Kubrick and the Holocaust
August 23rd 2006 22:25
Some quotes picked up around the net.
"'We were very committed to do this film,' Harlan recalls. 'We had done enormous amounts of research and preparation, but there came a point when he and Warner boss Terry Semel decided it would be better to do AI first. It had to do with Schindler's List,' he said. 'It was such a good film and so successful, and Stanley's film would have come out about a year later. He'd already had this experience with Full Metal Jacket, which came out the year after Platoon, and that hurt us, there's no question about it.' So in 1995, The Aryan Papers was abandoned and Kubrick returned to AI."
-- Steve Rose, Kubrick, Spielberg and the AI project, 5 May 2000
"The recently released 'Stanley Kubrick Archives,' an unwieldy coffee-table tome published by Taschen, sheds new light on the famously secretive director's failed project. An essay by Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and producer, details Kubrick's longtime pursuit of the Holocaust as a subject for a film. Harlan writes of traveling to New York in 1976 to try and interest Isaac Bashevis Singer in contributing an original screenplay. What Kubrick sought from Singer was a 'dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this manmade hell.'
Singer, who unlike many of his friends was not a Holocaust survivor, gratefully declined, saying, 'I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust.'
Kubrick shelved the project until 1991, when he read Louis Begley's short novel, 'Wartime Lies,' about a Jewish boy and his aunt who survive the war by snaking their way through Poland, pretending to be Catholics. Begley's autobiographical tale so intrigued Kubrick that he was willing to shoot the project abroad -- a dramatic decision for the director, who hadn't left England for more than three decades. Kubrick got the go-ahead from Warner Bros. -- which publicly announced the project as 'Aryan Papers' (a reference to the documents required to escape deportation) in 1993 -- and he got fairly far along in the pre-production, hiring set and costume designers and casting several of the main roles. For the role of the boy's aunt, Tanya, Kubrick considered Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman."
-- AJ Goldmann, Stanley Kubrick's Unrealized Vision
"In 1980, he told the author Michael Herr that what he wanted most was to make a film about the Holocaust, 'but good luck in putting all that into a two-hour movie.'
-- AJ Goldmann, Stanley Kubrick's Unrealized Vision
Frederic Raphael co-wrote "Eyes Wide Shut", and wrote a memoir, Eyes Wide Open.
"And then Kubrick drops the big one. 'The Holocaust, what do you think?' Raphael stalls a moment. 'As a subject for a movie. Can it be done?' The director's insinuation, of course, is that it hasn't been done; his strategy… compels the writer to offer some examples from film history and then await their swift dismissal. Proposing the French documentary Night and Fog and a Polish obscurity called Passenger, Raphael withholds mention of the cinematic gantseh megilleh until, finally, he has no choice. 'Well, there's [Spielberg's] Schindler's List, isn't there?' 'Think that was about the Holocaust?' teases Kubrick… 'That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List was about six hundred people who don't. Anything else?'"
-- Rob Nelson, Saving Stanley Kubrick, 4 July 2001
Geoffrey Cocks wrote The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust.
"Most unsatisfying is Cocks' argument that Kubrick was unable to confront the Holocaust directly and therefore the more obscure the apparent Holocaust reference, the more Cocks presents it as evidence of his thesis. Cocks argues that Kubrick felt he could not directly explore the Holocaust because its horrors were so overwhelming, that it was impossible to ethically and artistically do justice to such a mass crime against humanity. The fact that Kubrick was developing 'Aryan Papers'… does not convince Cocks. The obvious commercial decision to abandon the project and Kubrick's admiration for Spielberg… is not an acceptable explanation for Cocks. Instead Cocks uses such incidents as proof that Kubrick could never bring himself to make a film about the Holocaust directly."
-- Thomas Caldwell, review
Notes
-- Monday 3 December 2007: Christiana Kubrick in "Stanley Kubrick: A life in pictures" reports that, yes, the fact that Spielberg had already begun shooting "Schindler's List" was a factor, but, "There was another thing -- that he felt it just couldn't be told. 'If I really want to show what I have read and know happened' -- and he read everything -- 'how can I even film it, how can you even pretend it?' ... He became very depressed during the preparations and I was glad when he gave up on it because it was really taking its toll."
***
"'We were very committed to do this film,' Harlan recalls. 'We had done enormous amounts of research and preparation, but there came a point when he and Warner boss Terry Semel decided it would be better to do AI first. It had to do with Schindler's List,' he said. 'It was such a good film and so successful, and Stanley's film would have come out about a year later. He'd already had this experience with Full Metal Jacket, which came out the year after Platoon, and that hurt us, there's no question about it.' So in 1995, The Aryan Papers was abandoned and Kubrick returned to AI."
