Stanley Kubrick – Day of the Fight

In 1951, Kubrick made a few short documentaries, beginning with The March of Time newsreels to movie theatres. His first was the independently financed Day of the Fight(1951), notable for using reverse tracking shot, later to become one of Kubrick's characteristic camera movements.Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Lookand began work on others, including, Flying Padre (1951) and The Seafarers (1953), Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving documentary works, although some historians believe he made others.He also served as second unit director on an episode of the TV show, Omnibus, about Abraham Lincoln, clips of which are included in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001).Kubrick told writer Joseph Gelmis in 1969 how he became interested in making those documentaries:I'd had my job with Look since I was seventeen, and I'd always been interested in films, but it never actually occurred to me to make a film on my own until I had a talk with a friend from high school, Alex Singer, who wanted to be a director himself.

At the time, Singer worked in the offices of the newsreel production company, The March of Time, and Kubrick felt he could make a film for much less than the company was paying other filmmakers, telling an interviewer, "I can't believe it costs that much to make eight or nine minutes of film". He began learning all he could about filmmaking on his own, calling film suppliers, laboratories, and equipment rental houses. Kubrick decided to make a short film documentary about a boxer, the same one he wrote a story about forLook a year earlier. He rented a camera and produced a 16-minute black-and-white documentary, Day of the Fight. Kubrick summarizes this first effort at filmmaking:I was cameraman, director, editor, assistant editor, sound effects man—you name it, I did it. It was invaluable experience, because being forced to do everything myself I gained a sound and comprehensive grasp of all the technical aspects of filmmaking