The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London opened in 2007, giving unprecedented access to hundreds of boxes of documentation accumulated by Kubrick throughout his career. (A copy of my research into Kubrick’s photography is included in one box, presumably printed out by someone in Kubrick’s office.) The archive has transformed Kubrick scholarship, with a new focus on the primary sources available there. This has led to revisionist accounts of Kubrick’s working methods, most notably Mick Broderick’s Reconstructing Strangelove and James Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces.
In his new book Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research, Filippo Ulivieri goes a stage further: he not only corrects the persistent misconceptions about Kubrick’s life and work, he also identifies their origins. And Ulivieri’s findings are groundbreaking: “Kubrick deliberately crafted his own distinctive persona,” he writes. The legends surrounding Kubrick—his obsessive secrecy, his perfectionism, his eccentricities—were the result of strategic self-mythologising by the director: “what we know about him is in fact a mythology of his own design”.
In his new book Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research, Filippo Ulivieri goes a stage further: he not only corrects the persistent misconceptions about Kubrick’s life and work, he also identifies their origins. And Ulivieri’s findings are groundbreaking: “Kubrick deliberately crafted his own distinctive persona,” he writes. The legends surrounding Kubrick—his obsessive secrecy, his perfectionism, his eccentricities—were the result of strategic self-mythologising by the director: “what we know about him is in fact a mythology of his own design”.
This conclusion, based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of published interviews with Kubrick, is one of numerous revelations in Cracking the Kube. The book also features a uniquely comprehensive survey of Kubrick’s unmade films (of which there were more than eighty), including the first complete account of Kubrick’s pre-production of A.I. (prior to its development by Steven Spielberg). Ulivieri also fully explores Kubrick’s collaborations with the writers Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, and Frederic Raphael for the first time, and writes a nuanced defence of Raphael’s controversial Kubrick memoir Eyes Wide Open.
Cracking the Kube is the product of extensive archival research, and Ulivieri has also interviewed many of Kubrick’s closest collaborators. Aside from its impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is also incredibly well-written. Ulivieri’s first book, Stanley Kubrick e me, was published in English translation as Stanley Kubrick and Me. He is also a co-author of 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) which, like Cracking the Kube, was self-published. He writes that there are “over a hundred books” on Kubrick’s films, and at least half of these are on Dateline Bangkok’s bookshelves.
Cracking the Kube is the product of extensive archival research, and Ulivieri has also interviewed many of Kubrick’s closest collaborators. Aside from its impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is also incredibly well-written. Ulivieri’s first book, Stanley Kubrick e me, was published in English translation as Stanley Kubrick and Me. He is also a co-author of 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) which, like Cracking the Kube, was self-published. He writes that there are “over a hundred books” on Kubrick’s films, and at least half of these are on Dateline Bangkok’s bookshelves.