James Fenwick, "Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive" (Liverpool UP, 2024)
36:28 Share

What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.

To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. With new McValue at McDonald's, you always get more than you expect every day. So even if gas prices go up, you can buy a double cheeseburger and add a McChicken for $1. Or before game time, you can get $5 meal deals for the group. And if breakfast is about to end, get deals in the app to save before the bell.

The choice is yours, and the choice with McValue is always more. Prices and participation may vary. Valid for item of equal or lesser value must opt into rewards for app deals. Business taxes. We're stressing about all the time and all the money you spent on your taxes. This is my bill?

Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to James Fenwick about archive histories and archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive. So welcome to the podcast. Well, hi, you all right? Yep.

This is a fascinating book on quite a few levels. On the one hand, it's a book about archives and what they mean to us. It's a quite personal story of your relationship to a particular archive. It's also got some incredibly interesting insights into Stanley Kubrick's life.

and career. And I guess that there's quite a few places where we could start, but maybe the first one is what inspired the book? And I guess what was your kind of motivation to write the book about the archive? Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that you said it is personal, because sometimes I worry about that, because it's obviously by including that kind of personal aspects, perhaps some people

I might not think it's academic enough, I don't know, but it was that kind of personal aspect that kind of did spark the inspiration for it, I think, because the Stanley Kubrick Archive, it's an archive I've been using for many, many years, over a decade. And I kind of realized that often as I was in the archive, I would be kind of going through so much material that had nothing to do with Kubrick, and I was just kind of discarding it, ignoring it. And it got to a point where I thought, well, actually...

isn't that really what the archive is about and how can I use that kind of material? So, you know, receipts, doodles, scraps of paper, ephemera, the stuff that perhaps typically we might overlook and perhaps don't think, you know, don't realize that it can perhaps contribute to our understanding of history. And so that's really what I wanted to kind of figure out. I wanted to kind of investigate the archive's content beyond Stanley Kubrick.

and trying to think of a new approach. And the book isn't about trying to kind of say that the archive isn't about Kubrick, but it's a process of trying to de-center Kubrick and look at all these other voices and stories and histories that it might contain. So in a way, I think that's really kind of where the inspiration came from. It's this kind of, you know, the kind of

long-term use of the archive and this kind of personal recognition that actually i was not using large amounts of it and i wanted to try and find out therefore what that material was how it might be used um and then to kind of place into kind of a question about um kind of archival research archival practice and the production of knowledge yeah i mean so much of the book is about saying what

the archive kind of tells us way beyond Kubrick's directing and his life as well. And there's, you know, stuff about the film industry, there's stuff about kind of place and London. And I guess beyond, I suppose, the sort of what you were saying about the project of de-censoring Kubrick, is this broader...

this kind of hinterland of archival studies. And I was intrigued both by the idea of a kind of subfield of archival studies and I guess what the book kind of adds to it or its relationship to that field. Yeah, I mean...

Again, with archival studies, I suppose it's because quite often there has been a disconnect between humanities and other disciplines and kind of archival studies. And in part, I kind of wanted to try and bridge that divide, bridge that gap. And so trying kind of interact, collaborate with archivists, the kind of people that day-to-day are kind of cataloging these collections and trying to understand their perspective.

and bring it into connection with my approach of someone that uses the archive but perhaps doesn't necessarily have that kind of archival training. So it's kind of about what I was attempting to do in that respect, trying to bridge that divide. And people like Michelle Caswell, who's a big figure within critical archival studies, often talks about this divide and how perhaps people within humanities, researchers within the humanities, often don't recognize that

archival studies has got a huge kind of heritage of kind of trying to disrupt archival practice, archival traditions. So that's kind of what I was attempting to do there is to kind of bring these kind of disciplines into kind of conversation through what I was attempting with this book. The other, I suppose, kind of starting place

for that conversation is the Stanley Kubrick archive itself. And although, you know, I'm sort of conscious of you saying, you know, about that kind of project of going beyond just Kubrick and your kind of longstanding relationship with going into the archive and, you know, looking at stuff, wondering if various bits of kind of, you know, scrap paper receipts

these kind of things that are actually relevant to research. It'd be good to understand kind of what the Kubrick archive is, where is it, why is its kind of like location important, how was it put together before we kind of get into the content of it. Yeah, I mean...

