Direct link:

http://gizmodo.com/5052324/how-criterion-hones-its-restoration-magic-for-hd

Lee Kline, the Technical Director at The Criterion Collection, was in Italy. He had tracked down and original print of Il Posto, the classic 1961 Ermanno Olmi film, and he needed a digital master of it. The problem? It was far too valuable and delicate to ship to the States, so he had find a local studio to handle the transfer for him.

Sitting down in the lab, the local technician started the process of loading the film up, running it through the incredibly expensive machine to create a 2K super-high-def digital copy for Lee to take back to the States with him. The technician was deftly handling the irreplaceable film and the machine with both hands. All the while, a cigarette dangled from his lips. Lee, neither the owner of the print nor an employee of the lab, could only sit back and bite his tongue, hoping no wayward chunk of smoldering ash would find its way onto the decades-old piece of film. You could call it one tense moment in a film nerd’s life.

When you go to the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, you sort of expect it to be a gigantic library. You know, one with lots of dark wood, a fireplace and a globe, complete with a dapper man in a smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed chair. Instead of books, though, the walls would be lined with some of the greatest films ever made, DVDs that set the bar in terms of image quality and extras and packaging and liner notes. Criterion is the undisputed champ in all these things, yet the Criterion offices are simple, its walls adorned only with a collection of movie posters and framed letters from directors. There is a lovely screening room with a gigantic screen and projector setup, and there are edit suites, but it doesn’t feel like you are entering into a world belonging to film historians. Until you talk to the historians.

Essentially, the people at Criterion are a combination of film geeks and A/V nerds, equally excited at the prospect of getting a great print of a classic Fellini film as they are about creating a killer 5.1 surround sound audio track.

These people act as a curator and a publisher, hand-selecting a wide variety of films, mostly foreign, classics and indies. They painstakingly create the definitive digital version of that film, completely restoring both the audio and video, gathering up the most complete supplementary features available and releasing it all in beautiful packaging. It’s a film buff’s dream.

The Criterion staff gathers their own supplementary features themselves, traveling to find talent and record original interviews and audio commentary tracks, finding scholars to write essays and gathering up any additional footage or video that they can find.

It’s an incredible company, responsible not only for introducing hundreds of films to audiences who would otherwise have no other way to access them, but also pioneers who helped introduce many DVD features we take for granted now, such as commentary tracks, elaborate special editions and even letter boxing. And now they’re preparing to deliver innovation to a new format: Blu-ray. And man, are they excited about it.

David Phillips, who works on DVD Development for Criterion, told me that “We’re offering people the ability to see what is essentially 95% of the visual quality of our high-definition tape masters, something that we’ve dreamed of for a long time.” After all, these guys have been working with digital masters that clock in at about 2K resolution for some time, which is far higher than HD. “As good as standard-def DVD looks, we’ve been looking at these HD images for so long and feeling like it’s a shame that we can’t share this.” HD is the way most of these films are meant to be seen, and the people at Criterion get visibly excited when talking about the possibilities.

But with that huge uptick in resolution for the consumer, Criterion is faced with a lot of problems that they didn’t have when their masters were converted to standard definition for DVD. After all, they’re often dealing with old films, created before there was fancy low-grain filmstock and digital processing. And with the technology they have today, how much restoration and processing is too much?

Really, the mission of Criterion is “trying to replicate the original experience of seeing that movie when it was first released,” according to Phillips. While they certainly have the ability to process old films until they look like they were shot on a DV cam, that’s not the goal.

“Grain reduction has become such an industry standard that people, when they see grain, they think it’s a problem rather than what film looks like. Film is a physical medium that has this grain structure to it,” says Phillips. That being said, they realize that consumers buying restored HD films on Blu-ray are expecting near-pristine quality prints. It’s a tough balance to strike. Essentially, “it’s trying to stay on the side of not overprocessing but not leaving so much film artifact that it’s distracting from getting engaged in the film.”

