Honeymoon in Beppu
WARNER BROS. DISTRIBUTORS LTD
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Telephone: 01-437 5600
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Dear Dott. Moccia,
You will undoubtedly understand my disappointment that my film "Full Metal Jacket" has been classified so as to prevent it being viewed by young people under the age of 18. Obviously I do not regard young Italians as being substantially different in nature, character or temperament to young people in other parts of the world and it was my earnest desire that my film be an experience capable of being shared by the widest audience possible.
This is important to me because I sincerely hope that "Full Metal Jacket" will be regarded as making an important and relevant contribution to the ways in which people view their own nature.
My intention was not to relish violence for it's own sake but to emphasize the reality of both the training process undergone by the recruits and the war situation in which they found themselves. A crucial aspect of this process is the use of language to dehumanise the young men. This had to be presented in a totally truthful way otherwise I would have compromised the reality of the story.
I make no apology for taking such an approach. It is what attracted me to the project from the beginning: it's sense of uncompromising truth. "Full Metal Jacket" offers no easy moral or political answers.
I think you should know that Sweden has classified the film, 15, New Zealand has a 13 age restriction, Finland has given it a 16 age restriction, as has Germany. These ratings were applied without any cuts.
I believe that all the people should be given the opportunity to see things the way they are.
Yours sincerely,
(Signed)
Stanley Kubrick
cc: Dott.ssa Rosa Alba de Gaetano Leardi
Mr Bernard Weinreich, Warner Bros Italia
via Letters of Note | Archivio Kubrick | L'ascensore per il secondo piano
Michael Mandiberg has just finished assembling a handsome installation of his work at Eyebeam.
Mandiberg's one dozen separate pieces consist primarily of old, found books cut with a laser, handsomely shown individually or assembled in groups of two or more and placed on the artist's own constructions.
Mandiberg goes where no laser cutter has ever gone before. Some of the work physically and dramatically distinguishes important newly-established contemporary technologies from their aging or defunct antecedents (many of which could once have been described as cutting edge themselves), The result is a visual dialogue charged with the passage of time and composed in the empty spaces we see "written" in and on various kinds of reference books.
One piece, a work in progress (surprisingly, lasers take their time), is titled "We have never had a year of peace". When finished it will comprise the three volumes of the "Encyclopedia of the Third World", lying on their spines next to each other, open at a random page in the middle where the artist has deeply burned the name and year of every war fought by this peace-loving republic since 1890.
Another body of work consists of a wall display of cast-off volumes describing how to make money. Mandiberg has "whittled" with a laser into their hard front covers to describe the logos of, according to the artist, "all of the failed banks of the Great Recession" (...)
via James Wagner
Poet. Lover of academy and porch.
