Читать книгу Kubrick's Men - Richard Rambuss - Страница 7

I think he enjoys the male comradeship of making films. He’s surrounded by women at home and he likes to talk guns and sports.

—KEVYN MAJOR HOWARD (“RAFTERMAN” IN FULL METAL JACKET)

The first film that Stanley Kubrick made is a sports short. Titled Day of the Fight, this 1951 black-and-white documentary is about a man who, the film’s narrator melodramatically declares, “literally has to fight for his very existence.” He’s a young, 5′10″ middleweight boxer (and Navy veteran) from Greenwich Village named Walter Cartier. Cartier is the first of Kubrick’s men: the first of the male figures (some real, most fictional) in extreme, combative circumstances to whom Kubrick was drawn as a filmmaker and who predominate in his movies.

Day of the Fight was actually Kubrick’s second camera study of Cartier. A few of years earlier, he shot a seven-page lifestyle spread on the photogenic boxer for the popular biweekly pictorial magazine Look, a rival to Life. Kubrick had landed a job as a photographer at Look fresh out of high school. (His poor grades, along with the influx of returning veterans availing themselves of the GI Bill, kept him from college.) There Kubrick honed his technique for storytelling by pictures, for stylizing narrative and feeling into serial images. “Prizefighter” was published in the January 18, 1949, issue. Like the documentary short film to which it led, Kubrick’s Look photo-essay on Cartier takes us through the aspiring champion’s morning to evening fight-day activities and then to the ring for his late-night bout.