Art has a long and studied history of capturing the fragmented experiences and memories of human life through a variety of communicative forms, and it is through exploring these forms, and the people responsible for them, that we as human beings can discover just how interrelated and challenging our histories are. Histories which may be based upon factual events or verifiable data, but which rely upon viewpoints, perspectives, and interpretations that remain entirely personal to an individual and their circumstances, whilst being deeply-rooted in universal topics and ever-changing philosophies about who, what, and where we are. With this being the case, art has become a vast archive of works that, when studied closely, can offer us an important representation of the complexity of our existence, highlighting the duality of man’s nature through our imperfections. Consequently, the people who make art tend to be ‘cut from the same genetic strain’ (McIver, 2019, 8) as each other and despite their differing backgrounds, they continually produce art which grapples with many, extremely familiar and enduring themes, ideas, and concepts. Things which have been, and which continue to be, extremely valuable to our societies and their reflective cultures throughout the ages.
The legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick uses these symbolic foundations of art to plug his own imagery into the popular discourse, creating ambiguous think-pieces that often take more than a singular viewing to fully understand or appreciate because of their determination beyond traditional structures and temporalities. With that, there is something wonderfully morbid and prophetic about the work of Stanley Kubrick that has always triggered my inherent curiosity and intrinsic desire to know. Both his films and his photographic work emit the aura of both the mythological, and the mechanical man, and deal in many discernibly transcendent threads that I naturally care to investigate because they are things that can often influence the profoundly formative aspects at the very heart of the human experience and condition.
The principal aim of my dissertation then, will be to use his death, the passage of time, and our constant search for knowledge using archival processes, to ‘transgress accepted intersubjective boundaries; to break into another’s life; to handle, to investigate, to appropriate their private things’ (Broderick, 2019, 7) with the intention of: gaining a better appreciation of how Barry Lyndon functions as a transcendent Kubrickian text when compared with both his photographic portfolio and his other films, and to acquire a deeper understanding of how the director formed a co-existent relationship between history, art, and humanity using literature, music, painting, photography, and cinema in a way that teeters between objective and subjective thinking, captures a perfect ambiguity, and with it, the imperfect duality of the human experience.
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