I always laugh because I always say that I'm trying to de-center Kubrick, but in order to de-center Kubrick, I've always got to talk about him. So it's always kind of this catch-22 situation. But yeah, so the Stanley Kubrick archive, it's a huge archive. Kind of statistics that are thrown out, it's over 900 linear meters and growing, so that's the size of the archive to the way they're kind of shelving next to each other. But each kind of archival shelf contains, you know,

know, several boxes and within those kind of boxes are hundreds, thousands of pieces of paper, um, as well. And then there's other kind of archival records and objects, so kind of books, uh, film equipment, props, um, all kinds of, of different, um,

objects that you can find within the archives, stuff that has to do with film production, but often stuff that's just to do with Kubrick's personal life or to do with the personal or working life of those that were in his orbit or were employed by one of his companies.

So it's a huge archive. In terms of its history, so Kubrick himself, he was a bit of a hoarder. He had a kind of a personality that lent itself to him, essentially keeping everything. He was the kind of person that wanted to constantly acquire more information and would never want to let go of it, the fear that he might need it one day.

And so over the years, particularly as he accrued ever more power and he built his own production companies, those that worked for him would also therefore keep this information on his behalf. So the archive itself, it kind of stretches back to at least the 1940s right through to present day because people still keep adding to the archive. His family keep adding to the archive as well.

But yes, it was kept originally on Kubrick's estate. So the Kubrick family, they lived in kind of a huge country house just outside of St. Albans. And the archive itself, it basically took up a huge amount of the estate. It kind of was stored in sheds and kind of annexes and outhouses. It essentially took over the house. And

And when Kubrick died in 1999, the family realized that they had to do something with it. It was all these boxes everywhere. And they didn't want to throw it away because they felt it had some sort of inherent cultural value, particularly obviously kind of giving Kubrick's status within film and cultural history. And so they decided that they wanted to donate the archive with the idea that what he would kind of do would be to inspire the next generation of kind of –

not just filmmakers, but artists more generally. Um, and so after, you know, kind of various, uh, conversations, um, with family friends, it was recognized that a potential kind of, uh,

host for the archive that would be good was the University of the Arts London but it was a university that had a kind of a creative focus and therefore kind of fit what the family wanted to do with the archive so it's kind of a long process but eventually in 2007-2008 the first kind of wave of the archive was transferred to the University of the Arts London it's the Elephant and Campus Castle sorry Elephant and Castle Campus it's always known as the London College of Communication

And the University of the Arts got a huge amount of funding for the archive as well in terms of being able to set up a dedicated reading room. And the reading room for the archive replicates the set of 2001, or one of the sets from 2001, Spades Odyssey. So immediately it kind of centers Kubrick. And so once the Kubrick archive opened, I don't want to get too much into this, but it did kind of spark a new wave of interest in Kubrick from scholars around.

that had kind of long studied these films from kind of a textual analysis perspective. And it led to this kind of wave of, a kind of an archival wave, trying to understand the way in which Kubrick produced his films. And I was part of that as well. I kind of, you know, 2014 onwards, my PhD, for example. But as I said at the start, it was,

as I was going through the archive, I started to recognize more and more that even though it was the Stanley Kubrick archive, he himself was not often present within the archive. It would be other kind of people that were kind of either archiving the material or kind of were involved in correspondence. It just somehow, it kind of come into Kubrick's orbit and he then kind of kept that information. So that's kind of the history of it. I could talk more about it. It's kind of,

kind of provenance and so forth. But I think that would hopefully kind of provide the overview that listeners need. Within that kind of huge range of possibilities for research in the archive, the book, I suppose, kind of picks out various of these sorts of peripheral objects, papers, and