So how do they go about getting a film prepped for Blu-ray? Well, they start with the best version available, be that a camera negative, a positive or a print, depending on the qualities available. Most of the time, they need to travel to the negative rather than having it shipped to them, especially if it’s an original print. So if it’s a Kurosawa film, they go to Japan; if it’s a Truffaut film they go to France; and if it’s an Olmi film, well, they go to Italy.

Once they get their hands on the film, they use Thomson’s Spirit DataCine to digitize the print at a local facility. If available, they’ll try to get the director to consult on the color of the print, making sure it’s accurate to the original as they digitize it to tape in 2K—sometimes even 4K—resolution. Once done, they have their tape master, which they then can bring back to their headquarters to begin the restoration.

Once they have their master back at their offices, it goes through what they call the restoration workflow, which involves painstakingly restoring both the audio and video frame by frame. For video, this involves using a system called MTI Film, which allows a technician to go through the film and not only remove dirt and edit marks, but also fix warped frames and things of that nature. This isn’t some automated procedure, either. It involves a technician sitting at an edit station with a stylus going frame by frame, ensuring that each one looks as good as possible. With two shifts a day working on a film, it still takes weeks to get through this part of the process.

For audio, they work in ProTools HD to both create surround-sound audio tracks as well as to clean up the original audio. They often get prints with extremely hissy or distorted mono tracks, so much like with the picture, they need to go through with a fine tooth comb and clean it all up. Their goal, according to Kline, is to “create a track with the original acoustics, bringing it back to clean and straightforward mono that sounds crisp and clear.” I stood in while an audio technician was working on the opening of Lars Von Trier’s Europa (due on DVD in December), and the difference between the original print’s audio and the restored audio made the narration and the sound effects resonate much more without feeling like the original had been sterilized.

What about films they’ve already restored for DVD? Can they just be released on Blu-ray without much extra effort? Unfortunately, not usually. The good news is that once they’ve done their tape master, they have a high-def copy of it on hand and don’t need to re-transfer the original print. The bad news is that once they got those masters, half of the process needs to be done again because the original restorations were just done in standard definition. Making a quick rerelease of all of Criterion’s films to Blu-ray something that just isn’t going to happen.

Once they’ve finished their process, though, it’s like viewing a film for the first time. I got a chance to sit in on a quality-control screening of their restoration of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express. A scene in a crowded marketplace seemed to jump off the screen, and the surround sound perfectly placed the bustling sounds of the market behind me while keeping the dialogue front-and-center. I felt like I was in a theater in Hong Kong, watching the first, perfect print of the movie when it was first released. It was breathtaking.

These are the releases that film buffs have been upgrading their home theater setups for. After all, the best way to take advantage of thousands of dollars of AV gear is to give it material pulled carefully from the source.

—-

Criterion is releasing its first Blu-ray films in November, starting with The Third Man, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, Bottle Rocket and Chungking Express. They plan to release two films a month in Blu-ray next year, with HD releases ramping up as sales shift from DVD to Blu-ray. [Criterion Collection]

D.O.A. (1950)
Directed by: Rupolph Mate
Small-town accountant Frank Bigelow goes to San Francisco for a week’s fun prior to settling down with fiancée Paula. After a night on the town, he wakes up with more than just a hangover; doctors tell him he’s been given a “luminous toxin” with no antidote and has, at most, a week to live! Not knowing who did it or why, Bigelow embarks on a frantic odyssey to find his own murderer.

Direct link to download:

Runtime: 83 min

The opening scene to this film, which came to be known as 8 ½ (although, interestingly, the film’s original title was “La Bella Confusione” – The Beautiful Confusion), is one of the most memorable in all of cinema, it shows, with the use of no dialog, exactly how he was feeling at the time leading up to creating this film. It was the perfect opening to his cinematic autobiography in the barest, most pure sense imaginable, presented via Surrealist-like metaphor. It shows the slow suffocation, the distorted, fever dream-like anxieties of people watching him and expecting something, it also shows his sudden liberation. How do you portray these presumably complex emotional dispositions with no dialog? Is it possible to relay such a textured message on the strength of images alone?

