The grotesque in the context of Kubrickian cinema
No matter how grotesque is realized, it is not entirely consistent with "absurdity" if we understand the word to mean "against reason." It is also associated with "grotesque", "terrible" or "incredible" and is often considered "very strange", "related to death" and "obviously supernatural". Still, it belongs to the family of these and other words full of emotions, which are sometimes mixed and confused with these words.
Grotesque characters often appear in absurdist dramas and ghost stories, and all the use of grotesque art can be said to be a metaphor for a deep-seated anxiety. As far as modern painting is concerned, the grotesque effect can be seen in the works of the Surrealists depicting "delicate corpses", such as in the form of ancient Italian cave paintings, and a large number of images by Picasso and Francis Bacon.
In the grotesque of high modernism, we rarely encounter the pure supernatural. Modernism is still a secular aesthetic after all, it rebells against elegant beauty, against bourgeois realism and classical decoration; Its use of the grotesque is often intended to indicate the way the world actually or should be understood.
Thus, grotesque ghosts and monsters tend to be given a psychoanalytic approach to dissolution, a model in which events are ambiguous between fantasy and reality. Kubrick's work was shaped by his assimilation of modernist art in New York in the late 1940s and '50s, when black humor and absurdist drama profoundly influenced American culture.
As a young photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick not only photographed George Grosz, but also worked side by side with him, effectively becoming a member of the "New York School" photography artists at the forefront of the period.
Among them are two experts on the grotesque: Arthur Feliger, aka "Weegee," the first American street photographer to exhibit his work at the Museum of Modern Art, Diane Arbus after switching careers from Looktothecinema (after switching from LOOK magazine to the film industry) in Kubrick, and her career from Harper's Bazaar (aka Harper's Bazaar), aka Harper's Bazaar. Artistic photography transformation.
One of the fifty milestones in the history of photography, Weegee is often described by art historians as populist and documentary realist, and the vast majority of the disturbing force in his imagery comes from the way of life of New Yorkers, whether opera audiences or Poweribum, who look like communicators participating in carnival deformed shows.
Susan Arbus even called the disturbing photos a gift to someone she describes as a "freak."
Susan Sontag is deeply disgusted by Arbus's "calm frustration" and apparent lack of "sympathetic purpose", writing: "It is that they imply the feelings of her subjects... They see themselves, will the audience imagine that? Do they know how grotesque they are? ”
Kubrick's 1949 magazine study of Greenwich Village boxer Walter Cartier and his twin brother Vincent posed a similar question—a noir-like and vaguely eccentric "Human Interest" project that served as a template for Kubrick's early documentary, Day of the Boxing (1950) and second feature film, Murderer's Kiss (1955).
Notably, Kubrick later hired Viggy Sr. as a still photographer for Dr. Strangelove, while The Shining cites Arbus's famous twin girl photo. Something that is "disturbing and possibly even frightening" can also seem "irresistibly comical, especially because of the farcical nature of the brawl." "The comical sensation also depends on the process in which humans are reduced to clattering sticks or mechanical objects.
In Dr. Strangelove, the mad scientist is both a man and a puppet of fascism; In A Clockwork Orange, its title itself indicates an absurd combination of organism and machinery; And in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the black comedy comes from a computer with an incredible human voice and personality.
We can trace this line of thought from film to film, and we will observe the grotesque elements that recur in Kubrick's work: the squint-faced hotel owner named "Pig" in "Lolita"; "Mom" in a metal wig and miniskirt in "A Clockwork Orange", "Barry Barry Knight" in "Barry Lyndon", chunky Japanese man in bikini underwear in "Eyes Opener" and so on.
Kubrick likes to stage scenes in the bathroom, such as "Lolita", "A Clockwork Orange", "The Shining", "Full Metal Shell", "Eye Opener", and even "2001: A Space Odyssey".
He also depicts rough body figures, such as the female statue or "furniture" of the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange, as well as his giant openings and other architectural designs with holes for artificial intelligence machines.