It tells a story that goes way beyond Kubrick. And I think one of the places to start is with things like the kind of bureaucracy that the archive contains, some of which is painfully mundane in terms of, you know, boring things like receipts and postcards and office stationery and this kind of stuff. But you use that to tell the story of, I guess, the kind of how the film industry worked before

during Kubrick's work in life and particularly the kind of divisions of labor, especially around gender, things like doing the shopping, providing food that really kind of allowed working life to happen in the film industry. And I'm fascinated to hear how you kind of go from something like, you know, a food receipt to tell that broader story. Yeah. I mean, first off, what you said, that painfully boring story,

And I think I'm glad that you've said that because one aspect of this book that I wanted to kind of highlight was it was exactly that, that archive research is often boring. I don't know if we're often kind of, you know,

told not to kind of kind of express those kinds of feelings and emotions but when i'm in the archive i i feel boredom i feel kind of frustration as i'm going through this material because i've often kind of naively thought an archive would always you know contain the holy grail to whatever kind of subjects i'm investigating and going i find the rosetta stone or whatever it might be and it would give me all the answers um that i've been uh searching for but it

is the absolute opposite of that. It is a case of you go into the archive and it is just a box full of empty notebooks, of receipts, of scraps of paper with writing that you can't understand. And at the end of the day, you come out of the archive and you think, well, what did I achieve there? I found out nothing. And all I've found is all of this kind of useless or what seemingly appears to be useless information. And so that is really kind of what I did want to capture. I think with

with kind of archives like the Stanley Kubrick archive, paper-based archive predominantly, it is often about bureaucracy and kind of, um, the kind of routines of daily working life of particularly that kind of mid 20th century of sending memos between, uh, offices or kind of, uh, you know, kind of constant barrage of correspondence, um, or just kind of note keeping, you know, keeping receipts for the kind of, uh, invoice purposes or kind of expenses. Um,

And it was in that that I started to think, well, what can I use this material in terms of telling a story?

Particularly because often a lot of this stationary, a lot of this kind of organization, a lot of this bureaucracy, behind it was the kind of voices of women. And there are examples because you do find kind of pieces of information where they say that we need to hire more secretaries. Let's use the female secretary agency. And then therefore they would hire a number of kind of female secretaries and administrators.

But a lot of the information within the documents would be the voices of the men rather than the actual experiences of the women secretaries. Often what would happen is that an example would be correspondence at the bottom, which would be some initials, and those initials would be the only presence that we have or indications of the presence of these female secretaries.

But one example, so in the book, I look at an example of receipts that were kept during the 1990s on production of R.S. White's shirt. There's numerous binders filled with these receipts. And it is kind of, as you say, painfully boring. Someone's sent in the receipt for a microwave curry, for example, and all of these kinds of things. And I realized that actually the person behind this was a secretary, a female secretary. And I wanted to try to start evoking her experiences of

doing this boring work or what seemingly appears to be boring work but is absolutely essential to the functioning of these film productions. So again it was a way of trying to disrupt I suppose first off the Stanley Kubrick archive and think

think about these other individuals that are often sidelined, marginalized, forgotten, overlooked within kind of studies of the film industry, for example, and put them at the center to think about what it is that they're doing and the vital function that they're performing as well. I think in terms of stationery and bureaucracy, though, I mean, again, I kind of do start talking about Kubrick because what we do see is a bit of an obsession with stationery, with kind of notebooks, with pens,

with pens, with paper, with the kind of branding of letterheads. He has this absolute obsession, right down to the fact that he even has an obsession with the boxes in which the material is stored, so the kind of original archive boxes. And he decided to commission the perfect archive box because he found that quite often if you'd go to Ryman's or some other stationery store, the box would just not be good enough. It kind of wouldn't fit, the leg wouldn't fit or it'd get stuck

So we decided to work with a local stationery shop to design Earthen Box. And the kind of original archive was therefore then kept in these boxes. We're going to talk about, I think, in the final chapter of the book.