The first shot we see is the camera, omnisciently floating behind Guido’s car, then we get an establishing shot; a huge amount of cars surrounding him on the road; everyone seems to be languishing around him. We enter a tunnel, but we stop, we do not make it out the other side in our automobile, we are trapped. Guido becomes self-aware, surrounded by these people he doesn’t understand, staring back at him… he feels everyone looking on disapprovingly, he is judged, mocked. Apprehensively, Guido wipes at his window with his handkerchief attempting to clean up his appearance perhaps, make sure he is presentable; re-affirm his mask. He first notices an unknown figure staring back at him intently from the car in front of him, almost in shadow, and immediately gas starts filling his car. What is this man a harbinger of? Guido tries to escape, yet he is trapped in this modern cage where everyone just stares, watching his every move. The gas continues to pour in, he continues trying to break the window and then suddenly he is out, but did he break the window himself or did someone else just allow it to open?

So we saw the mundane occurrence of being stuck in traffic used as a metaphor for being, as explained earlier, slowly suffocated, which of course, the noxious gas filling the car very literally represented. Fellini paused on the faces of the other drivers as they watched our protagonist, waiting, expecting something, the pressure of their expectations. Also present are various people personally connected to him in his life, distractions perhaps, or even excuses for avoiding his art. They all seem grotesquely distorted through this glass ‘house’ Guido is currently residing within. He tries to break the windows of the car out, yet he is unable, only through the manipulation of his reality is he able to escape, to find freedom. He is suddenly able to crawl out of the window with no real indication of how. He is just able, where once he was trapped, he is now suddenly, in a flash, freed… much like the strike of true artistic inspiration; sudden and inexplicable. This is the very plight Fellini was going through while trying to write this film. Only through the examination and subsequent abstraction of his personal situation did he finally find he did have a story to tell. Then we see the main character of Guido flying through the clouds, liberated and soaring. However it is only for a short while, as soon he finds he is still tied down to the real world; he tries to unfetter himself, yet is ultimately yanked down from his peaceful and lucid isolation by the sordid dealings of reality. “Down for good”, read off from some documents as if it is an official sentence, then, as he falls back to the cruelly imposed earth of business and anxieties he is awoken in his hotel room, engulfed by both of these avatars of his despair.

Definitely one of the most brilliant opening sequences to a film I can recall. With just the basic language of film; image and sound, we are given all the information we need. To discerning viewers this must surely stand as a definitive benchmark for the powers of purely visual story-telling, the foundation of film as an art form.

From the The Wikipedia entry :

The film’s combination of religious themes and imagery combined with violent and sexual content was a test for the British Board of Film Censors that at the time was being pressured by socially conservative interest groups.

In order to earn an “X” certificate, Russell made minor cuts to the more explicit nudity (mainly in the cathedral sequences) and removed some violent detail (notably the crushing of Grandier’s legs). However, the biggest cuts were made by the studio itself, prior to submission to the BBFC, removing two scenes in their entirety, notably a two-and-a-half-minute sequence of crazed naked nuns sexually assaulting a statue of Christ and about of half of a latter scene with Sister Jeanne masturbating with the charred tibia of Grandier after self-administering an enema. However, even in it’s released form, the film was considerably stronger in detail than most films released prior to that point.

Its fate in the United States was even more stringent, with a further set of cuts made to even more of the nudity with some key scenes (including Sister Jeanne’s crazed visions, exorcism and the climactic burning) shorn of the more explicit detail.

All of this material was presumed lost or destroyed until critic Mark Kermode found the complete “Rape of Christ” sequence and several other deleted scenes in 2002. The artist Adam Chodzko made a video work in which traced and interviewed many of the actresses who had played the nuns during the orgy scene. Although some material may have been lost forever, the NFT was able to show The Devils in the fullest possible state in 2004. This uncut version premiered at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film in March 2006.