-- Steve Rose, Kubrick, Spielberg and the AI project, 5 May 2000
***
"The recently released 'Stanley Kubrick Archives,' an unwieldy coffee-table tome published by Taschen, sheds new light on the famously secretive director's failed project. An essay by Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and producer, details Kubrick's longtime pursuit of the Holocaust as a subject for a film. Harlan writes of traveling to New York in 1976 to try and interest Isaac Bashevis Singer in contributing an original screenplay. What Kubrick sought from Singer was a 'dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this manmade hell.'
Singer, who unlike many of his friends was not a Holocaust survivor, gratefully declined, saying, 'I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust.'
Kubrick shelved the project until 1991, when he read Louis Begley's short novel, 'Wartime Lies,' about a Jewish boy and his aunt who survive the war by snaking their way through Poland, pretending to be Catholics. Begley's autobiographical tale so intrigued Kubrick that he was willing to shoot the project abroad -- a dramatic decision for the director, who hadn't left England for more than three decades. Kubrick got the go-ahead from Warner Bros. -- which publicly announced the project as 'Aryan Papers' (a reference to the documents required to escape deportation) in 1993 -- and he got fairly far along in the pre-production, hiring set and costume designers and casting several of the main roles. For the role of the boy's aunt, Tanya, Kubrick considered Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman."
-- AJ Goldmann, Stanley Kubrick's Unrealized Vision
***
"In 1980, he told the author Michael Herr that what he wanted most was to make a film about the Holocaust, 'but good luck in putting all that into a two-hour movie.'
-- AJ Goldmann, Stanley Kubrick's Unrealized Vision
***
Frederic Raphael co-wrote "Eyes Wide Shut", and wrote a memoir, Eyes Wide Open.
"And then Kubrick drops the big one. 'The Holocaust, what do you think?' Raphael stalls a moment. 'As a subject for a movie. Can it be done?' The director's insinuation, of course, is that it hasn't been done; his strategy… compels the writer to offer some examples from film history and then await their swift dismissal. Proposing the French documentary Night and Fog and a Polish obscurity called Passenger, Raphael withholds mention of the cinematic gantseh megilleh until, finally, he has no choice. 'Well, there's [Spielberg's] Schindler's List, isn't there?' 'Think that was about the Holocaust?' teases Kubrick… 'That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List was about six hundred people who don't. Anything else?'"
-- Rob Nelson, Saving Stanley Kubrick, 4 July 2001
***
Geoffrey Cocks wrote The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust.
"Most unsatisfying is Cocks' argument that Kubrick was unable to confront the Holocaust directly and therefore the more obscure the apparent Holocaust reference, the more Cocks presents it as evidence of his thesis. Cocks argues that Kubrick felt he could not directly explore the Holocaust because its horrors were so overwhelming, that it was impossible to ethically and artistically do justice to such a mass crime against humanity. The fact that Kubrick was developing 'Aryan Papers'… does not convince Cocks. The obvious commercial decision to abandon the project and Kubrick's admiration for Spielberg… is not an acceptable explanation for Cocks. Instead Cocks uses such incidents as proof that Kubrick could never bring himself to make a film about the Holocaust directly."
-- Thomas Caldwell, review
***
Notes
-- Monday 3 December 2007: Christiana Kubrick in "Stanley Kubrick: A life in pictures" reports that, yes, the fact that Spielberg had already begun shooting "Schindler's List" was a factor, but, "There was another thing -- that he felt it just couldn't be told. 'If I really want to show what I have read and know happened' -- and he read everything -- 'how can I even film it, how can you even pretend it?' ... He became very depressed during the preparations and I was glad when he gave up on it because it was really taking its toll."
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Comment by Luke
Old Movies
Cane Toad Warrior
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
I'd never actually heard of that movie before. But the concept of mixing Holocaust and comedy is kind of interesting. Absolute evil and absolute good are so absurd that perhaps they can only be expressed through the comic.
Found the following quote, attributed to Harry Shearer, in the Wikipedia article on "The Day the Clown Died":
"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. 'Oh My God!' -- that's all you can say."
Comment by Luke
Old Movies
Cane Toad Warrior
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
On the topic of Kubrick and a Holocaust picture it is something we can only specualte on. Watching his anti war gem Paths Of Glory you can see that he deals with the profound questions of humanity in times of combat with flair.
In terms of dealing with Holocaust, I still think that Tun Fei Mou Man Behind The Sun is the most powerful and profound film made about mans inhumanity to man during wartime.
Telling the story of Camp637 where the japanese did human testing and experimentation on hundered of thousands of Manchurians. This event is stil denied by the many Japanese and has been overshadowed by the Jewish slaughter in WWII. Harrowing but thought provoking.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Kubrick's Paths Of Glory is a thought provoking experience.
Man Behind The Sun is a real challenge to get through because of it's graphic nature, but its well worth it.