- Strangelove's Weegee / Zhang Yaxin: Model Operas. Presentation House Gallery. Opening reception tonight at 7 p.m. For more information on the exhibit visit presentationhousegallery.org.
THE unlikely collaborative relationship between tabloid photographer Weegee and film director Stanley Kubrick is explored as part of a new exhibit of photographs at Presentation House Gallery.
Curated by John O'Brian, a UBC professor specializing in modernist art history, the show is built around a series of rarely seen photographs Weegee took on set at Shepperton Studios in London, England during the production of Kubrick's Dr.
Strangelove in the spring of 1963. O'Brian talked to the North Shore News about the exhibit and Weegee's involvement in Kubrick's classic film.
North Shore News: How did the Weegee exhibit come about? Is it related to your ongoing research on nuclear war media and Camera Atomica?
John O'Brian: It is but it was also by luck. As so many things are when one is working in the archives. I was doing research in New York for Camera Atomica. I've done research in Japan and the States and Europe and elsewhere and I was at the International Center of Photography which is where the Weegee photographs are that are in the exhibition. I put in "Nuclear" as I was working in their archives and up popped a hundred photographs by Weegee. I thought, 'Well, this is a mistake, where did these come from?' I'd never seen them before and only two or three of them had ever been shown before. So I asked for them to be brought out and looked at them and realized it was an astonishing group of photographs and that was the genesis of the show.
North Shore News: Both Weegee and Kubrick were photojournalists in the '40s - they must have crossed each other's paths at some point.
John O'Brian: They not only crossed paths, Kubrick hugely admired Weegee. Kubrick was still a teenager when he got a job as a photographer at Look Magazine. By then Weegee was famous - he even called himself 'The Famous' and actually stamped that on the back of many of his photographs. He'd already brought out the book Naked City in 1946, which to this day remains the most successful, in terms of numbers of copies sold, photography book in the United States, outdoing Walker Evans and all the others. Weegee knew him first of all by
reputation and then knew him personally and admired him so there was that relationship. I'm not sure if they had much of a relationship in the '50s at that time. Kubrick started to make films and Weegee pulled away from a lot of the work he had been doing before and spent time in Hollywood.
North Shore News: How did Weegee do out in Hollywood? I didn't realize he made films.
John O'Brian: He did, he was a filmmaker himself. You can see bits and pieces of them on the Internet. They're not particularly strong. It wasn't his forte but he was fascinated by the medium and also fascinated by celebrity. A big chunk of his work are celebrity photographs - not in the '40s when he was doing the Lower East homicide crime scene and stuff that was suitable for the tabloids - but later. He'd sell some to Vogue and he'd sell some elsewhere because he was Weegee the Famous.
He spent time in Hollywood and had bit parts in films, very bit parts. There was one film where he had a major role that somebody made of him in the mid-'60s. It's almost unwatchable. It's about a highly sex-craved photographer and Weegee is playing himself - because he was a character - and I think that did a lot of damage to his reputation.
Weegee's great work is what he did in the '30s and '40s and by the time Dr. Strangelove came along he might have been remembered fondly but was not taken particularly seriously and that may be why the photographs weren't shown. He did a presentation set for Kubrick which I've seen there in the Kubrick archives in London - because I went over there to do work in the archives - and there's another set in the International Center of Photography. Neither have been shown.
There's a big Kubrick show that's been traveling on and off in different places that started in Frankfurt many years ago. I saw it in Paris, it's been in Los Angeles and it's on each of Kubrick's 13 films as well as his unmade Napoleon film. When it comes to Strangelove there's a couple of images of Weegee and a couple of his photographs that are there but you don't get a sense of the large number of photographs that he took. He actually had been allowed - I'm sure he had to get permission on this - to send a couple of photographs off for use in newspapers. Nobody knew how to do that better than Weegee did because he was the master of it. He'd develop his photographs in the back of his car and he'd chase fires and homicides with a police radio he had in his bedroom and in his car. I actually bought online on eBay a couple of photographs that had been newspaper photographs. He must have got permission to do that from Columbia Pictures. One of them is quite badly damaged and the other isn't and we're putting both of them in the show. In both cases it shows Peter Sellers being wiped down, once by a man and another by a woman, of all the cream pie and custard that had been thrown at him. Those haven't been circulated widely and I paid virtually nothing for them because they're not classic Weegee photographs. The classic ones are a homicide with a shoe in the gutter. These are something else so there was not a lot of interest in them.
North Shore News: When you found the photos in the archives were they negatives you were looking at?
John O'Brian: No I'm looking at the prints.
North Shore News: Is that everything he shot? John O'Brian: No, many were repetitive. We're showing something like 32 in this exhibition. We've taken the 32 most interesting ones to my eye, because I chose them, at least another 35 that are very close to those subjects and then another 30 photographs that we didn't include. We took the crème de la crème and that's what we're showing.