The British version remains the most complete one in circulation, although there are long promised plans to release the uncut version on mass-market DVD. On April 25, 2007, The Devils was shown for a second time in its fullest possible state to a group of students and staff at the University of Southampton, followed by a question and answer session with the director, moderated by Mark Kermode. It was the first significant event to take place during Russell’s tenure as a visiting fellow at the University of Southampton in the English and film departments, April 2007 to March 2008.

An NTSC-format DVD edition on the Angel Digital label appeared in 2005, with the so-called “Rape of Christ” scene and other censored footage restored, and featuring a documentary by Mark Kermode about the film, as well as interviews with Russell, some of the surviving cast members, and a member of the BBFC who participated in the original censorship of the film.

DVDActive.com announced on February 28, 2008 that The Devils would finally be released on DVD by Warner Home Video in the U.S. on May 20, 2008, in the uncut (111 min) version, but without additional material. However, a day later, a DVDActive forum post asserted that the release had been dropped from Warner’s schedule.

Now I own the aforementioned ‘Angel Digital’ release of the film and honestly it’s not too bad looking, it seems as if it’s a direct transfer from PAL tapes, but I believe they were broadcast quality tapes so it’s not as poor looking as a regular VHS transfer… Unfortunately as of yet, the Warner home video release still is MIA with no word on it ever returning, so if anyone is interested I’d recommend just biting the bullet and picking up the ‘Angel Digital’ copy. It even contains the aforementioned documentary about the making/banning of the film that originally aired on the BBC.

Find it, rent it, watch it…

Some clips for your viewing pleasure:

Sister Jeanne dreams of her Grandier/Christ coming down off the cross to get down:

That Catholic repression and the exorcist arrives:

The rape of Christ:

Grandier’s trial

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/07/bfkubrick107.xml

Or read the entire interview compiled into one, ad-free page below.

The Stanley Kubrick files

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 07/07/2008

Scripts, letters, designs, props, photographs – as many as 900 boxes of material belonging to one of the greats of cinema have been made available to a wider audience. Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, has donated the auteur’s paperwork to the University of the Arts, and the collection, carefully sifted for this Kubrick retrospective by Chris Hastings, gives us a fascinating insight into the public and private worlds of an inspirational film-maker

An interview with Stanley Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, by Chris Hastings

Christiane Kubrick is uncharacteristically hesitant as she recalls the most terrifying period of her life. It was 1973, and intense controversy inspired by the release of A Clockwork Orange, her husband, Stanley Kubrick’s, most uncompromising film to date, had taken a sinister turn.

Campaigners opposed to what they saw as unacceptable depictions of violence and rape in the film had begun to send well-researched death threats to the director’s London home. Although the Kubricks had grown used to Stanley’s films attracting what he referred to as the crank element, nothing had prepared them for this.

“When we normally got funny or strange mail I was the one that said, ‘Ah, it doesn’t matter.’ I was always the calming effect,” says Christiane. “But I couldn’t pull it off this time. I was terrified. The threats were so detailed, and I was worried for the children.

“We phoned the police and they advised us to leave the country. But we didn’t want to do that, and as a family we were imploding with worry. So Stanley rang Warner Brothers and said, ‘Look, I don’t know what to do. Can I withdraw the film?’ And they were wonderful and said yes. Of course, that worked straight away. The threats stopped. Then again, I guess that was the point.”

Until she recalls this particular anecdote, Christiane, now 76, has been her usual effervescent self. Even nine years after his death she is happy to carry on waving the flag for the man she was married to for more than 40 years. She knows the iconic nature of his work means she will be doing so for the rest of her life. But the uncharacteristic and short-lived moment of sadness is broken when she recalls what appeared to be a particularly threatening arrival at the house.

She laughs: “I remember while all of this was going on, we got a parcel, which contained a ticking plastic orange. Of course, we thought the worst. But it was actually from a fan.” One reason why Christiane is reluctant to talk about the threats is that she is only too aware that this time in their lives together is often used to reinforce what, in her eyes, is one of the cruellest and most enduring myths about her husband: the idea that he was a paranoid recluse who shunned publicity and did everything possible to cut himself off from the world.

