Sorry, I've gotten way behind on posts, and to be honest, I have trouble
bringing myself to read posts about Kubrick! I've not even seen all of
his films, but the same thing strikes me about them every time: lots of
ideas, lots of calculations, but a completely lack of cinematic
"architecture": I never feel the compositions adding up one after the
other spatially, visually. The word "emptiness" keeps coming to mind.
Perhaps this is a blind spot of mine, and I write this in ignorance of
most of the recent posts here, so I'll try to get caught up over the
next few days.

But one thing struck me in Bill's post: the reference to the "Dark
Tower." There's a very short Brakhage film, 'The Dark Tower," on the DVD
that does in fact have a "dark tower" that I find hugely more powerful
than Kubrick's. The film is handpainted. And when I asked him the source
of the title, he cited a line from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"
-- "Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came." Presumably the Browning poem
is a reference to the Byron line?

- Fred