But yeah, I think in general, as I say, I try to use these what seem to be very boring items within the archive as a springboard to tell stories about the way that actually film production takes place and the roles that often we overlook are really central to the activity of films.

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Which Manning brother will win the FanDuel Kick of Destiny 3 on Super Bowl Sunday? Peyton or Eli? Watch the showdown live on Super Bowl Sunday. Plus, new customers bet $5 and get $200 if your bet wins. Only on FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook.

21 plus and present in Virginia. Must be first online real money wager. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. You mentioned how film production worked in the mid 20th century. And within that paper and bureaucratic story is also, I guess, a story of

climate change and in particular i mean that just the sheer amount of flying that that happens is really kind of clear and i'm intrigued by the way that um there's been quite a lot of literature on i guess the kind of environmental impact of contemporary film production but slightly less kind of casting um the eye backwards um into um the

maybe kind of more, you know, sort of mid-20th century, that kind of auteur golden age of Hollywood. And where does kind of, I suppose, the archival research help us understand film and climate change? Yeah, I mean, this was, again, it was another way of me trying to think, well, what could

What kind of use could the archive have going forward? And it kind of stemmed first off this idea of climate change or the environment, stemming in part from conversations with one of the archivists down at the Stanley Kubrick Archive thinking about sustainability and how that was kind of central question for them in terms of the management of the archive. Most of the archive hasn't been digitized. It is in a

physical forms kept in a climate controlled environment in strong room and that kind of just led me to these questions because as you say when looking into the kind of documents that are contained within the archive those documents indicate how there was a culture of using kind of planes or cars without any knowledge of what the impact was and obviously perhaps wouldn't have been that kind of knowledge at that time prior to

you know, kind of the 1980s and 1990s when we start to understand the impact of fossil fuels more. And so I just thought, in what way could we therefore use fossil fuels

use the archive as kind of a warning as to what we've done, what kind of impact this film production had, and maybe that could then intercede into these wider contemporary debates about how film production needs to kind of adapt and change its methods going forward. So yeah, flights, for example, was one area where the archive indicated that

um people would take a flight just one flight you know just have one meter and they would fly back to wherever um or we'd get examples kind of jack nicholson would demand that he'd have to be chauffeured you know on his own his own car all around london and so these kinds of examples of kind of excessive use of of um kind of damaging uh vehicles and the impact that had in the environment or just for example the use of

kind of film footage for example so kind of raw film footage and kind of the processes of where that came from kind of the materials of the earth and the impact that had on the environment and then starting to think about how that might shape our understanding of the films that we're watching to understand yeah we might enjoy a film like the shining or 2001 space odyssey but at the same time the kind of impact behind that on the environment the long-lasting impact they

The kind of point with the chapter wasn't to try and condemn or judge the people during that time that kind of undertaking this activity, but rather to kind of use it as a springboard again, to think about these kinds of contemporary debates, to think about, well, okay, if that is how film production once took place, perhaps there are kind of legacies of that that we need to kind of

change and adapt and move forward as well. And another example, which always kind of terrifies me because it's something I still occasionally do, it was the amount of emails that have been printed off. This was kind of the 1990s through to the 2000s. Thousands of those emails constantly being printed off. And again, it means, well, do you know what? That is something I kind of do. And it kind of seeing it in an archive kind of fast forward.

amounts of paper, I just mainly kind of realized that probably these kinds of archives have a lot to kind of tell us and we can learn from them in many ways as well.

One thing that's, I guess, really important to understand about the archive is where it is. And the middle of the book is two chapters that are about London, both how London kind of figures in the archive and how it's kind of represented, how they were, you know, sort of

scouring for locations, how Kubrick was really kind of interested in possible kind of places. And earlier, you know, you were saying about that kind of slightly hoarder mentality that might be useful later. And place is really a good example of that. But at the same time, there's that...