“He was absolutely no recluse,” says Christiane, with a steely conviction in her voice. “He was quite the opposite. The press liked to paint him as this weird witch-doctor figure sitting in his lair. They liked to see him as this weird horrible monster sitting in a spooky house in the country with the rain coming down. But it was nonsense.

“The only thing Stanley did to earn this description was refuse to give interviews to television or radio. But there was a very good reason why he didn’t do them. He simply felt it wasn’t one of his talents to appear in front of the camera or in front of the microphone. He thought he was always doing it badly and that was true.

“If you watch the long speech he gave when he got the [DW] Griffith Award you can see him freeze. The minute the microphone is off, he was back to normal. He was the first to laugh about it. But he also knew not to expose himself. He considered it a weakness and thought, ‘Why do it?’ “In any case, he always believed the films should speak for themselves.”

She added: “Stanley had no idea that in the end this would be something the press would chase him with. When he was alive we thought it was funny. Because he was the absolute opposite. It didn’t bother us then… but it bothers us now.”

Christiane, then an actress, met Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory, his first major critical and commercial success, in 1957. They married a year later. From the very beginning she knew her husband was a unique individual: “I could see he was attacking things very differently from other people and with much more intensity. I was aware that he simply had more energy than most people.”

Christiane had to adapt quickly to learn to live with a man for whom four hours’ sleep was enough. Kubrick loved to work and he had no time for holidays – or even Sundays. If he was making a film he didn’t want the work to stop. He would organise dinners with key people from the film so the work could continue.

“I remember there were always people around when he was making a film. Stanley would always ensure people were having a good time. I remember in the other house there was a billiard room, and he and Peter Sellers were always playing ping pong together. They were like two schoolboys dreaming up ideas.”

Christiane insists neither she nor her children, Katharina (who was the eldest from Christiane’s marriage to Werner Bruhns and became Kubrick’s stepdaughter), Anya and Vivian, suffered as a result of the director’s preoccupation.

“We didn’t holiday regularly because to ask Stanley to lie on a beach was a punishment. But it wasn’t hard on me or the children. We had a big garden and lots of people came to the house. They had a much more interesting childhood than anybody else. They really did, and I think they knew it. Of course at 15, like all teenagers, they thought their father was boring. But when they were 18, it was a different story.

“Stanley was a devoted husband and father. He could cope with all the conflicting roles. He was very concentrated and not easily distractable. No matter what happened with a family of young children, dogs and cats and whatever else, he coped with it.

“He could turn his attention to anything and then go back to talking about a script without a moment’s hesitation. He wouldn’t be thrown by interruptions in the way most people are. It wouldn’t make him nervous. He seemed to me almost like a radar, whatever came in came in and he dealt with it. Most people have a much smaller radar and not the same level of intense interest.

“The fact is, he was equally involved with everything he did. It was the same with his wife and children as it was with the work. Nowadays, he would be accused of being a control freak. But he wasn’t that. He used to say, ‘Either you care about something or you don’t.’ If he cared about something, he would do it extremely well.”

It has been just over nine years since Stanley was killed by a heart attack at the couple’s manor house home in St Albans at the age of 70. It was March 7, 1999. Just four days earlier he had organised a screening, for family and friends, of what was to be his last film, Eyes Wide Shut. He was buried in the garden next to his favourite monkey puzzle tree.

Christiane recalls that during the weeks leading up to his death he was already contemplating what his next project would be following his collaboration with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. But she accepts that this heavy workload contributed to his end.

“All people who have enormous energy get themselves into enormous trouble. By sleeping only four hours a day he lived a longer life than he actually did live. But it killed him, that and the smoking. It was even worse when we were younger because he would sometimes not sleep at all.”

