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), 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.
Arthur Schnitzler, Viennese playwright, novelist, short story writer, and physician, was a sophisticated writer much in vogue in his time. He chose themes of an erotic, romantic, or social nature, expressed with clarity, irony, and subtle wit. Reigen, a series of ten dialogues linking people of various social classes through their physical desire for one another, has been filmed many times as La Ronde. As a Jew, Schnitzler was sensitive to the problems of anti-Semitism, which he explored in the play Professor Bernhardi (1913), seen in New York in a performance by the Vienna Burgtheater in 1968. Henry Hatfield calls Schnitzler "second only to Hofmannsthal among the Austrian writers of his… generation and one of the most underrated of German authors... . He combined the naturalist's devotion to fact with the impressionist's interest in nuance; in other words, he told the truth" (Modern German Literature). In his most famous story, Lieutenant Gustl (1901), Schnitzler employs the stream-of-consciousness technique in an exposition of the follies and gradual disintegration of society in fin de siecle Vienna. Schnitzler has also been linked with Freud (see Vols. 3 and 5) and is credited with consciously introducing elements of modern psychology into his works.