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Stanley Kubrick did it his way

A new life of the auteur lays bare the obsessiveness behind his films and what it cost everyone around him, writes Robert Hanks

He did not excel academically and left school at 17, but he had already begun to take photography seriously as a hobby, and within a few months was the youngest photographer on the staff of Look magazine, being sent on assignments that showed him aspects of life few of his contemporaries would see, and learning about lenses, lighting and exposures. And though he was celebrated for the fluid mobility of his camerawork, his awareness of the still image is always clear – in the echoes of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth and Joseph Wright in Barry Lyndon(1975), for example, and in the allusion to Diane Arbus in the weird twins of The Shining(1980). But the pace picks up, and Kubrick softens and becomes a more intriguing protagonist as his career progresses through his first really accomplished feature, the complex, bleak heist story The Killing(1956), and his first brush with stardom: the bitter First World War drama Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas (1957).

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