A Gallery of Stanley Kubrick Cinemagraphs: Iconic Moments Briefly Animated

Type “stu­pid ani­mat­ed gif”—or words to that effect—into your pre­ferred search engine and you’ll be reward­ed with an abun­dance of ger­mane mate­r­i­al.

Mean­while a search on “ani­mat­ed gif of Stan­ley Kubrick rolling in his grave” fails to yield any­thing of sig­nif­i­cance.

Pity. I guess we’ll just have to imag­ine how the late per­fec­tion­ist and cel­e­brat­ed direc­tor would have react­ed to a gallery of his most icon­ic images, down­loaded and doc­tored into infi­nite­ly loop­ing, min­i­mal­ly ani­mat­ed snip­pets.

Per­haps I pre­sume. Per­haps he’d be pray­ing for some­one to rean­i­mate him, so he could haunt the realm of the late night cha­t­rooms, his every obser­va­tion and opin­ion punc­tu­at­ed with a lan­guid Sue Lyons lift­ing her head in Loli­ta, or a dia­bol­i­cal Clock­work Orange toast.

Admit­ted­ly, the longer one watch­es George C Scot­t’s Gen­er­al Turgid­son work­ing over a mouth­ful of gum, or Jack Nichol­son act­ing four kinds of crazy, the more tempt­ing it is to put togeth­er a cin­ema­graph of one’s own. That’s the high fly­ing term assigned to the form by artist Kevin Burg and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jamie Beck who alleged­ly invent­ed (and lat­er trade­marked) it while cov­er­ing New York Fash­ion Week. To quote super­mod­el Coco Rocha, as they do on their web­site, “it’s more than a pho­to but not quite a video.”

Be fore­warned that it’s not a project for the Pho­to­shop new­bie. Maybe the instruc­tion­al video below just makes it seem so.  (Though if you’re look­ing for an instruc­tion­al video on how not to make an instruc­tion­al video, this is very instruc­tion­al indeed. If not, stick with a more straight for­ward, non-film-based how to. Stan­ley Kubrick, this guy ain’t.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Cin­ema­graph: A Haunt­ing Photo/Video Hybrid

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Ayun Hal­l­i­day rec­om­mends Stan­ley Kubrick­’s “Paths of Glo­ry” in its orig­i­nal form.