Stanley Kubrick exhibition, Cinematheque Française

Back to Paris via a couple of days in Cologne, in which I caught up with an old girlfriend (Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus - usually in the Musee d’Orsay, temporarily in an exhibition at the very good Wallraf-Richartz Museum), ate half a pig, and didn’t have to put up with a leaking toilet or a smelly washing machine that didn’t work properly (our fate in Berlin). The people are friendly and the beer is lovely (Gaffer kölsche). The Cathedral is astounding, a huge rocket ship, beautiful and light-filled. But the priests are rude and cranky. They make Berlin museum attendants look charming and amiable, and more than justify the Reformation.

The forementioned washing machine meant that we had some domestic duties to take care of on our first morning in Paris. I will never forget the sight of the Palais Garnier majestic and dazzling in the morning sun as we lugged our washing down the Avenue de l’Opéra to the laundromat. A quick drying cycle and excellent timing on the Metro, and we were at the front door at opening time of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française at Bercy near the Gare de Lyon.

The Cinémathèque is a Frank Gehry-designed building that is as confused inside as it is complex outside. There are logical dissonances in the layout; that’s a polite way of saying it’s a bloody mess. It seems like they bought a ready-made interior and made it fit into the building.

The permanent collection has a few dissonances of its own. The history of French cinema is a long and glorious one; after all, they invented it. So where are the Lumiére brothers? Some objects relating to Georges Meliés, but nothing earlier. Then there’s a jump to some jewellery worn by those well-known French actresses Theda Bara and Louise Brooks; some set designs for those well-known French movies Metropolis and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari; and Ringo Starr’s Pope costume from Lisztomania by that well-known French director Ken Russell. Oh, and that thing that happened in the 50s and 60s – the ‘nouvelle vague’? Doesn’t rate a mention – not a sniff of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais or Chabrol in the air. Not so much a crap exhibition as one that completely misses the point. This is a case of buying something and making it fit; it is based on two idiosyncratic private collections, and they haven’t done much to fill out the gaps. It’s like calling a place a restaurant and not selling food.

Incidentally, the Cinémathèque has a restaurant, ‘Restaurant 51’, which doesn’t serve food.

The Kubrick exhibition, however, is brilliant. It should be, it wasn’t curated by the Cinémathèque. It spreads over two floors, with the exhibits on most of his films on floor 5 and those on the last two films, his photography and the films he planned but didn’t make (Napoleon, Aryan Papers and A.I.) on floor 7. That arrangement doesn’t quite work; it would have made more sense if the photography and unmade films had been presented chronologically with the other films, so that we could see for example the influence of Napoleon on Barry Lyndon. Again, it’s buying something and making it fit. But the content is so good it’s a minor point.

It’s all there for all of them – photos, scripts, production documents, designs, cameras, posters and publicity materials, tickets and other ephemera, props, costumes, clips from the films and the inevitable interview with Martin Scorsese. My favourites:

• the script for Paths of Glory
• HAL’s ‘face’ from 2001
• the set model for the War Room in Dr Strangelove (‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!’)
• the friendly and funny letter Nabokov sent Kubrick concerning the script for Lolita (with a great line that I can’t remember but is very Nabokov)
• the droog suit and turntable from A Clockwork Orange• the axes from The Shining

Makes me want to watch them all again. Is it really twelve years since he died?