a lot of identical jackets.
“You know the uniform. He always worse these very comfortable military jackets made out of the a kind of ripstop nylon for the summer and cotton for the winter. He had them sent in batches from the United States, then had them dyed navy blue. Stanley said he had twenty-eight of them. He would pat the chest and pockets of his jacket and say to me, ‘This is my office’.”
I have read many books on Kubrick, but I haven’t read the one by Michael Ciment. No other book ever referenced the jacket, so I just presumed there was no answer, that this was just another mythology to add to the Kubrick collection. Today, without even trying, I feel like I know the man a little bit more.
The Forgotten M.F.A. of Trevor Paglen
You may know the work of Trevor Paglen, or not, depending on his mood. He is best known for creating investigative art that orbits the surveillance state in one way or another. His most recent work shows ███████ and its ability to █████ █████ ████████████ but you may have also seen some of his images as promotional material for Laura Poitras’ recent documentary on NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
FINAL WORKS:
Interpreting Rothko’s 1968-77 Monotone Period
A new exhibition opening soon at the Tate Modern in London aims to bring the 1970′s work of Rothko to the forefront of the medium. In its press release, the gallery promises to finally highlight the artist’s latter works and admits fault for not including them in their flagship Rothko exhibition a few years earlier.
This caught me by surprise. Not only that an institution would apologise outright for a curatorial decision, but that they would take action to rectify their mistake. But of course, it only took me a few minutes to realise how brilliant this would be as a marketing opportunity. Rothko’s life as a man who rediscovers himself while on the brink of annihilation is just the kind of narrative that may be swept under the rug one minute and exhibited for promotional gain just a few years later.
![The House That Boys Built [2016]Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Emma Stone, Ben Mendelsohn.
In a post-9/11 America, is there anything that has beentalked about, explored, and picked apart more than post-9/11 America itself? It has...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a69a0a729898b74cd9f6e82373a120a/tumblr_nlh9wi0tCa1qzi284o1_500.jpg)
The House That Boys Built [2016]
Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Emma Stone, Ben Mendelsohn.
In a post-9/11 America, is there anything that has beentalked about, explored, and picked apart more than post-9/11 America itself? It has taken on the status of a near-automatic cultural touchstone for all mainstream cinema. Whether it’s the eternal struggle against the surveillance state or a summer blockbuster that incorporates faux-found footage of a collapsed building; America is infatuated with looking into the mirror at its own bruised psyche. Years, even decades, are spent picking at scabs yet there still remains a mystery as to why blood keeps appearing.
Spike Jonze’s first major picture since his gruesome tennis injury is the latest film to look in that mirror. The House That Boys Built is another bout of self-analysis theatre that takes the viewer down a rabbit-hole of the United States in 2016. Unlike Terrence Malick’s ham-fisted approach to last year’s Dawn Chorus, Jonze manages to make a full-bodied feature that doesn’t dwell on introspective self-pity or take 120 minutes to build to the inevitable and played-out “Is War Justified?” argument. You wait and you wait for something like that to happen, but before you know it, the credits are rolling.
Public and Private Perceptions of Meaning
DIGITALFAUN 2009-2014
By Alex Sinclair
* * *
Lately, I’ve been busy. I may actually be in one of the most promising and fruitful periods of my short professional career to date. I have been chipping away at a lot of projects and avenues for months in the hopes that they lead to something bigger, something concrete. And during those months, the perception of those around me may have been that I was doing nothing with my life. I’ve been trying. I really have. And it’s really difficult to deal with a current social standard where being jobless is the default position for someone my age yet, it’s also something looked down upon. I have been trying. I swear.
I’ve been applying to jobs. Even jobs I don’t want. Mostly jobs I do want though. None of these are great big jobs where I cost a company lots of money in exchange for little work. Instead they’re modest, entry level positions at places where I think it might not totally suck to work at. And I’ve definitely been trying.
Flashers at the National
By Luke Winter
* * *
“We’re not supposed to talk about it. But the policy was changed three weeks back and don’t see how they’d be able to reverse it now.”
“And has it got louder?” I ask.
“Har har”, his eyes flash, “Oh most definitely. What with their clicking of shutters, louder. And who wants to see that red beam all over the painting that you’re looking at? And they look less at the paintings now that they’re allowed cameras, as if by taking a photo they’ve conquered the painting, but they’ve not looked at it, whereas before they’d stand and try and claim some little victory of comprehension, even if it was just reading the information plaque. But the vast majority don’t really know how to use their cameras and so you get a lot of flashers.”
There Are Stages
By Alex Sinclair
* * *
When a celebrity dies, society goes through several phases. There are initial remarks of grief.
“Gone too soon."
"Oh no.”
“I loved him/her!”
Then come the tributes. Images of the deceased are immediately manipulated to show their best side. Quotes are arranged. Some longer, more poignant, tributes are written by those who may have met the deceased in their lifetime. Most of these are by people who had brief encounters with the person they looked up to. Rarely are they by those truly close to the individual.
WESTWARD BOUND
ISSUES WITH ROADTRIP PHOTOGRAPHY
By Matthew Flores
* * *
A dusty stretch of road, cleaving its way through far-off, majestic spines of snowcapped mountains. An open vista of turbulent ocean, battering against rugged cliffs and foreboding boulders. A heroically battered vehicle, practically bursting at the seams with tents, surfboards, sleeping bags, and clear-eyed young adults (always the coolest kids you know) sporting a perfectly positioned cigarette and a pair of gleaming Ray Bans. Few things are as synonymous with summertime as the road trip, and, likewise, few photographic genres resonate as clearly with the season as the road trip series.