North Shore News: As far as Weegee's own approach goes do you know if he took a lot of images when he photographed a subject?
John O'Brian: He was working with a Speed Graphic and so you were limited in the number of photographs you could take. He was working with flash because that had been insisted upon by Kubrick. On the set every time he took a photograph you had a little mini atomic explosion going off. I think that's one of the reasons he got invited on the set because Kubrick wanted him to take flash photographs. He didn't have to by that time because the technology had changed. He was using flash with a Speed Graphic 4 by 5 camera and you couldn't take a lot of photographs with that because you had to change the plate and put in another bulb.
North Shore News: Kubrick was thinking of Weegee circa 1930s, 1940s. John O'Brian: That's the look I think he wanted. That noir look, that in-your-face, point-blank, extreme contrast look for the film which, of course, was shot in black and white. The War Room where half of it takes place is really dark but with highlights and that's what he wanted.
North Shore News: Kubrick was famous for his control but this was also one of his first independent productions wasn't it?
John O'Brian: It was but there he was working with Columbia. It may have been partly the cost but it was absolutely the look he wanted as well - once he decided on what his approach to the film was going to be and that took a bit of time. It was going to be a nightmare comedy but with a noir look with those sorts of tensions and contrasts that he was so attentive to. In every film he did there's a look that nobody else has for each one and they're not the same as the other. Partly cost as it would have been less expensive but also for the aesthetics.
North Shore News: At that point in his career his motivation seems like an obvious reaction against Hollywood and its way of making movies because Strangelove was the second film he made in succession in England after Lolita. Two very American films shot in exile.
John O'Brian: He loathed Hollywood. He also was frightened of nuclear war and so he thought London would be a place to live. While he was shooting Lolita he came to know it and like it and moved his family over. He might have gone back to the United States except he really wanted Peter Sellers for the lead role and Sellers was engaged in court proceedings with a divorce and was not permitted to leave England.
North Shore News: Kubrick seems to have maintained a very anti-American stance even though he is still fascinated by the U.S. in his material.
John O'Brian: He's such a complicated mind it would never be something as simple as that. He deeply feared nuclear war and you might think he is going to make anti-war films but no, that's not what he does - he looks at the anatomy of war in his films and the protocols and the apparatus of the state and I think it's similar to his relationship to the United States.
North Shore News: I checked production history during that year and, other than Kubrick, only Godard (on Bande à part/Band of Outsiders) shot in black and white, everything else released in 1964 was in colour. Was that for aesthetics or control of the medium or overall cost or a combination of all those things?
John O'Brian: I think it's because it's the aesthetic that people don't want to see. Now it's possible to shoot in saturated technicolour and it can be done more cheaply than it was done before. It was so expensive when it was initially used in The Wizard of Oz (in 1939). We were through the noir period, we're into the '60s at that point through the Italian cinema of neorealism and the nouvelle vague of Truffaut and others, they're now becoming successful enough they can start using colour. It's interesting that Godard continued to use black and white.
North Shore News: I guess production costs couldn't have been too much of a factor for Kubrick as he would have to bring Weegee over at considerable expense to do his job on set.
John O'Brian: Yes and he paid him a lot. Weegee was not a major figure on the set. It was a substantial budget even then and Kubrick became increasingly famous for spending and spending and spending. Weegee was paid £750 which was a lot of money in those days and they would have to fly him over and put him up. He was there for two months. He says in an interview he was invited to come for two or three weeks and seven weeks later he is still there so obviously Kubrick liked having him around.
North Shore News: Weegee's images were never shown. Did Kubrick have specific plans for them?
John O'Brian: You know that's very interesting. I think he wanted him on the set and part of the deal must have been he would provide Kubrick - and that must have been a side deal that Kubrick made with Columbia - with a full set of prints of what he took and many of them are of Kubrick. Typically somebody who is doing publicity stills will concentrate on the actors rather than on the director whereas Weegee was free to shoot anybody. He shot a lot of Kubrick.
- Strangelove's Weegee is being shown at Presentation House Gallery with Zhang Yaxin: Model Operas, an exhibition of colour photographs by Chinese photographer Zhang Yaxin that vividly record the actors and scenery of the Communist Party-sanctioned "model operas." Several events are also planned in conjunction with the exhibit:
Screenings: - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) by Stanley Kubrick Wednesday, July 10, at 7 p.m.
Empire Theatres Esplanade, 200 Esplanade Ave, North Vancouver. - Yang Ban Xi, (2006) by Yang Ting Yuen and Weegee's New York, (1948) by Weegee Wednesday, July 17 at 7 p.m. Pacific Cinematheque, 1131 Howe Street, Vancouver.
Talk: Curator of Strangelove's Weegee - John O'Brian, Saturday, June 22, 1 p.m. at Presentation House Gallery.
