The Kubrick Archives: An Interview With Alison Castle
By: Kevin Filipski |
Friday March 17, 2006 |
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Paris-based Alison Castle was the editor of this gargantuan volume, and she is to be heartily commended for digging through the vast archives of material left behind by Kubrick. |
| Taschen is a company specializing in glossy, beautifully-illustrated art books. Its recent The Gates, which covered Christo and Jean-Claude's recent "event" in New York's Central Park, was more satisfying than "The Gates" themselves. Taschen's current The Kubrick Archives shows off the company at its best: this huge, heavy (15 pounds!) item is the ultimate coffee table book - if your coffee table is big enough to hold it (and if you can splurge for the $200 price tag).  Of course, Castle's job was made easier by one simple fact: she loves Kubrick's films. "I'm a huge Kubrick fan and have been for most of my movie-going life," she said recently via email. "It took about two and a half years from start to finish to put together the book, and though it was extremely challenging, it was even more rewarding than it might seem." After Kubrick's death in 1999, his estate - led by his brother-in-law and producer Jan Harlan - was responsible for pretty meager DVD releases of his films. Even the "improved" boxed set in 2001 was lacking good transfers and interesting extras. The estate was adamant that nothing would see the light of day from the archives, as per the director's wishes. But Castle insisted that never caused any problems. "I was given unlimited access to all of Kubrick's work-related material, and nothing among this material was in any way off-limits," she explains. "The Kubrick Archives" is divided into two sections. The first part, "The Films," consists of frame enlargements from all of Kubrick's films from 1955's Killers Kiss to 1999's Eyes Wide Shut. (His debut feature, 1953's Fear and Desire, has been unavailable since Kubrick never wanted it shown publicly.) Since the plot of each film couldn't be developed through selected frames, Castle had to decide which frames would give the best taste of each film's uniqueness.  "It was a bit complicated," she admits. "I did a first run-through on the DVDs to grab images for the layout. Once the design was complete, I then had to locate and make note of each frame on the actual film reels, using a 35mm editing table for the black and white prints and beta-transfer with timecode for the color interpositives. I gave these frame numbers to the film scanning lab so they knew which frames to scan." The second part of the book, "The Creative Process," is a grab bag of great archival material on the making and importance of each of the films: there are stills from the sets, sketches, drafts, props, interviews with Kubrick and essays about the films from prominent scholars like Michel Ciment, whose own Kubrick book is still essential reading. "The Creative Process" also includes information on three important projects which Kubrick never got around to directing: Napoleon, The Aryan Papers (based on Louis Begley's brilliant debut novel "Wartime Lies") and A.I. Considering the scope of this book, is there anything left for future archivists? "There's a seemingly endless amount of material in the archives," Castle says. "It would take dozens of books to explore it all, but readers can rest assured, however, that all of the best items are in this book."  Needless to say, "The Kubrick Archives" should be on the shelf - or coffee table - of every self-respecting Kubrick fan. |
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