I suppose, kind of sense of you going to London, go into the LCC, to Elephant and Castle, which, you know, has changed an incredible amount in, in recent years. And, and I'm sort of, I,

I suppose this is where, you know, maybe you really can decenter Kubrick when you think about the archive's relationship to London. And I suppose what the sort of psychogeography of London is that you found from the kind of archive's inspiration. Yeah. I mean, it is again an example of the kind of variety of material that is held within the archive. So, yeah,

You have large amounts of kind of huge amounts of photographs, many of which have never even been properly cataloged. They're just shoved into boxes and kept in the strong room. And if you kind of request one of these boxes, you're open. And there's just tons and tons of photographs and absolute chaos and disorder, often without any kind of labeling on them. So you don't even know really what's going on.

what kind of parts of London that they're depicting. But the kind of origins, first off, of these photographs. So films like Fartwick Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Cotton, Eyes Wide Shut, they were by and large films in the UK using kind of locations within London. And

Again, part of Kubrick's mentality, his kind of hoarder mentality, was that before he could even start filming, he would have to have photographs taken by location scouts of every possible location. So what you end up with is this kind of fascinating history of the way that London changes between the 1970s through the late 1990s. And you get to see everything. You see, again, the mundane, just random streets, random pictures of doors,

um there's a whole series of photographs about staircases coffee shops and so it started to reveal um the kind of everyday working and you know routine life of london um i became fascinated with some of these boxes and i was never quite sure what to do with them so as i say one of the boxes had um envelopes that were just marked staircase okay and you'd kind of open these um

And each envelope would kind of depict a story. So the photographer would go along to a particular location, take photographs outside of the street, then take a picture of the door, then they'd open the door, they'd step inside, start taking pictures of the staircase, then they'd kind of go up a level, take more pictures of the staircase until they got to the top of whatever particular building they were taking a picture of. And this was, again, kind of the case with each particular envelope. And it offers this kind of...

kind of fascinating voyeuristic insight into London because if you think about all those different buildings that we walk past each day within London and all the kind of lives and stories that take place behind those doors that we have no idea about the archive provides this you know unique insight into that so it's representing both the kind of exterior and interior world of London um

in quite a lot of detail really. So it's kind of, let's say this, it would be the kind of unique photographic heritage that the archive contains over kind of a 40, 50 year period. And,

in a way it's really kind of being underused. And this is, um, I think an area that probably needs a lot more research. I attempted to start thinking about it within the book. Um, but I think as you say that probably there's the potential to relate the archive a lot more to the community and to start telling these kind of histories of, of look kind of London's urban change, particularly, you know, he said that, uh, the archives based in Elephant and Castle, an area that's kind of undergone huge regeneration, uh,

moving from kind of a solidly working class kind of background to more kind of a gentrified kind of area nowadays. So the archive has this unique potential to kind of tell those stories and perhaps to even engage the community. And I think that in many respects is kind of the next step with the archives and the kind of potential research focus going forward.

So what I tended to do with these two central chapters, and I don't know if I fail or not, but I thought, well, do you know what? How can I start relating these photographs to the environment in which the archive is located and to London? How can I take it out into the streets of London? And one way was through the fact that alongside some of the photographs would often be sketches that the photographer would make of areas of London and make kind of

uh, marks and coordinates on these sketches of these maps of the areas that they've gone to. And so I decided that I'd use these, uh, kind of these sketches of these maps and these coordinates to start wandering and drifting through the streets of London, kind of a psycho-geographic walk. I start to kind of reflect what was I seeing? How would London change compared to the photographs that I was looking at? What kind of personal memories, uh,

that might evoke, how can I start to think about these photographs, both in the kind of historic kind of representation, but also in a kind of contemporary relevance as well. So yeah, that was kind of what I attempted to do. As I said, I'm not entirely sure if it was kind of a success, but I think it is an area that's really kind of ripe for further research, certainly.

