- Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove
One of the supreme pleasures of the new 35-millimeter restoration of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (which screens for two more nights at the Music Box) is that it allows you to celebrate how grainy Stanley Kubrick’s movies are. I can’t think of many other comedies that look like Strangelove, with its sci-fi mise-en-scene and newsreel-style matter-of-factness. Nothing about the imagery suggests you’re supposed to laugh—Kubrick creates the impression that he captured the humor surreptitiously and then smuggled it into the theater. This odd spontaneity is central to the director’s art. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, Kubrick’s notorious practice of shooting dozens of takes of the same shot didn’t stem from some mad perfectionism, but rather a desire to achieve something as unforced and unpredictable as real life. (Compared to Dr. Strangelove, the improvised humor of most current Hollywood comedies feels especially belabored.) This method has roots in Kubrick’s early career as a photojournalist—one might say he constructed his movies as intricate, self-contained worlds so that he might film them as if he were a documentarian.
Here most of the lighting comes from overhead florescent bulbs—many of them to the rear of the principal action. This has the effect of deemphasizing Mandrake’s significance within the world of the film, despite the fact that he occupies a front and (almost) center position in the particular shot. It also underscores Dr. Strangelove‘s central irony—that in creating systems that can function independent of human interference, humankind has in fact hastened its own annihilation.
