Wonderworker

Recently, I got to watch Filmworker, the documentary focused on Leon Vitali, who worked as Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 30 years after acting in Barry Lyndon (and, masked, as the red-robed leader of the ritual in Eyes Wide Shut, as I learned in the documentary). It's been sticking with me since.  

Does it show an emotionally abusive relationship, possibly adding evidence that Kubrick was an abuser of his employees (maybe most famously Shelley Duvall in The Shining)? That picture of him has maybe been countered by the one of Kubrick loving and lived by his family--but Vitali's children, interviewed, talk about their own father, ever driven to do the great director's bidding, not being there for them.  

The documentary, to me, to its credit IMHO, doesn't come down on the side of Vitali's life demonstrating effects of prolonged emotional abuse, great sacrifice in the service of great art, or both. It's difficult for me to see his having to go through Full Metal Jacket frame by frame in order to enhance the marketing campaign, his Dickensian work schedule that included Christmas day, and his going so uncredited I hadn't heard of him as a great and inspiring art story, but I don't know.  

What has stayed with me most, though, is simply the change in Vitali from vibrant and healthy-looking in Barry Lyndon to really rundown-seeming after those decades of service, or servitude. It's hard not to see him as the one really making, living through, or being dragged through, the "anything-for-art" kinds of sacrifice I am sorry to say I once admired. Hoping I don't anymore at some level.  

Maybe one of my own mistakes in perception is seeing mental illness as facilitating or helping, rather than impeding, talent. Guessing Kubrick may have been eligible for a diagnosis of OCD like mine, I wonder if his movies were genuinely helped by the dozens (and dozens) of takes of small movements, the tape-measuring of sidewalks and so on. And, maybe the more important question for me, if so, was it worth it?  

Leon Vitali, as depicted in Filmworker, would, I believe, say yes, and might be bothered, possibly very much, by the idea that his three decades of often brutal work were more a cautionary tale than a hidden and vital aid to some of the world's greatest pieces of cinematic art (art, period?) not only coming to life but living on. Touching, to me, was the part of the documentary where, poor and living in L.A. after Kubrick passed, he would take anyone who asked to see a museum exhibit of Kubrick's work and tell them stories from the actual making of the films--walking with them through an exhibit that made no mention of him at all.  

It was touching, more than sad, perhaps, because he simply seemed to have a childlike love of, and wonder at, these films he had given everything for, or to, or both. Maybe it was the wonder that self-sacrifice can produce, even if unhealthy in key ways--that of recognizing that art doesn't come from, but through, its so-called creators.