I mean, it's not only that actually that's got lots of different potential lines of further research. I was struck by one of the later chapters that talks about things like the history of communication and how, I guess, the kind of intersection of technology and materiality allowed films to be made. And indeed, you know, kind of,

caused problems for various film projects as well. I guess a place to conclude though, and there's so many things we could have been talking about in the book, not least of which your heroic attempts to take the British train system down to London to use the archive from the north of England. But one thing the book reflects on as both a kind of personal reflection, but it put me in mind of

I think it's Jacques Derrida's concept of kind of archive fever is the question of how you decided to stop and where you kind of drew a line around the project is finished. And this comes up in the book in the context of the kind of the strong room, you know, the kind of, I suppose, the sort of vault section where some of the more prized kind of assets of the archive are.

But also, I think it relates to that feeling that comes through in the book of, you know, kind of plowing through lots of material and sort of getting lost in it, but also kind of seeing endless possibilities. And so how did you decide to stop digging in the archive?

Yeah, I mean, it does become a bit of an obsession with an archive. I always feel that I have to get through everything and then you realize, well, what is the point? Because it kind of leads to saturation and redundancy. He's trying to make sense of that material as well. And actually, all I wanted to do with this project, first off, was to evoke a sense of the kinds of potentials that the Kubrick archive has. It wasn't an attempt to kind of

tell the full kind of story of every item that's in the archive because that's impossible. It has to be a long-term project that's, you know, undertaken by many people. So in part, first off, I think one of the reasons that I had to stop was just simply, you know, time and resource. Doing archive research is expensive, it's time-consuming, and I had to call it quits at one point. And I think it was also the fact that I was

overwhelmed i think i might even talk about that at one point kind of tired and overwhelmed because i was just losing absolute sight of what the archive was about um and because i was in the in the archive so much it was starting to kind of you know no longer make any sense so i realized i had to stop in order to try and start kind of analyzing and reflecting on what i discovered uh i think it was just personal reasons too i think i'd kind of reached a point and uh

It was kind of personal in many respects. I kind of reached a point where I thought, you know what, this is it. I have to kind of end it here because otherwise it will kind of seem like Jack Torrance in The Shining and I'd go slightly mad. So I kind of drew a line under it. I thought, you know what, move on from this now. Allow other people to kind of take up the mantle and start using the Kubrick archives and actually maybe they'll have unique insights or original insights that I had not even thought about, for example.

And yeah, kind of hand it over to the next generation of researchers, whether they're going to be people using it to kind of create new art or use it to kind of investigate, I don't know, different aspects of Kubrick's films and their production. So yeah, kind of a combination of reasons in many respects, yeah. That...

I suppose sort of challenge of stopping and that kind of feeling of being kind of overwhelmed with the possibilities means that a question about, so what are you going to do next? And, you know, is there another kind of Kubrick archive book in you seems a bit, you know, kind of cruel or almost, but yeah,

I suppose given you've done a lot of Kubrick work already, you've now written this book reflecting on the kind of possibilities and potentials of the archive. Is there something to go back to or are you thinking of a sort of more different and distinctive direction for future work? I mean, one...

One area I'd love to eventually go back to, and this is something down the line, it isn't kind of the next project, but it would be to use the photographs in some way, whether it would be kind of some sort of community projects. There's, for example, boxes and boxes of material related to a project called Arian Papers that was never made. So it's kind of Kubrick's Holocaust film. He did years and years of pre-production on that particular project.

and thousands of photographs taken of Eastern Europe. And I think there's a fascinating potential there for kind of community engagement and kind of creative practice. But as I say, that is something down the line that needs a lot of thought and collaboration and so forth. So for me, it is kind of

The book is kind of a line under this kind of period of using the Kubrick archive. And it is in many respects my kind of, well, my kind of parting gesture. It's kind of that for me is the end of using it for now. And I want to kind of move on in different directions, new kind of projects beyond the Kubrick archive, definitely. Yeah.

One project that I have got on the go at the minute that sort of stems from the Kubrick Archive is an edited collection that I'm working on with the Kubrick Archive Senior Archivist. And the book is Disrupting Dominance in the Archives. And that kind of looks at these creative approaches to archives in general, how we can kind of disrupt them or kind of use them in different ways and look for kind of different potentialities.

within the archives. But as for the Kubrick archive itself, for now, I think I have to just hand it over to the next generation, as I say.