She hesitates when I ask how she has managed since. A talented painter, whose art can been seen in A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, she has thrown herself into her work. She teaches and also organises an annual art fair. “To be honest, I don’t know how I have coped. It sucks quite honestly. I have my work, and thank God for that.”

Christiane and her brother, Jan Harlan, who acted as the executive producer on many of Kubrick’s films, have recently donated Kubrick’s archive to the University of the Arts in London. Sorting through nearly 900 boxes of scripts, letters, designs, props and photographs has proved a cathartic experience. It has also given Christiane back a huge part of the house that was hidden from view by virtue of being buried under the mountains of documents.

“Until recently, I never thought about doing anything with the material. After Stanley died I would look through it and start crying. He used to say, ‘Let’s just leave it there because I will take care of it eventually.’ He had the best intentions but they never came through and that was good because he would have thrown a lot of it away and we wouldn’t have had any of it.”

Although Christiane, herself, would never have contemplated throwing the boxes out, she only began to look at them in a different light following an approach from the German film museum in Frankfurt about a possible exhibition.

“I could never have thrown the stuff away. That would have been awful. It is like letting the person die twice if you throw it out. When the Frankfurt museum came, it was a wonderful solution. I saw the material for the first time with an archivist’s eyes rather than my own. The truth is, you don’t appreciate things if you spend your time constantly having to step over them.”

The German government covered the insurance costs for the museum so that some of the material could make the trip from St Albans. The exhibition, which opened in 2004, was an enormous hit and toured European cities until this year. Now that the tour is over, the material will join the unseen remainder of the collection.

The archive contains thousands of individual items relating to the 13 films Kubrick completed and other projects he was working on. It provides a unique insight into the mindset of a man totally immersed in the world of film. Kubrick would spend years, decades even, researching individual projects, and his thirst for knowledge knew no bounds.

For his never-realised film about Napoleon he despatched students across Europe to gather artefacts from the 18th and 19th century. This particular treasure trove includes maps, uniforms, cutlery, jewellery and weapons.

“He thought it was very important to prepare for a film well. But he liked the process of research,” says Christiane. “He loved doing that work. He just felt that with each film he was going to a new university and receiving a different education. You have to remember, Stanley never went to a film school or university. He just thought it was great fun. He got all kinds of excuses to read things he would normally never read.”

Kubrick would famously work as the director, producer and writer on his films. But the papers in the archive show his control of each project extended well beyond even this workload. He would oversee everything from designing the adverts to approving the casting of the dubbing on the foreign-language versions.

The archive also contains plenty of material to attest to the fact that he was pre-occupied with box office performance. He frequently complains when a film is performing less well in, say, Newport than in Manchester. When Full Metal Jacket was released in the early 1990s he had polaroids sent to him of video shops across Sweden as a way of monitoring how the film was being promoted.

“These things did matter to him,” says Christiane. “Critical reaction was very important and he loved being successful. He was hurt when he wasn’t or when he was ignored. Then like all of us he would get angry for caring and then felt stupid. On strong days he wouldn’t read the reviews or the articles, and then he would read something and find himself thinking about it for half a day. And then he would say, ‘Not only am I angry about what it says but I am angry because I have lost time thinking what this idiot has written.’

“He also loved the business side of things. The money was very important to him. It could buy him the two things that were important to him: time and space.

“You could get larger rooms and you could delegate things.

“But of course he didn’t like people to recognise him. He didn’t like that aspect of it all. He simply didn’t know what to do. I remember someone came to the house and said, ‘I want to speak to Stanley Kubrick,’ and he looked them straight in the eye and said he is not at home.”

Stanley and Christiane fell in love with England after they moved here for the filming of Lolita, which was released in 1962. The remainder of his films were all largely shot in England irrespective of whether they were set in the landscapes of Vietnam or the snowy wilds of Denver, Colorado.

In fact, the files in the archive pay testament to his genius. They vividly show how he created Vietnam in the soon-to-be-demolished gas works in Beckton for Full Metal Jacket and how he and his team turned Brent Cross Shopping Centre into Denver aiport for The Shining.

