Stanley Kubrick Biography
Stanley Kubrick was born in New York in 1928. His family wanted him to follow in his father's footsteps, but his grades were not good enough to enroll in medical school. From a young age, he showed interest in two things: the game of chess and photography, which he inherited from his father. Furthermore, he played drums in a jazz band. Thanks to the camera that his father had given him, he began to take photos and develop them independently, together with a neighbor. An image captured the day after the sudden death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed him to sell his first photo to the prestigious Look magazine, when he was only sixteen.
At twenty-two, he decided that his future would be in cinema, which he had been passionate about since his early adolescence. He frequented the best New York theaters and saw at least one film a day. Kubrick was quite critical of cinema and believed that, with the right means, he could do better. The challenge launched by the young director began with a titanic and ambitious spirit that had to clash with the difficulties of making cinema and with a language that he learned to master only after a few uncertain attempts. One of his first films was the short documentary Day of the Fight in 1951, taken from one of his photo stories published in 1949 regarding the preparation of a match for boxer Walter Cartier. This work allowed him to acquire a lot of technical knowledge, which he considered invaluable for his career.
