Kubrick’s nose

You can tell a lot about a nose. If we are to believe sources (admittedly dubious however literary), an Englishman named Gruton postulated that the "visible nose represented only 1/8 of the ‘real’ nose…literally the tip of the psychological iceberg of hereditary disposition."

After shaving the subject’s head and inserting lights into the ears, eyes (!) and nose, the presiding expert would draw a "nasoscope" based on the shadow appearing on the scalp that would be "a true indicator of character" and deduce unsavory things such as "heimic tendencies." If all this had any validity, one can just imagine the results when presented with a prominent, Jewish nose like the one on Stanley Kubrick’s face.

Born the son of a physician working in the Bronx, New York, Kubrick started a professional career in photography early, selling a photograph to Look magazine showing a line of motorists waiting for their share of rationed gasoline while still only a student. He never went to college and instead went to work for the publication right after graduation from high school. His interest soon veered towards the cinema, drawing inspiration mostly from seeing awful films: "I was aware I didn’t know anything about making films," John Baxter quotes the director in Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. "But I believed I couldn’t make them any worse than the films I was seeing. Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie."

It was a decision that has changed the very medium of cinema. Whether it be Alex (played with relish by Malcolm McDowell), staring us down at the start of Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange or the emergence of the Star-Child – humanity’s next step in evolution – at the close of 2001: A Space Odyssey, these are images important in any serious discussion of cinema as an art form. "He was the last of the great directors," mused McDowell in interviews following Kubrick’s death, after which he’d go on to relate an odd anecdote about the man to cut him down to size.

Indeed, there’s much gossip portraying the late director as an eccentric, helped in no small measure by his being a recluse who rarely gave interviews.

(Rarely photographed especially later in life, Kubrick was impersonated by a man who bore no physical resemblance to him for several years without being found out.) Numerous takes, painstaking attention to every aspect of his projects and an almost ruthless drive to make the picture his way, all conspire to paint the man as megalomaniac. (His own friend Alexander Walker remembers Kubrick berating some hapless underling via a long-distance phone call because one of the screening times wasn’t printed in The New York Times.)

One of the technicians working on the pioneering special effects for 2001 complained that Kubrick kept badgering him to redo certain things; but what really annoyed him was that the bastard was right every time. His obsessiveness served to communicate a singular vision, a cinematic statement that was genuine and the dream real. (To elucidate, Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov said after seeing the film that he felt like he had "been to space twice".)

Watching Kubrick’s films one feels that obscure branches of psychology aren’t necessary for a peek into the director’s head.

Up there on the screen, it’s as obvious as a nose.