Populous cities blur the meaning of quantities, and yet they can be no less surprising. We hear that there is a poetry recital competition and we are curious to approach the basement of the CCCB (Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona). Some 200 rows of people have been found in the entrance plaza. Misunderstood, we ask one of them if he has come to listen to poetry. He said no, he expected to see the exhibition he had dedicated to Stanley Kubrick. "From the color cube?" ", says his colleague. It made me graceful of the occurrence. “No, from Director A Clockwork Orange,” I replied, hiding my ignorance almost as big as my friend’s. After following the poetry competition with another 300 people we have agreed that it’s time to learn more.

We have done our homework and we have been accumulating information for the second time to the CCCB. The exhibition, composed of elements from the Stanley Kubrick Archive in London, has been seen in different parts of the world, although in each city it has been given its own vision and form. Commissioner Jordi Costa has been in charge of organising the event to be held in Barcelona for five months. This is what the note announcing the exhibition says: “Kubrick has been presented as a cold man living in isolation from the world, but we have focused on his creative passion. He represents, better than anyone else, the figure of the director in charge of creating an entire autonomous universe.”

Before the filmmaker, photographer

The journey has been organized according to chronological criteria, and as could not be otherwise, part of Kubrick’s first works. But not audiovisual. A camera was the first working tool of the American director. Before finishing high school, he started publishing reports in Look magazine, and there he was a photographer for four years. The exhibition brings together many of these images – lehiak boxing, trendy parades… – as well as evidence of a unique custom: the last photo of each reel was used by Kubrick to do what we would call selfie today.

Its first audiovisual works are presented. The first data from 1951: Day of Fight, 13-minute documentary on a boxer. Nor did he jump to fiction in the next two films, as Flying Padre and The Seafarers, commissioned by the Union of Sailors, are also documentaries. The first fictional feature film is Fear and Desire, from 1953. In total he made twelve more.

Spartacus, a bittersweet milestone

Despite other works, Spartacus, presented in 1960, was the turning point in Kubrick’s career. Also in the exhibition itself, a detailed individualized review of the author's most known feature films begins with the documents and explanations of the work. The lead actor and producer of the film was Kirk Douglas, who gave him the opportunity to lead the film. They knew because they were together in the censored movie Paths of Glory. Douglas launched Anthony Mann, the initial director, and replaced him for the first time with Stanley Kubrick, leaving overproduction in his hands. The film was once again delimited by censorship, which had to transversally remove an entire sequence that talked about homosexuality. This part was not recovered until the 1991 reissue.

The film, in full Franco in the Spanish state and with its soldiers as extras, achieved great success, at least enough to win the Golden Globe for the best dramatic film. The Kubrick became well known and gave it the opportunity to carry out the next projects with more resources. However, the exhibition highlights the filmmaker's frustration: his work was limited to directing, without interfering in the script or in the production itself. He would not repeat himself again: in the following works he would reclaim his autonomy, he would assume the responsibility of taking care of all the details.

Fiction written as a starting point

The exhibition continues with the review of the other films of the filmmaker born in New York, with scripts, sketches, costumes, props, etc. Among so many information, each focuses on its sections of interest: you can write a lot about the role of music in its filmography, but we have noticed the importance of written fiction. Most of Kubrick's works come from a novel or storybook. One of them is A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgessen, recently edited by the editorial Meettok, which has translated to the Basque Ion Olano. With the same name, Kubrick took him masterfully to the screen, building a fascinating dystopian world and leaving dozens of memorable scenes. As a curiosity, in the film you can see the dictionary of the Nadsat language used by Alex and his drugs.

He also dared to bring to the movies the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. In the CCCB you can see the first version of the script that it was Nabokov himself who adapted it. It was 400 pages long enough for a film of almost seven hours. Convinced that it would be more effective, collaboration was eventually interrupted and the filmmaker himself adapted the script. The Russian writer did not feel satisfied: “Kubrick has made a wonderful film, but he and I see Lolita differently.”

The movie The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson, is still the same: The work is based on Stephen King's homonymous novel, although he underwent several changes in the script's adaptation. The film also used writers who dominated that language to translate into other languages. This demonstrates Kubrick’s effort to control everything: production, casting, special effects, distribution, even dubbing.

Science Fiction Pioneer

The most outstanding film in the sample is the one that has just turned 50 years 2001: A Space is Odissey, probably because it's the one that most visibly shows the work that has been taken to build an entire imaginary universe. Arthur C. This work was based on Clarke's short narration The Sentinel, and was carried out in collaboration with the writer. To build interplanetary and remote futures, Kubrick had to design a way to dress up characters, architecture and technological advances almost from scratch and accommodate special effects he had barely seen before. It was an essential source of inspiration for movies like Star Wars, Alien or Blade Runner.

One of the most striking features of the film is the jump in time of four million years, ranging from the first hominids to the year 2001. Kubrick hired a group of mimos to prepare the scenes of the symbols of the first part and prepared costumes that seemed very realistic for the time. For a month, the entire team was dedicated to watching the movements of chimpanzees and gorilla at the London Zoo. Accompanied by the Dutch ezenographer Ken Adam, the second part of the film also used particularly attractive scenarios. In the exhibition you can see how they were created. The best example is the centrifugal step located in the space station, a decoration of twelve meters in diameter that rotated 4.8 kilometers per hour, allowing the movement of the cameras and causing an effect of weightlessness. The exhibition also pays tribute to Wendy Carlos, a pioneer of electronic music in the world of electronics. 2001: Many of the pieces from the soundtrack of the film A Space Odissey made them himself.

Unfinished work

==Death==Stanley Kubrick died in 1998 at the age of 70, after leading thirteen films and leaving many projects and ideas unsuccessful. The epilogue of the exhibition is that of sketches of the inconclusive projects of the filmmaker. A.I. One of them is Artifcial Intelligence, which years later was taken to the screen by Steven Spielberg, and the attempt to bring Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies to the movies.

But the most striking thing is the library that houses a selection of books, archives of the time and various images for a film about Napoleon. From this material collected by Kubrick, HBO is producing a small series. Knowing all that, we've made our way home. We go back to make a second lap: you can go twice with a single entry.