Stanley Kubrick He was a great image perfectionist. By watching some of his films we can appreciate his obsession with symmetry and technique, the first characteristics we think of when talking about his cinema.
However, the director of A Clockwork Orange He was not very receptive to negative criticism. To the conflict with Stephen King over The glow it adds that in the 70 tried to prevent a book from being published that included bad reviews of his work.
We talk about The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick by Neil Hornick, a book that reviewed the director’s cinematographic work. Although it had a generally positive outlook, it included some negative aspects.
What bothered you?
At first Kubrick approved this project and cooperated, but then he opposed it, taking the matter to legal proceedings. 55 years later, this book was finally published by Sticking Place Books.
About the book, the writer himself explains that it was about “a summary of good things about each film followed by a summary of bad points that, in Kubrick’s view, always outweigh the good because of the overly emphatic way in which such criticisms are presented”(via The Guardian).
One of the examples of “negative criticism” refers to Lolitathe 1962 film based on the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov: “There are good things in Lolita. But, in many aspects it wastes, impoverishes and conventionalizes its original material, taking away its complexity, nympheterie and eroticism”.
For his part, editor Paul Cronin said: “Kubrick didn’t just edit: he deleted the entire project. Now, nearly 55 years after Neil Hornick completed it, readers can finally make their own judgments about the book that Kubrick was so ruthlessly determined to keep out of the public eye.”
