England,
2000, 141 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jan Harlan
- prod
-
Jan Harlan
- cam
-
Manuel Harlan
- editor
-
Melanie Viner Cuneo
- source
-
Warner Bros. Classics, 15821 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 525, Encino, CA 91436
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Jan Harlan in person.
OTHER
Jan Harlan, brother-in-law of the late Stanley Kubrick, has come up with the definitive documentary on the mercurial, immensely gifted, challenging and controversial filmmaker. With full cooperation from Kubrick’s family, friends and collaborators, Harlan portrays him as a devoted family man who, though a native New Yorker, lived for 40 years in Britain and whose complete perfectionism gave him the reputation for being difficult, unreachable or, in the words of one British tabloid, “barking mad.” Filled with carefully chosen clips from the films, and with a star roster of Hollywood names (Arthur C. Clarke, Tom Cruise, Christiane Kubrick, Malcom McDowell, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson and Peter Ustinov, to name but a few) willing to talk on the record, A Life in Pictures is a useful starting point for anyone wanting to know more about one of the cinema’s most significant talents. Certainly one of the most insightful moments comes in Jack Nicholson’s revelation that Kubrick saw The Shining, a very dark, grim gothic thriller, as an optimistic film because it dealt with ghosts. For Kubrick, anything that suggested there was some kind of life after death had to be optimistic.
—David Stratton, Variety
FACTOID #208
Before the showing of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest at the 40th SFIFF, Bay Area editor Walter Murch (who selected the film to screen in the Indelible Images series), passed out fortune cookies to the crowd with Bresson’s musings on making films.
