Stanley Kubrick’s filmmaking career begins and ends in a mood of urban claustrophobia—at its earliest stages, gritty and almost inarticulate, yet full of expression; at the end, almost hyper-articulate yet inchoate; refined, even rarefied, yet darkly, mortally carnal, unfolding its waking-unconscious narrative in a space that is as simultaneously closed and expansive as its protagonist’s mind. Over the course of 50 years of developing and directing films, Kubrick was to open and physically amplify those spaces, casting ever wider lenses in every direction to the sky and beyond.

Many of those same lenses are displayed in a vitrine in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Stanley Kubrick” exhibition, which originated at Frankfurt’s Deutsches Filmmuseum. Although they may be of more interest to film professionals, they are not incidental here. At the risk of legitimizing a battered and near-meaningless phrase of some currency in media circles, no one understood the “optics” of a situation—in every sense—better than Kubrick did. Beyond understanding how perceptions were shaped was his understanding of how every aspect of their representation shaped story and outcome. Whether in a chiaroscuro, half-tone world of black and white and hazy grays, or sanguineous and richly saturated color, Kubrick’s films show us matters of sense and sensibility trumping abstract notions of order, perspective, control, belief; the whole contained and magnified by the story moving across the screen. What remains consistent through these very distinct films, is a preoccupation with the juxtapositions and intersections of interior and exterior spaces, and parallel to that, physical and psychological spaces. In Kubrick’s movies, we are always acutely aware of how where and what the characters see condition the way they see, and vice-versa.

Kubrick’s gift for grafting a dramaturgy of space and perspective to the dramaturgy of script and performance was unique. There is a stunning economy, almost bluntness, of character development evident from the earliest of Kubrick’s films to the very end. Kubrick understood the craft of photo profile and essay from his years as a staff photographer for Look magazine; and there is a quality at the core of several, if not all, Kubrick films that hearkens back to magazine-style photojournalism. Kubrick uses the body language of the characters in relation to their space to both articulate character sensibility and development and their relationships with each other. The characters in Killer’s Kiss (1955) might be shadow puppets. The dialogue and character exposition range from the schematic to almost hilariously blunt to psycho-absurd; but, in almost perfect sync with gesture and movement, the film story holds us with its drive and urgency.

In Paths of Glory (1957), set against the backdrop of World War I, human conflict is plotted out against variously social, ceremonial, strategic and mechanical spaces. In the opening scene, set within the drawing room of a grand chateau, Kubrick choreographs one general cagily circling (and ensnaring) another in what amounts to a martial minuet, as they discuss a maneuver that will cost the lives of hundreds of their soldiers. The forthright Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) does not linger in this space—or any other—but, framed by barracks and trenches, moves relentlessly forward into a backtracking camera.

Breaking Lolita (1962) out of the head of its narrator, Humbert Humbert, involved similar cinematic choreography—counterpointing Humbert’s interior monologue with his various pas de deux and trois with Lolita, her mother Charlotte, and the enigmatic Clare Quilty. Here (as if the screenwriting services of Vladimir Nabokov were not enough), Kubrick was aided by another kind of cinematic trick: genius casting. In addition to Sue Lyon’s revelatory performance in the title role as an American suburban “nymphet,” and the note-perfect performances of James Mason and Shelley Winters in the roles of Humbert and Charlotte, Kubrick was afforded the services of another genius, Peter Sellers, as the chameleon Quilty. From Quilty’s disheveled mansion to suburban interiors and backyards, to the open road, to the revelation of the character of Lolita herself, Kubrick foregrounds frank yet guileless American corruption against a receding horizon of betrayed idealism and false (European) cultural pretensions.

Kubrick would deploy Sellers for another triple impersonation in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Here, Kubrick shows us a ship of state turned ship of fools, a synoptic view of man’s fate rendered tragic-comically absurd. Sellers is variously angel/handmaiden to the incapacitated (as Mandrake), agent of inefficacy (as President Muffley), and agent of doom (Strangelove). In the Ken Adam-designed War Room with its halo of light bathing the circled desks and soaring raked walls with strategic maps tracking SAC deployments, as the world closes in on its masters, Muffley dissolves into the light, while Strangelove wheels around seemingly out of nowhere—an anti-Christ manifesting from the void—the same void through which Slim Pickens as Major Kong will ride his nuclear warhead to bright oblivion.

