this is the closest we'll get to watching Aryan Papers

Started by Pubrick, February 01, 2010, 07:52:00 PM

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Pubrick

not very close really.

Jane and Louise Wilson are some kind of wanky new media artists and they were commissioned by the BFI to visit the Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts, London, and make something out of what they found in the Aryan Papers section. you see, that university has had kubrick's entire archives since 2007, and this is the kind of thing i would like to do at some point in my life.

read the overview: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/kubrick/kubrick

they basically got to interview Johanna ter Steege who was going to be the lead in the film. the film is 17mins 30secs and uses still images taken in costume during pre-production 18 years ago intercut with real footage of the actress NOW in similar locations and get-up. but the genius part is to keep her in the position kubrick wanted in the still images.

watch the thing: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/unfolding

i'm not sure where the dialogue is from. i havn't read the book (i hav it in the hand that isn't holding infinite jest), but since they had access to the archives this could even be snippets from a screenplay. it doesn't reveal a lot in way of plot of the overall story but Johanna gives amazing insight to her character. the questions kubrick asks her during rehearsal, his obsession with her hands, and the very very particular position/angles he wanted to see for the costume photos -- i think are very revealing.

i know that when trying costumes the director might want all the angles, but the ones that are repeated are mostly from the back. i think this is repeated enough times with enough consistency to make it on purpose and could be useful in developing theories. for example, since johanna also reveals her character would have been a chameleon, having a relationship with a german officer, and taking care of her kid.. we can EASILY see a connection with kidman's character in eyes wide shut. since she's facing away from the camera so much in the still images, we can see this would hav been a motif in keeping her character unknown. we would hav learned who she was from her physical movement. it would have been a subliminal tour de force.

more thoughts later.
under the paving stones.

Derek

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Gold Trumpet

Spoilers

I still have yet to look at those videos, but in general, I'm glad Kubrick didn't adapt Wartime Lies. I remember whenever he talked about the Holocaust, he not only talked about the enormity of the event, but he talked about the moral imperative to honor the dead of the Holocaust. The leading example (for Kubrick) was that Schindler's List wasn't about the Holocaust because it was about a number of people who lived and not about the millions who died. Wartime Lies not only falls into that same category as Schindler's List, but it doesn't even depict life in the ghettos or the camps. It's about a Jewish woman and son managing to stay steps ahead of Nazi authorities who want to outcast them to the camps. The suspense of the story is how she is always on the fringes of being captured, but finds ways to escape doom. If someone watched the film and had little idea about what the Holocaust was, the event would still remain foggy to them.

Wartime Lies is Kubrickian in that the story is about the idea of the Holocaust. Most of his films are stories that focus on the idea of something devastating happening but never physically manifesting itself the way you expect. Kubrick always inspects the psychological forces around how people perceive a major thing. Wartime Lies is about how a mother and son deal with the threat of the Holocaust but always are able to avoid it. Kubrick believed there was a weight to the Holocaust that had to be depicted and documented to be an honest narrative. It's why he still refused to endorse Schindler's List even though it showed a lot of brutality, but Wartime Lies shows far less than Speilberg does and it's much further removed from the reality of the camp's devastation. The whole of the novel has Kubrickian elements, but in reality, the novel is the last thing he should have considered adapting.

I think he found himself at the end of his life and had to find some novel or piece of literature to adapt about the Holocaust. He had a few projects in consideration during the 70s but they fell through, but Christianne Kubrick admits that the event weighed heavily on him and he had to find something, but Wartime Lies just showed him that he was never meant to make a film about the Holocaust.

Pubrick

i don't even need to hav read the book to see what's wrong with your argument. there has never been any necessary correlation between the content of a book and the content of a kubrick adaptation. especially since the shining. obviously what you say about wartime lies may be true when comparing the book to what he said about schindlers list, you make that point quite clear the first of the five times you repeat it. but it's not a good argument about why he should not hav adapted it.

obviously he would hav added his own interests, details not present in the book, to make it more of a complete account of the holocaust as he saw it. he only ever looked for characters or a basic skeleton of a story in any book he chose to adapt. Wartime Lies is very short and would probably have only supplied what i just said. NOT the boxes and boxes of research he would hav amassed, photos from the real events, and the locations he already scouted as are mentioned in the film i linked.

i think it's fine that he didn't end up doing the holocaust film for the reasons he mentioned. your rationalisation doesn't make sense tho. he wasn't at the end of his life when he thought about making it. you miss the point if you think it has anything to do with his biographical situation. unless you meant in the development of themes in his films, that making a holocaust film would hav been highly appropriate (doubtful that you meant this), then you would hav been closer to the truth.

and derek yes kinda but mostly it was just a reference.
under the paving stones.