Because of its visual allure and popularity, road trip photography has become almost ubiquitous in contemporary visual culture. While certainly not a new development, this genre of photography has recently delved into occasionally troubling thematic waters. If it can be taken seriously, these issues need to be addressed and considered when analyzing a body of work identified with the road trip.
A N I N T E R V I E W W I T H J O H N N Y D E G U Z M A N
By Alex Sinclair
DISCLAIMER: I’ve been to Chicago twice in my life. Both times I never set foot outside of airport property. I say “property” rather than “terminal” because while I was there during a layover on my way home from a New Orleans wedding, I was really sick and regularly alternated between navigating the ice rain outside and the bleach-blonde tiles of the bathroom.
* * *
I met him at the corner of Walton and Michigan. He wore a plain black t-shirt, narrow jeans and his shoes look black too, but matte black, like charcoal. He had just finished work and we were meeting up to talk about David.
This was my first time meeting Johnny, and I’d never met David, the subject of his latest photo-series, À Tout Le Monde. I only had a couple of hours in town before I had to run back to O'Hare and catch a flight to see my cousins in Louisiana. We didn’t have long but I think that may have helped the matter. With complicated issues such as these, it’s almost better to be forced into confronting them. Address the subject. Get the answers. Understand things a little better.
THE SECOND DANCE
By Luke Winter
–
[Article compares the compulsion to shoot, and ecstasy of shooting, with the alternate faculty of editing. Article begins with the anecdote of a photographer expressing their wish to die and an editor to subsequently arrange and publish their work without them, before examining what is narrow in that point of view.]
–
Half thought he saw. His other half’s scared. Know he won’t check, is still walking (The Writing Editor doesn’t like this phrase. He calls it clumsy). You're past him now, have flipped your camera to the front of your hand. You got it. Another two steps, you're lined up perfectly and *BLATZ*, nailed the angle on that bin. Feet ahead swivelling to the side past two idlers and the way that pavement will intersect that lamp-post in half a step’s time and *BLATZ*. Got it again. Feet forward. Momentum. Shot after shot and *BLATZ*. You’re surging.
LANDSCAPE PERSPECTIVES:
PROJECTING PHOTOGRAPHY’S FAVOURITE GENRE
By Isobel Taylor
Once considered a secondary subject in painting, landscape imagery now dominates our visual media as a vista of its own. Often the word ‘landscape’ is interchanged for words such as nature, place or space. Each concept is duplicitous and makes engaging with landscapes on a critical level all the more challenging. Landscapes in photography are mostly considered to be factual and therefore ideas about realism must be considered too.
‘Nature’, as a concept, has now become alien to us and even our understanding of the landscape genres (romanticism, picturesque imagery, etc) has become a managed and manicured version of nature. Representations of the landscape have changed throughout history and are now influenced not just by art movements but the way we have changed our external world through urbanisation and virtual reality.
ASSEMBLING MATTERS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
By Stephen Hughes
These are stills from an RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s public state-owned public broadcaster) news report on the 13th of April 2014 on climate change, in response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released the same day. This was the report that showed how global emissions of greenhouse gasses grew more quickly between 2000 and 2010 than in each of the three previous decades. The scientific consensus on this issue is that climate patterns of temperature and precipitation are evolving alongside a slow rise in sea levels, and that humans are very likely responsible for it – primarily through the emission of greenhouse gases and transformations of the Earth’s land surface. This is the reality of the situation. As a public-service broadcaster, RTÉ is tasked with conveying this reality to its citizens. A problem arises however, when we confront the fact that the reality of climate change is not identical with representations of the reality of climate change.
ACCIDENTAL PHOTOGRAPHIC DEMOCRACY:
THE MASS APPROPRIATION OF GOOGLE STREET VIEW
By Alex Sinclair
In May 2007, Google launched their ’Street View’ campaign; an ambitious project documenting the various sights that could be seen when navigating five major US cities (New York, Miami, Denver, Las Vegas and San Francisco).
The aim was to replicate the sensation of exploring these cities yourself. The product at the time was seen as an extreme version of urban mapping and an extension of the popular Google Maps and Google Earth applications. With Maps and Earth, the idea was to give you an aerial view of whatever you wished. The programs comprised of thousands of satelite imagery stitched together and aside from some potential security concerns from government officials regarding secure locations and important buildings, the impact felt on cultural and societal levels was minimal.
THE STATE OF CINEMATIC TELEVISION
By Stephen McCabe
“Amazing direction happened on TV all the time before cable but almost nobody recognized it as such because we were told that art was an anomalous in television as wildflower in a toxic waste dump”
- Matt Zoller Seltz
Television as a medium, produces much that could be in direct opposition to ‘having qualities characteristic of motion pictures’. The visual language of television staples like soap operas would not be considered cinematic at all, the same can be said for some of the output of television at the moment. As we progress through the so-called ‘Golden Age of Television’, there has been a shift towards television as a more cinematic medium. With the continued rise of content streaming services such as Netflix or Video On Demand, the lines between cinematic television and cinema itself are becoming considerably blurred.