Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick’s last film certainly won’t be confused for a polite benefit performance by an artist bidding farewell to the world. As is typical for Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut is a moral and intellectual provocation, the result of a game played with the viewer’s expectations. The film—shooting took up to four hundred days, which was a record at the time and even made it into the Guinness Book—also confirmed Kubrick’s reputation as an incurable perfectionist. Eyes Wide Shut was inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, which is largely forgotten today. Although Kubrick moved the setting from Vienna to contemporary London, he remained true to the main subject of the book. Like its literary predecessor, Eyes Wide Shut is a perverse treatise on fidelity and desire that is filled with bold eroticism. The film was spiced up even more by the fact that the two leading roles—a couple struggling with a crisis—were played by one of the hottest couples in Hollywood at the time, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
in a set with short:
Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick And Eyes Wide Shut
dir. Matt Wells, UK 2019, 8'
awards
Cahiers du Cinéma Awards 1999 - Best Film; French Syndicate of Cinema Critics 2000 - Best Foreign Film
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was born in New York in 1928 and died in Harpenden, Great Britain, in 1999. He was an American director, screenwriter, editor, and film producer, as well as one of the most important and influential artists in the history of cinema. Some of the major aspects of his creative work were his thematic and stylistic versatility, his obsessive perfectionism, and his desire to explore the dark sides of humanity. He was nominated for an Oscar for best director four times.
Selected filmography
1957 Ścieżki chwały / Paths of Glory
1960 Spartakus / Spartacus
1962 Lolita
1968 2001: Odyseja kosmiczna / 2001: A Space Odyssey
1971 Mechaniczna pomarańcza / A Clockwork Orange
1975 Barry Lyndon
1980 Lśnienie / The Shining
1987 Full Metal Jacket
1999 Oczy szeroko zamknięte / Eyes Wide Shut
Cast & Crew