Although Kubrick is often seen as an artist of grand narratives, the crux of his style lies in his anxious fascination with the body and his ability to bind conflicting emotions together like all black humorists and grotesque artists, thus confusing our rational and emotional responses.
As Hollywood censorship liberalized and he had greater control over his work, his work became increasingly visible. Time and again, he uses grotesque effects to shake liberal or conservative social norms, triggering a moral and emotional imbalance.
This feature is perhaps least evident in 2001: A Space Odyssey, simply because the humans in that movie are dwarfed in the vastness of space; But even at the opposite extreme, when his irony might be seen as a humanism, he creates an unsettling emotional ambiguity.
The nuclear bomb explosion at the end of Doctor Strangelove may not be a grotesque moment, but the way it operates mixes horror with a detached appreciation of the beauty of the sun, the sky, and mushroom clouds.
For Kubrick, the body is the source of terror, which can only be controlled by a radical, mocking humor.
The House of Dancing: National Insurance Building in the Netherlands
Kent S. C. Bloom said in his book Body, Memory and Architecture: "When the space of existence of architecture contains a sense of human drama, tension or confrontation between forces from all sides, it proves that the integration of this space will always exist and infect the audience." "Any man-made form of reality is the materialization of a metaphorical idea, because it is made for a purpose in itself, and this purposefulness is its metaphorical meaning.
In Kubrick's film plot, many shots convey his metaphors about human nature, and the expression of human nature conveys the characteristics of that era and personal emotional values through the dynamic images of time and space.
In terms of the metaphorical concept of architectural space, just as the spiritual connotation produced by the psychological and physiological reactions of the characters affects the form of the building, and the form of the architectural space wraps the human body.
The scale of architectural space is a metaphor for the relationship between power and identity, and the grotesque metaphor of form in space is the inner spirit and temperament, and the building itself is used as a metaphor for intervening in the human spirit, exploring its symbolic meaning.
There are two forms of metaphor in the film, one is the metaphor under the camera, and the other is the metaphor of the content. The perspective of the viewer and director in the metaphorical perspective of the lens is similar to the perspective of the architect and the viewer in architectural design; The composition, color, and before and after relationship embodied in the metaphor of the content of the film appropriately correspond to the composition, light and shadow, and spatial relationship of the building, so the artistic techniques of the metaphor construction of the film and the building are very similar.
The "dancing house" designed by internationally renowned architect Frank Owen Gehry, whose real name is the National Insurance Building in Dutch Landon, because it is so out of touch with the original environment, and subverts its original spatial intention in a very different way, the grotesque and bizarre form makes the originally familiar building strange, and even breaks people's common cognition, at this time the "grotesque" can be produced, and the artist's strong fantasy is also born in the "grotesque" form of architecture.
Gehry uses fractured geometric figures to break traditional customs, and for him, the grotesque of fracture means exploring an unclear social order.
In architecture and space, architecture is a living life related to art, which can perfectly carry the emotions and spirit of the architect, and can also exaggerate, fantastic, romantic, and soft, producing a "grotesque" effect. Deconstructivist architecture emphasizes the unity of change, reasoning and randomness, inverting and inverting existing planning conventions, and in addition to dissolving the affiliation of objects, it also establishes a new system, so it is not a destruction of nothingness, nor a one-sided reorganization process, but has a dual definition of disintegration and architecture.
Gehry deliberately plays his cards unreasonably, forcibly disrupting the ideology that people attach to the material and forcing people to re-understand the material itself. Perhaps those strange forms are metaphors for certain themes of the time, such as complexity, distortion, irregularity, and advocacy of desire.
In short, film and architecture, as the most universal art forms at this stage, have great tolerance for various groups, and have the characteristics of "polyphasic" in the process of extracting phenomena to figurative expression.
The interpretation of the meaning beyond loud noise in architectural symbols can explore abstract meaning, the poetic expression of the architect, the metaphorical narrative technique, the generation and extension of reshaping the space, the subtle and figurative transmission of a certain one, showing a strong emotional appeal, and deriving a deeper philosophical connotation.