Stanley Kubrick at the Design Museum

This was definitely one of the best exhibitions I had ever seen. I totally agree with Will Gompertz, Arts Editor of the BBC who gave it five stars and says "The exhibition has been reconfigured and re-thought by the museum's curators with help from the designers, Pentagram. Elements have been thoughtfully added, such as Don McCullin's Vietnam War photographs, which Kubrick used as a reference source for scenes in Full Metal Jacket". He goes on:

You don't really get a true sense of the man behind the camera. Like almost all exhibitions nowadays, this is a myth-making enterprise in which the only criticism of the subject (letters from censors and disapproving cinema-goers) are designed to elevate his status as a maverick genius. But what it lacks in the way of a serious examination of an idiosyncratic, complex artist, it makes up for with a deeply researched documentary account of his working process. In the first room, we meet a young Stanley making a living by winning a few dollars playing chess and taking photographs for Look magazine (there's an accompanying exhibition of this early photographic work in the gallery above). We see the Eyemo camera he used for the fight scenes in Killer's Kiss, an early film he considered "amateurish". And in the corner is the cold-metal lumpen shape of his trusty Steenbeck editing table. 

What came across loud and clear was that Kubrick was far more comfortable editing his footage than anything else in the film making process. To sit at a cramped desk with film passing through a tiny screen for hours on end shows what a dedicated genius this man was.

One of the first items on display was this notebook for some special effects on The Shining. But they were written in a Quantity Surveyor's dim (dimension) book. There will not be many who spotted this!

In that first room of the exhibition is a piece of the script from Doctor Strangelove (one of my favourite movies). It is the part when the President speaks on the hot phone to his Soviet counterpart and includes the words "It's like this". Straightaway, I was bowled over.

What then follows is a room-by-room presentation of all his major films, starting with Paths of Glory and then Spartacus.  Amongst the hundreds of displays there is a shooting schedule for Paths of Glory. I have to say, I have never seen a shooting schedule before.

On the same film, a photo of a camera tower.

A sketch for an exterior of the hotel in The Shining.

Some costumes from that movie.

Some masks from Eyes Wide Shut.

Costumes from Barry Lyndon.

And those from 2001.

These are just a selection from a huge collection of items from the Stanley Kubrick archive. The presentation of those with a room for each film was just wonderful. I was in awe.