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: ρ on February 02, 2010, 09:45:30 AM
i don't even need to hav read the book to see what's wrong with your argument. there has never been any necessary correlation between the content of a book and the content of a kubrick adaptation. especially since the shining. obviously what you say about wartime lies may be true when comparing the book to what he said about schindlers list, you make that point quite clear the first of the five times you repeat it. but it's not a good argument about why he should not hav adapted it.

obviously he would hav added his own interests, details not present in the book, to make it more of a complete account of the holocaust as he saw it. he only ever looked for characters or a basic skeleton of a story in any book he chose to adapt. Wartime Lies is very short and would probably have only supplied what i just said. NOT the boxes and boxes of research he would hav amassed, photos from the real events, and the locations he already scouted as are mentioned in the film i linked.

i think it's fine that he didn't end up doing the holocaust film for the reasons he mentioned. your rationalisation doesn't make sense tho. he wasn't at the end of his life when he thought about making it. you miss the point if you think it has anything to do with his biographical situation. unless you meant in the development of themes in his films, that making a holocaust film would hav been highly appropriate (doubtful that you meant this), then you would hav been closer to the truth.

and derek yes kinda but mostly it was just a reference.

Read the book. He can't just change a few details to make the book more about about the horror within the camps. Kubrick would need to completely reshape the story and change details that would not only alter what the book was about, but also what its essential identity was. It would be a completely different story which would put into question why he even chose the novel and if it was really even a real adaptation because it would be about a completely different story. The Shining was different than the novel, but it at least was about the same essential story of a man losing himself to the hauntings in a hotel.




Pubrick

obviously i'll read the book but i don't think it's really relevant to the argument you're making. you cannot seriously be saying that it is INCONCEIVABLE that kubrick would take a book only as INSPIRATION. that it's inconceivable that he would take some basic elements and even DRASTICALLY CHANGE THE TONE OF THE ORIGINAL:




you cannot possibly be arguing that isn't possible.

strangelove single handedly proves you wrong if you are arguing that. not to mention the utter rape of The Short Timers. i mean even the shining was hated by stephen king (OBVIOUS INFORMATION), how can you interpret that as meaning that he still has to as a rule take a certain minimum percentage of the novel., he took a lot from that story but removed what king considered its essential IDENTITY, which is why he commissioned the second version.

seriously GT. normally i am the first to defend your posts on two basic fronts that others usually ignore: 1, that you have a point, and 2, that you are actually saying something coherent and not just babbling sentences that seem to contain information but don't add up to anything intelligible. but i think i'm feeling right now what everyone else has felt time and time again, you are just being stubborn and ridiculous with this argument.

it was hardly the point of this thread. sigh.
under the paving stones.

Gold Trumpet

Wow, I'm being criticized for a word I didn't even use in my last reply. Awesome.

You are missing my entire point. I'm not talking about drastically changing the tone. Tone is minuscule to what I am describing. My points are about the identity of the story. I'm talking about totally changing what the story is about. Kubrick's essential point about the Holocaust is that it was about 6 million people who died. Schindler's List failed to to honor that in some ways, but Wartime Lies fails in many ways. One, it is about life outside the camps and it's about people who survived. Even if the characters in the story are killed off by the end, the story is still not about the camps. The story would have to be a different beast if it wanted to be about how the majority of people were killed in the mass genocide.The story is purposely too small for such a huge allegory.

It's like if someone wanted to make a film to honor the battles of World War II and instead made the Great Escape. The events are still about World War II and allied soldiers, but peripheral to the major devastation's. Even though a number of prisoners were killed by Nazi guards, it isn't how the majority of thousands of Americans died in wartime. Kubrick wanted a story that could honor that larger devastation. He felt the enormity of lives lost warranted it. The Great Escape has the potential of a tragedy on a personal level, but it can't symbolize the greater tragedy unless it's a completely different story. Wartime Lies cannot come close to the larger massacre even if wanted to.

There is a debate to be had about Wartime Lies' merits as a larger perspective Holocaust novel, but it's not happening here because you haven't even read the novel and your replies scream it. Maybe I wasn't clear in my original post and you mistook certain things, but you're the one who is being stubborn here by trying to argue something you have no reason to. Someone who may have read the novel could have understand the original post's intentions, but it should have been left as a stand alone post. I clarified I was making a general comment and intended to leave it at that.

Pubrick

no GT, wow you. wow, you.

look, i don't disagree that the BOOK probably does not cover all the elements that would enable kubrick to make the film about 6million jews killed. but you assume too much about his intentions and what it means to adapt a book.

first. there's no rule saying that you can't just take like the first 20 pages of something and call it an adaptation, in fact, there's no proof anywhere that kubrick was so obsessed with the book that he felt any need to be extremely loyal to it. still for this argument i don't need to hav read the book, do u see? it's an argument about what Kubrick can do and has done. and not only him, PTA did it with CMBB, that piece of shit book would hav made a boring movie probably but that wasn't the point. does it matter that he only took the character of plainview and some information about how oil fields work? no man. that's all i'm saying and i think you can't disagree with that. and by agreeing with that you are agreeing that it's conceivable that he needn't have been STUCK on whatever the fuck wartime lies is ABOUT or CONTAINS, we don't know why he chose that book anymore than why he chose The Short Timers and then proceeded to insert elements and dialogue from Michael Herr's Dispatches. if you say it's conceivable then it doesn't matter what the book was about.

