Stanley Kubrick : The Exhibition


Fascinating exhibition at the Design Museum looking at the work of Stanley Kubrick and the designers who worked with him.

I must admit I went along to with low expectations and I’m not a huge fan of Kubrick’s best known films but it was so well arranged and explained with a wealth of archive material and artefacts and I’d forgotten what a range of films he made. I was grabbed from the first display which looked at how he researched his films in amazing depth taking a film on the life of Napoleon he researched but never made. As a librarian you have to love his card filing system!

The show then went through his career film by film using each one to illustrate some aspect of how his design process worked. The films followed in chronological order but for once I didn’t mind this. I hadn’t realised he’d directed Spartacus after the previous director was sacked and added the great battle scene to it. I loved a photo of numbered extras on a battlefield.

The section on Clockwork Orange looked at how he used the brutalist post war architecture to set the scene and included costumes and good production photographs. The Shining section included a wonderful model of the maze in the film and the iconic dresses worn by the twins. I loved the attention to detail that Kubrick had made 5 versions of the manuscript Jack Nicholson’s character is working in different languages for the translations of the film. Of course it ended with 2001 Space Odyssey looking at the detail of the design for it which created a whole world.

My favourite section was on Barry Lyndon and how Kubrick used the art of the period to influence every shot of the film. There were costumes from the film along with a board looking at the different locations he used.

Closes 15 September 2019

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