The troubled spaceship, “Discovery 1,” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), under the stewardship of another dubious (and similarly constituted) trio, might be considered another kind of ship of fools. Here, within astonishingly realistic sets, including a rotating centrifuge, Kubrick documents the tasks and activities of his astronauts Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Bowman (Keir Dullea), including their interactions with the HAL-9000 computer (voiced by Douglas Rain) through which, in tandem with earth-based command operations, virtually all of the vessel’s functions are managed and run.

But within the arc of Kubrick’s Odyssey, which after all takes us back to the dawn of humankind and fast-forward (via “stargate”) to another sort of dawn, Discovery’s troubles amount to a sideshow—however elaborate and richly informative, critical to this particular dramaturgy of space.

In 2001, the human relationship to space—from the microscopic to the cosmic—would seem to be at the heart of the film’s subject matter. But more central to Kubrick’s concerns here are the ways humankind orders space, our extensions into space, and the attenuation of our relations to these extensions over time and distance—and by implication, to each other.

There is a break here, left unresolved by Bowman’s emergence into the Louis XVI-classical space of his observation chamber, his transfiguration via yet another vessel—the “amniotic” sac of the Star Child.

Some of these issues are foreshadowed in Kubrick’s earlier films: the inventory and ordering of human thought; the protocols seemingly dictated by mechanistic feedback. (E.g., in Strangelove, the operation of the Doomsday Machine; Muffley’s attempt to placate the Russian premier’s inebriated pouting at the protocols of the hotline: “Of course I like to say, ‘hello,’ Dimitri.”; Mandrake’s desperate attempt to tease out the return command code.) Kubrick would weigh these issues in another far more dystopic futuristic context in his film based on Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1971). More than Kubrick’s preceding (or later) films, the surrealistic visual style of Clockwork is identifiably of its time (though as always, Kubrick is ahead of the pack—consider that Scorcese’s Taxi Driver was released five years later). Here, a swinging welfare state incarnation of the U.K. (tailor-made for a Thatcherite campaign ad) is the backdrop for a counterculture of wanton gratification and sociopathic violence amongst a balkanized but empowered welfare class with time on its hands and vivid comic-book imaginations.

Without setting aside concerns central to his prior films, in Clockwork, Kubrick moves beyond a straightforward spatial choreography to a fluid and versatile style beautifully adapted to the post-Pop landscape that had evolved between the time Burgess published his novel and when filming began. In Clockwork, Kubrick has already leapt beyond that landscape to what we now recognize as Postmodernism. Its influence can be seen in everything from music video to Japanese anime to (in its lowest common mass-dilution) Apatovian freaks, geeks and superannuated lost boys.

Although Kubrick yearned to return to the “big canvas” of a historical picture, his difficulties financing a long-planned Napoleon project, turned him toward a more intimate novel set against the panorama of 18th-century Britain and Europe, William Thackeray’s Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. Here, Redmond Barry’s progress from Irish adventurer to baronial seat to forlorn exile unfolds against landscapes and interiors deliberately intended to evoke Gainsborough, Chardin and Menzel. Adapting lenses used by space discovery missions to cameras once used for background film, Kubrick shows us the world Barry sees and moves through—in natural light, the filtered daylight from the windows of high-ceilinged great halls, and candlelit drawing rooms. There are no feints or sideshows here. Kubrick has even substituted a narrator for Barry’s first-person voice. Instead, the pictures are allowed to tell the entire story—set magnificently to music by Bach, Mozart, and, most famously, the Handel D-minor Sarabande and Schubert E-flat piano trio. Music literally underscores what Kubrick commits and resigns us to—Barry’s quest for some purchase on his fate and his inexorable surrender to it.

Barry Lyndon is a pivotal moment in Kubrick’s career—as dark as its candlelit salons. In no other Kubrick film are we left with a comparable sense of the futility of human agency. Even Jack (Jack Nicholson) is ultimately recomposed into the “big picture”—repossessed by the world of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980). Private Joker (Matthew Modine), the reluctant killer, survives and moves on, his humanity marginally intact, which, in the context of Full Metal Jacket (1987), is saying a lot.

LACMA’s Kubrick exhibition sprawls between the foyer and the adjoining plaza-level galleries of its Art of the Americas building, but has a resonance and coherence that accords with the issues and concerns that thread through these very distinct pictures. Walking between the installations built around various props, stills and transparencies, clips, documentation and paraphernalia, the viewer has the sense of moving between rooms marked by formative incident or heightened awareness—which is true to the experience of the films. Caught up in the dramatic and affective themes and motives of the individual films, we may be less conscious of what they present in their totality—which is nothing less than a history of late 20th-century consciousness.

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