Kubrick was interested above all in the fractures of History, those moments when everything is turned upside down and the bases of an established order give way to the sudden appearance of the unknown. The reason he accepted Kirk Douglas's proposal to take over the shooting of Spartacus (the only one of his films that was not a personal project) from Anthony Mann was because he must have viewed the revolt of the Roman slaves as the harbinger of other revolutionary mass movements that shook the world. Although Barry Lyndon was born out of the frustration of not being able to make Napoleon, both films take place in a turning-point period round the French Revolution. The final frame of Barry Lyndon shows Marisa Berenson signing a letter dated 1789, and Bonaparte himself came out of the Revolution. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick portrays an ossified caste society, constricted in its rituals, and with it the coming decline of the Europe of the Enlightenment. Napoleon himself admired the goddess Reason, like Robespierre, before subjecting the continent to a bloodbath, just as his predecessor had pushed France into the Terror. Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket are concerned with two wars that marked historic turning points: the first would give birth to the 20th century, and the second marked the first defeat in the United States' history. Dr. Strangelove echoes the nuclear peril, which was never felt more strongly than in the early 1960s, whereas 2001: A Space Odyssey dealt with the conquest of the cosmos, a spectacular advance in science and technology.
Kubrick always prepared his films with the mentality of a historian. This visionary filmmaker needed the most solid bases, the verification of facts and the most in-depth research to immerse himself in an environment before his imagination could unfold. The extraordinary wealth of documentation assembled for his Napoleon bears witness to this concern. He brought together five hundred works on the emperor and asked Oxford students to put them on file cards. Fifteen thousand photos of possible shooting locations, seventeen thousand images from brochures, engravings, drawings and paintings were thus collected. As he would do for Barry Lyndon, he proposed shooting in natural settings without recourse to artificial lighting. The period reconstructions of Barry Lyndon were based on paintings of the era by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hogarth, Zoffany, Chodowiecki and Stubbs (for the horses). For more recent and contemporary periods, he proceeded in the same way. He viewed hundreds of documentary films and consulted thousands of photos to reproduce the atmosphere of the Vietnam war in Full Metal Jacket. He could not have been further removed from the belief of our time that one needs first-hand experience to better create. With The Short-Timers, the book by Gustav Hasford who had experienced the Vietnam conflict, and the documentation in which he had immersed himself, he knew the different phases of the conflict and the ordeals of the combatant better than most of those who had actually been there. Similarly, he probably gained a better understanding of Napoleon than some members of the emperor's own entourage. For the Aryan Papers project (1991-93), an adaptation of Louis Begley's narrative Wartime Lies whose framework was the Holocaust and related the survival of a Jewish child and his aunt, he similarly gathered an enormous quantity of photographs, in particular for researching locations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Others came from archives on the life of Jews in the ghettos and death camps as well as on their daily life in Eastern Europe. He had also meticulously annotated Raul Hilberg's monumental The Destruction of the European Jews.
To imagine the future, he proceeded in the same way. He contacted the leading experts in aeronautics and cybernetics such as NASA to give life to space voyages and the HAL 9000 in 2001 or the android in A.I., his project on artificial intelligence.
Michel Ciment