second. you assume too much out of his statement about schindlers list. in fact that's the very basis of your entire argument, along with the other misconception i outlined above. he said the holocaust was about 6million killed not a few saved. ok so where in that statement does it say that in order to show the holocaust properly on film you would hav to sit there and watch 6 million ppl die one by one? obviously that's not what he meant and i know that's not what you think he meant. you were RIGHT when you said he deals always with subjects in an abstract way. so maybe your conception of what the holocaust is about is not exactly what he had in mind, maybe he wanted to deal with the subject from the perspective of the HORROR or mankind, maybe he wanted to show duplicity in goodness, to extend the idea of necessary evil developed in FMJ, and so on. the point is that his statement about 6million does not mean anything, his criticism of schindler's only means that spielberg didn't get it right, that he didn't add enough to the superficial story of schindler as saviour. he never said THOMAS KENEALLY was to blame.

so if your argument is "if kubrick wanted to be loyal to the book then he was destined to fail cos the book does not cover the antithesis of his criticism against schindler's list." then obviously, but he wasn't going to be loyal to the book. if your reply to that is "then why did he choose the book since he can't take anything from it except a few things," then obviously, that's what kubrick does to books sometimes, FORGET THE BOOK. who do you think he was? MERCHANT-IVORY?

i can't wait to read the book and pick out its kubrickian elements. i still plan to talk more in this thread about what ideas kubrick might hav developed as already i've made the case that Johanna ter Steege alludes to Eyes Wide Shut's depiction of women. i think aryan papers would hav been his long-awaited woman's movie. i'm interested in tracing its elements back to his previous films and to what followed. out of its explosion, just on the subject of women's psyche, which he treats as the UNKNOWN, we get a major part of EWS. just like Barry Lyndon came out of napoleon's remains. that's what this thread would hopefully be about.
under the paving stones.

Derek

13 million were killed in the Holocaust, not 6. 6 million were Jewish.
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Pubrick

thanks. no wonder kubrick was destined to get it wrong.  he should hav done his research. :roll:
under the paving stones.

Derek

Welcome. If there's an argument about books and movies regarding the Holocaust, surely that detail is as important as arguing about books and movies, no?
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Pubrick

yes it's important to get the number of deaths right so let's just pretend he said that number and that we're the ones who misquoted him. ok?

this thread has gone to shit.
under the paving stones.

Derek

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: ρ on February 02, 2010, 11:42:29 PM
first. there's no rule saying that you can't just take like the first 20 pages of something and call it an adaptation, in fact, there's no proof anywhere that kubrick was so obsessed with the book that he felt any need to be extremely loyal to it. still for this argument i don't need to hav read the book, do u see?

Yes, you still need to read the novel because I can assume certain things about this project. The title Aryan Papers falls into line with all the themes and events of the novel. It's actually a more fitting title for the novel than the novel's title itself. You can't just assume he could have (and would) radically adapted it to be something else. You also can't assume Aryan Papers could have meant something else. If you read the novel, it's obvious what Aryan Papers refers to. The whole identity of Aryan Papers is paramount to this woman forging a different existence to keep her and her son from going into the ghetto and the camps. Even if the story was changed in major ways, the title itself is evidence that Kubrick was going to keep enough of the original novel which wasn't about the thick ugliness of life in the camps at all. It still would have been a story that would have avoided the central conflict of history.

Yes, there is still a theoretical possibility the title by Kubrick is meaningless or means something that has nothing to do with anything logical. If he was intending to do that then fine. I'll amend my comment to say it's based on probabilities, but since he contacted the original author to help with the screenplay, I'll stick with my side for this particular issue.

Quote from: ρ on February 02, 2010, 11:42:29 PM
he said the holocaust was about 6million killed not a few saved. ok so where in that statement does it say that in order to show the holocaust properly on film you would hav to sit there and watch 6 million ppl die one by one? obviously that's not what he meant and i know that's not what you think he meant. you were RIGHT when you said he deals always with subjects in an abstract way. so maybe your conception of what the holocaust is about is not exactly what he had in mind, maybe he wanted to deal with the subject from the perspective of the HORROR or mankind, maybe he wanted to show duplicity in goodness, to extend the idea of necessary evil developed in FMJ, and so on. the point is that his statement about 6million does not mean anything, his criticism of schindler's only means that spielberg didn't get it right. not that THOMAS KENEALLY was to blame.

1.) It's why I used allegory in my last reply. Obviously Kubrick couldn't show all the deaths, but the point is that he could tell a story that attempts to get to the heart of the major ills in the Holocaust. That's all an allegory can do. Considering the title Aryan Papers falls in line with most of what the novel is about, he would be hard pressed to really do that - to find a story that centers the Holocaust experience.

2.) The criticism by Kubrick on Schindler's List focused on how Schindler's List was not about the Holocaust. He felt it was about thousands of people who survived. That has nothing to do with Speilberg getting anything wrong. The Schindler controversy is a different matter. It's about how he chose a story that was about a happy ending when the entire event begged for stories that were about its destruction.