Kubrick's Boxes and Useful Information

I’m no Kubrick maniac. I doze off in the slow spaceshippy scenes of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY every time. I still can’t bring myself to watch EYES WIDE SHUT. But despite my lack of zeal, I recognize his genius. My understanding of his creative life expanded by watching Jon Ronson’s documentary, STANLEY KUBRICK’S BOXES, recently shared via the newsletter Meanwhile by Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Maybe the most on-topic discovery from the film was the Kubrick was a stationery enthusiast. He stole away to his local stationer at seemingly every opportunity. His right-hand-man described heaps of specialty paper and fountain pen wells. They could’ve started their own shop, he said.

The topic of the film I think, is that Kubrick’s rigorous and seemingly extreme creative process is utterly symbiotic with his achievement. To be great, in other words, he had to do things more rigorously and obsessively than your average filmmaker. 

The sojourn into his passion for stationery contradicted the dour characterization of the obsessive who couldn’t get out of his own head. Yet, his zeal makes perfect sense within context. Who would be more likely, after all, than a fan of ink and paper to engineer his own cardboard box to his perfect specifications? We gain in our understanding of an artist by seeing a curious new contour of humanity.

I give KUBRICK’S BOXES five perfectly calibrated boxes out of five.

-Ted

P.S. Adam jumping in here. I watched this documentary on Ted’s recommendation (five out of five boxes here too.) and I came across something I had never seen mentioned before. The image below, a frame from the film, is the back cover of Kubrick’s notebooks. To me this is a clear precursor to the inside cover designs and practical applications used by Field Notes. It’s not clear from the film whether these notebooks were custom made for Kubrick or were the director’s preferred brand. Given Coudal Partner’s well-documented obsession with Kubrick, this probably isn’t a coincidence.

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