Kubrick: Fear and Desire (1953)

Stanley Kubrick desperately tried to prevent his first feature, Fear and Desire, being seen, going so far as to seek out every available copy to ensure that it would be destroyed for posterity. In retrospect, that’s a little unusual, since there’s nothing especially embarrassing or even amateur about it. At times, it does feel slightly provisional, or uncertain, but that suits the story, which follows a group of four soldiers (Frank Silvera, Kenneth Harp, Paul Masursky and Steve Coit) stranded far behind enemy lines in an unnamed war. Most of the film involves them figuring out how to outwit the enemy and make their way back to their own camp, although it’s considerably more contemplative and surreal than that might make it sound. In part, that’s due to a series of poetic inner monologues, but it also reflects the way in which Kubrick anonymises the terrain, or at least prevents any clear allegories being drawn or disseminated. The soldiers are continually anticipating the end of things, but, at its strongest, the film suggests that the apocalypse may have already occurred, that we might be in the midst of the spirit world without knowing it. Perhaps that’s why The Tempest plays such a critical role in the film’s most notorious scene, as Kubrick follows Shakespeare in crafting a political allegory that only serves to make politics feel after the fact, part of a vanished world. If he’d started filming a decade earlier, chances are Kubrick would have cut his teeth on war shorts, so there’s also a sense that this has all somehow played out before, world without beginning or end. And, at only an hour in length, it pares back anything resembling a stable beginning or end - it simply emerges, which is quite a striking quality for a feature-length debut. Scored to the continuous muffle of distant explosions, and swathed in Lethean fog, it perhaps works best as a melancholy, hypnogogic mood piece, a rehersal for Kubrick’s more fully-formed mindscapes, his fascination with figures who can’t quite figure out if they’re experiencing their own mind or someone else’s.