But there were very real reasons for staying in England. Kubrick was terrified of flying. It is one of the “myths” about the director that is totally true. But Christiane insists it came out of a very rational fear on his part.

“Stanley actually had a pilot’s licence but he passed the test largely on theory. Once he started going up in the plane he began to suffer a series of mishaps and nearly crashed it. But what really frightened him was when a friend was involved in a bad crash and they sent him the remnants of a burnt-out camera and other stuff. He dismissed it at the time but that is how these traumas are born. You don’t admit and you don’t think about it and it festers in the subconscious.

“Eventually, he got to the point where he physically couldn’t fly. He would become nauseous. It was just like someone who couldn’t pick up a spider.

“I flew with him to Spain once and he was downing strong drink and tranquillisers by the handful. But he didn’t become drunk, or calm, or anything. It was having no effect at all. He was totally rigid with fear. I remember someone subsequently said he should go under hypnosis to try to tackle it. Stanley said, ‘I don’t want to be hypnotised. I have very good reasons to be scared.’

“But it did annoy him and he was bothered by it. He was interested in planes and had little fantasies about flying. He would listen on a special shortwave radio to Heathrow traffic.”

Contrary to what some critics said at the time, Christiane insists that his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was a happy shoot. She says Kubrick loved working with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who came to regard him as a grandfather figure. Ironically, this is the film project Christiane was least keen on for most of the years of their marriage.

“We had endless conversations about this over the years and I said I don’t like such stories. I was a bit of a cow, I think.

“We were very, very young when he first became interested and I don’t think you like this kind of stuff when you are young. You are uncomfortable and you don’t like talking about it. I thought it was pretty sick. But that didn’t put him off. Only when I got older did I begin to appreciate it. I loved the film very much. It is a hard topic but it goes to the heart of who we all are.”

Kubrick was a technology freak who loved gadgets. Christiane says she and her daughter can’t enter a computer shop without feeling a little tearful: “He loved all of his gadgets and toys. It was another reason why he didn’t like going on holiday – he didn’t want to be parted from them.”

In the weeks leading up to his death he was again thinking of making AI: Artificial Intelligence. He had abandoned the project in the early 1990s because he thought computer technology was not yet advanced enough to offer up the dazzling visuals he wanted.

He had then passed the film on to his good friend Steven Spielberg. Christiane recalls: “Towards the end of his life he became very excited about the leaps computer technology had made. He was very much looking forward to doing the film.”

Kubrick’s archive has gone, but the house will never be free of the man and his movies. Christiane is happy to share her memories and points out a spot in the kitchen where Tom and Nicole would sit and chill. And of course, there are just some movie treasures you can’t be parted from.

“Have you seen The Shining?” she asks, while serving lunch. “The table we are sat at now is the one Jack Nicholson types the novel on in the film.”

· KUBRICK ON MORE 4
More 4 launches a series of 10 of Kubrick’s films beginning on Tuesday, July 15. The season will open with a new More 4 drama, Citizen Kubrick, which tells the story of the man through his work and the archive.

· THE STANLEY KUBRICK ARCHIVE

The archive is housed at University of the Arts London. Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, stressed that her family wanted the archive to be a living resource that would inspire future generations of artistic risk-takers.

Having spent most of his life in the UK, the Kubrick family felt it important that Stanley’s rich legacy remain in the country he made his home. The university welcomes artists, scholars, students and the public who wish to explore aspects of Kubrick’s genius and enrich their own scholarship, understanding and practice.

The archive is holding two special open days on July 21 (6.30pm-8pm) and July 23 (2pm-4.30pm).

University of the Arts London, Archives and Special Collections Centre, Elephant and Castle, SE1 6SB.

Open Tuesday to Friday, 1pm-5pm.

To arrange an appointment or make an inquiry, please telephone 020 7514 9333, or email archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk. You can also visit the Stanley Kubrick Archive website at www.arts.ac.uk/kubrick-archive.htm

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