Screengrab: The Shining
There is so much red going on in Stanley Kubrick's oeuvre. So much. Just look at the above supercut, by Rishi Kaneria, and you'll see.As our office buddies at The Creators Project put it, the value behind something like Kaneria's study is "…not just to remind us why we love Kubrick's films so much, but to show how often the filmmaker relied on the color red for dramatic effects including terror, isolation, and individualism."Thing is, it joins a growing parade of Stanley Kubrick Supercuts. Here's a supercut of the late director's obsession with training our eyes toward the middle distance:Kubrick, if you can believe it, was also obsessed with the zoom, especially in his darkest of dark comedies, Full Metal Jacket. There's a supercut of that, too, because of course there is:And what about his obsession with bathrooms? Sure, why not, have a supercut:What's next? A supercut of Kubrick's obsession with yellow? I bet you could make a supercut of that, if you really wanted to. Ditto for Kubrick's obsession with cars. Or eye glasses. Or, well, pretty much anything.So, do we bemoan the supercut as a gross devaluing of an artist's body of work (in this case one of the most important, if not the most important filmmaker of the past half century, perhaps ever)? Should we be critical of the supercut mindset, to which Kubrick is not an exception (Hitchcock's eyes, anyone?), of trying to connect dots that simply don't exist?If anything, supercuts fuel an ongoing discussion about the aesthetic and technical merits of connecting the dots, whether or not there are dots to be connected. At the very least, now I've got an excuse to make really awful jokes. Redrum, anyone? No? OK. Play me out, Eclectic Method:
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