The 1960's - The Criterion Collection

Stanley Kubrick was born in the Bronx, New York, and became a skilled photographer before he went into directing. He achieved fame with the fine antiwar film Paths of Glory in 1957, and his output since then has been extremely diversified. Through it all, however, runs a deep vein of pessimism. Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), show more and A Clockwork Orange (1972) express his vision of an apocalyptic future, while Spartacus (1959) and Barry Lyndon (1975) reveal his dark view of futility in the past. Kubrick has been able to work independently for most of his career, enjoying the rare right to make the final cuts of his films without studio interference. Some of his other notable films are Lolita (1954), based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), about troops in the Vietnam War. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

The French-born Polish actor and director Roman Polanski survived one of the darkest events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. At the age of 8, he was interned in a German concentration camp, where his mother died. He later attended the Polish Film School and, with his film noir Knife in the Water (1962), helped establish the reputation of show more Polish cinema abroad. Polanski's vision is of an unstable world of violence, sexual frustration, unconscious impulses, and destructive psychoses. Repulsion (1965), his first feature in the West, and the chilling Rosemary's Baby (1968), about satanic possession in New York City, marked him as a filmmaker who was unafraid to confront evil. He was forced to confront evil in his personal life once again when his wife, Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered in 1969 by the satanic Charles Manson cult in one of California's most sensational slayings. The horror of this experience informs his filmed version of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1972). Of his later films, Chinatown (1974), the story of a private investigator's discovery of twisted relationships in the wealthy family that has hired him, was well received, as was Tess (1981), Polanski's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. (Bowker Author Biography) show less