Kubrick / Antonioni - The Glacial Epoch

If one is really into cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s approach in his later films is clearly similar to the general style of Michelangelo Antonioni, a key filmmaker of the European Art Cinema of 1960. In fact, Antonioni was one of the filmmakers who could appreciate ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ at a point where most people did not understand what the film was driving at, and he has also made ‘Red Desert’ to address the problems of the modern era.

I would like to address an issue regarding both Antonioni’s and Kubrick’s film characters. Many critics believe Antonioni and Kubrick had deep contempt for their characters, therefore they made the characters uninteresting. Kubrick’s characters are often cold and emotionless, and Antonioni’s characters are often empty and purposeless. Kubrick and Antonioni shared a cold and clinical approach towards filmmaking. Some detractors even projected these movie characters to the directors, saying that Kubrick and Antonioni were cold and robotic themselves. The truth is, it is quite the opposite.

Why did Kubrick and Antonioni treat their characters this way? Well, because they had a common belief that it was more important to inspire the audience with important ideas rather than providing some feel-good characters, or characters that the audience could ‘identify’ with in a sentimental way. Kubrick aimed for universalizing concepts and Antonioni targeted the immanent landscape. Both directors saw their characters as an instrument to contribute to this aim. Kubrick’s characters were really ideas in a human form, and some were extreme, like Alex de Large and Jack Torrance. In Kubrick’s cinema, he wanted to illustrate how the various ideas might interact in cinematic terms. Antonioni’s characters were reflections of the failure of interaction of his characters and their surroundings. Both Kubrickian and Antonioni-esque characters were victims, the former ones suffered from frequent bouts of mechanical dehumanization, the latter suffered from alienation and an empty soul. The two filmmakers unleashed these terrible characters because they did not want us to become these characters in the real world.

In both cases, there were something to do with the systems we have created for progress and well-being throughout our existences. Kubrick’s characters were drained of emotion because they fitted in so well to the systems, and have become instruments rather than masters. Antonioni’s characters were so submitted to the established values that their lives were drained of meanings as they did not want to try and find out new ones.

If we can sympathize with these characters’ plights, then the filmmakers have succeeded in getting their messages across. Kubrick and Antonioni were certainly not the only two persons on this planet who were aware of these problems, but the way they presented these ideas and resulted in inspiring so many others were what made them genius. 

by Ed Law

Film Analysis