This week marks the 10th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s passing on March 7, 1999. Not only was he one of the greatest directors ever, but arguably the best all-around filmmaker. Beginning with Lolita (1962), Kubrick exercised increasing control over nearly every aspect of his independent productions. One aspect that he paid particular attention toward was the poster design of his films, which he either created himself or in collaboration with a graphic design artist. They include some of the most iconic posters in all of cinema with provocative tag lines, minimalist designs and bold, ironic imagery. With the kind of challenging films he made, Kubrick knew that if his work was going to find an audience in America, savvy marketing was vital.

With the intellectual and thematic density of a Russian novel, a Kubrick film is hard to pigeonhole into a category without undermining its vision. This presents a marketing problem. How do you sell a brand of cinema that unflinchingly probes heavy themes involving the dark, irrational impulses of mankind to a mass American audience, who values entertainment over art?

In the first case, it helped that Kubrick typically chose a controversial subject matter. A prime example is his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s acclaimed novel, Lolita (1962) about a middle-aged professor’s infatuation and love affair with a teenage nymphet. Securing a publisher to release the book was difficult enough, but bringing it to the big screen in the production code era of the early 1960s was almost unthinkable. So Kubrick seized on the controversy with the poster’s tagline: ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’ over the sardonic image of the vixen Lolita wearing heart-shaped sun glasses and sucking on a lollipop, like an innocent little school girl.

With his adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s acclaimed novel, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick had material even more shocking than Lolita, but with an undeniably perverse appeal to the audiences of the early 1970s. In the tagline of the first poster style – ‘Being the adventures of a young man, whose principal interests are rape, ultra violence and Beethoven,’ Kubrick highlighted the lurid qualities of the film’s anti-hero, Alex, while suggesting one of its themes about the relationship between goodness and art. But the poster’s triple V-shaped design of Alex holding out a pointy knife and a female mannequin with its legs spread open clearly aimed at controversy with its promise of the film’s chilling sexual violence. The second poster style, however, steers clear of controversy. It hints at the film’s thesis with an image of a faceless, and thereby dehumanized, head of Alex with a clockwork eye.

On the other hand, the two poster styles for The Shining (1980), both played it safe. In the first one, its tagline – ‘A Masterpiece of Modern Horror’ could be a consensus of the Stephen King novel or a description of the film’s quality. The design, too, remained neutral, featuring the title in creepy font with a literary-style dotted drawing of Danny Torrance’s frightened expression as he ‘shines’ or communicates telepathically. Although it wasn’t misleading, the poster totally excludes the rich subtext of white imperialism – a very Kubrick-like theme – that was absent from the novel but crucial to Kubrick’s re-envisioned film version. Kubrick didn’t want to alienate fans of the novel, who expected a faithful adaptation, but, more importantly, with the strong commercial appeal of the horror genre, The Shining had the only selling point it needed. The second poster still sold it as a horror film, perhaps even more explicitly, but added the star power of its director and cast. Screen stills of the film’s two stars, a crazed Jack Nicholson and a terrified Shelley Duvall, are placed over the title with their names in capital letters under Kubrick’s name.

Selling the film’s genre was not unusual for Kubrick. Along with The Shining, he worked primarily within popular genres for most of his career and, in fact, those films were his most commercially successful. The posters for such films as Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) are all excellent examples.

2001 was Kubrick’s biggest commercial success. Released in the space age of the late 1960s, the poster captured the public’s imagination with its tagline – ‘An Epic Drama of Adventure and Exploration’ and an illustration with the caption ‘Space Station One your first stop on an odyssey that will take you to the moon, the planets and the distant stars.’ As with The Shining, 2001 was part of an enormously popular film genre, but its rich subtext wasn’t left out all together in the film’s publicity. In two other poster styles, 2001 was sold as “the ultimate trip” over images of both the star child and a blinking eye from the psychedelic Star Gate sequence. By touting 2001 as a poetic, non-verbal cinema for the senses, Kubrick was targeting the drug culture of the late 1960s, who were hungry for a new kind of aesthetic experience.

The nuclear war satire Dr. Strangelove is certainly the zaniest Kubrick poster. Its cartoonish design depicts a striking parallel between macho military and government leaders and their twin impulses for sexual intercourse and war. On the bottom half, a woman’s arms are wrapped around the Soviet premiere, who talks by phone to the US president on the other side of the globe as war planes, probably carrying nukes, fly overhead. Another Kubrick war film, but which takes a morally ambivalent stance, is just as subversive. On the poster for Full Metal Jacket, a marine helmet has ‘Born to Kill’ scrawled on one side and the peace symbol on the other, implying the Jungian duality of man at the film’s thematic core.

When it lacked controversy or a popular genre, a Kubrick film was a tough sell. Barry Lyndon (1975), a period piece set in the 18th century chronicling the rise and fall of a class-climbing Irish rogue, was one of his least successful films commercially. But the first of its poster styles by Saul Bass is the most elegant and complex one for a Kubrick film. In a square box, the title character is shown in shadow from the waist down with his gun pointed at a red rose, which is pinned under one of his boots. This reveals the tragedy of Barry Lyndon: an audacious young man who steam-rolled up the social ladder, but ultimately lost out on true happiness, becoming a pawn of both his times and his own self-destructive nature. The other poster style by Richard Amsel took an alternative approach, selling the film as a romantic adventure rather than a tragedy. Its storybook design traces the scope of Barry’s life with illustrations of all his duels, love affairs and adventures snaking around the poster’s border.

Like other visionary auteur directors, Kubrick’s name was almost always featured as the primary author of his films in publicity campaigns. But by the time of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his popularity, as well as the anticipation for another Kubrick film was so great that it created a unique set of circumstances. Not only had it been over a decade since his last film, but the two stars of Eyes Wide Shut, playing husband and wife, were Hollywood’s hottest couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. On the film’s poster, Kubrick’s name is featured after Cruise and Kidman in the same size and block font. It was as if he were billing himself as the third star of the film. But, of course, he was the real star, as he had always been. What is so revealing about Kubrick is that his posters rarely featured the image or the name of his lead actors. He wanted his concept to be the main selling point, of course, but he also didn’t want the stars to steal credit from him.

In terms of genre, Eyes Wide Shut was a special case in which its marketing campaign was totally misinterpreted by the American media. The poster shows a reflection in a mirror of Cruise and Kidman making love with her suspicious eye looking off to the side. Along with the influence of the trailer, the film was misconstrued as a wild erotic thriller in the vein of Last Tango in Paris (1972) when, in fact, its sexual content is quite cold, and it is actually more of a companion piece to The Shining that explores themes of human perception and the unconscious, dream-like undercurrent of everyday life. Of all Kubrick’s work, Eyes Wide Shut was probably the most difficult to market to an American audience. So it comes as no surprise that it performed the worst of any of his films at the US box office in the last three decades, but was a smash hit overseas.

As a filmmaker with a background in still photography, Kubrick always looked for that singular image that would crystallize a whole complex set of ideas. His approach toward the design of his films’ posters was no different. With remarkable simplicity and honesty, his posters effectively sold films that were not your typical consumer products, but revolutionary works of art.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kevin Hogan.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 11:55 am and is filed under Graphic Arts, Branding, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.