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Cast

 Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick & Louis Begley

News

Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress. 2/09
Duration17'30"
Credits
Directors Jane and Louise Wilson
Producer Pinky Ghundale
Director of Photography Alistair Cameron
Editor Reg Wrench
Actress Johanna ter Steege

    Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege. It begins with images of Johanna taken in 1993 by Stanley Kubrick - they are of the wardrobe shoot for the film Aryan Papers. Johanna was to play the lead role of Tania, a compelling character. Tania is central to the film: she is a Polish Jew trying to save herself and her family from the Nazis. When we visited the Kubrick Archive, we were intrigued to look at the detailed research for a film that never made it into production. The amount of research is overwhelming and it seems to have overwhelmed Kubrick himself. The research left him very depressed and he abandoned the project. The work takes its title from Kubrick's film and, intercut between stills of Johanna, are images from the archive of specific scenes Kubrick wanted to recreate and images from the Ealing Studios Archive of interiors, shot in 1939/40. The film moves into live action with footage of Johanna filmed now, fifteen years later, where she appears to come to life, recreating stills from the original wardrobe shoot. Technical information Filmed on 16mm and transferred to HDCam. Live action footage edited with stills scanned from The Stanley Kubrick Archives.
    Kubrick is at the forefront of conversation because the sisters are halfway through their latest installation, an exploration of the director's unfinished passion project, a 1993 Holocaust-themed drama called The Aryan Papers. The movie had been in development since 1976, and eventually emerged into preproduction in 1993 as an adaptation of Louise Begley's Wartime Lies, about a Jewish woman and her nephew pretending to be Roman Catholic to escape persecution. Julia Roberts had been circling the lead role, but Kubrick chose the Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege (The Vanishing) and began scouting locations in the Czech Republic. However, Schindler's List was released that year, to critical and commercial acclaim, and Kubrick subsequently abandoned his film, fearing that there wasn't enough cultural space for two prominent Holocaust movies. The Wilsons' work, entitled Unfolding the Aryan Papers (a joint commission from Animate Projects, funded by the BFI and the Channel 4) began as ten days of immersion in the Kubrick archives in South London. The sisters could have chosen any Kubrick movie for inspiration, but The Aryan Papers grabbed them from the start. "There was something unique about it, which made it stick out," Louise says. "It was the closest that any of his films would have come to being slightly biographical, in the sense that he had family from Eastern Europe who were lost in the Holocaust." "Plus," Jane adds, "it became obvious that this was an amazing role for a female lead to take on - he didn't actually do that in any of his other films." After painstakingly sifting through the material ("Ten years of research, rows and rows, 50 or 60 boxes!" Louise says), they began constructing their own project - they interviewed ter Steege, filmed her, re-created Kubrick's wardrobe tests, recorded voiceover lines, and edited it all together with newsreel footage of Holocaust abuses. The work-in-progress that they play here today on their ancient television is fractured, dreamlike and appropriately disturbing (the final BFI installation, complete with infinity mirror and top-notch technical specs, they warn, will be even more affecting). They dismiss any notion that they have succeeded where Kubrick failed, and instead insist that their work is merely one of many potential approaches that the film invites. "I hope it will give you a sense of the different roles and identities, and of a movie in the process of 'becoming'," Jane offers.

Kubrick's lost movie: Now we can see it...
By Geoffrey Macnab 1/27/09

    You probably haven't heard of Johanna ter Steege, even if the legendary American film-maker Stanley Kubrick once called her the best actress he knew. Ter Steege, who was born in 1961, has had a reasonably successful career, appearing in such films as George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988), Istvan Szabo's Sweet Emma, Dear Boebe (1992), and Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road (1997) but she is hardly a household name, even in her native Holland.
    It could all have been so very, very different. The actress chuckles as she remembers the circumstances in the early 1990s when she was summoned over to St Albans to meet Kubrick. He wanted her to play the lead in his "Holocaust" film, The Aryan Papers, which he was planning to adapt from Louis Begley's semi-autobiographical novel, Wartime Lies. If the film had been made, she would have become a huge international star.
    "He [Kubrick] was convinced that he had found an actress whose performance would catapult a new star to the forefront of international stardom and give this dark and serious film the needed 'gloss'," Kubrick's brother-in-law and producer Jan Harlan has said of Ter Steege. He believes that it was "devastating" for her that the film wasn't made. "It's like a young musician getting his first Carnegie Hall [concert] and then being told you can't do it. It must be terrible, after you've prepared yourself for months and months."
    The movie may have been abandoned but audiences will at least have the chance to experience the "ghost" of The Aryan Papers through a new installation by the Turner Prize-nominated artists Jane and Louise Wilson, which will be shown as part of next month's Stanley Kubrick season at BFI Southbank. The Wilson sisters have scoured the Kubrick archives for stills and information about the movie, poring over wardrobe research stills and period stills.
    As Jan Harlan reveals, Kubrick had been trying to make a Holocaust-themed drama for more than 20 years. It was a daunting challenge – how do you condense one of the most horrific episodes of the 20th century into a two-hour dramatic feature? Kubrick had no desire to make a documentary. At one stage, he had considered making a film set in the German film industry of the Nazi era, as propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was pulling the strings. However, he couldn't find a story or script that satisfied him.
    When Harlan approached the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer on Kubrick's behalf to ask him to write an original, Holocaust-themed screenplay in the 1980s, Singer responded: "I don't know the first thing about it." What Singer inferred was that an outsider couldn't begin to do justice to the Holocaust. This was certainly a subject too challenging for a film-maker – even one as brilliant as Kubrick – to have any chance of interpreting in a meaningful way in a dramatic movie. Chastened by Singer's remark, Kubrick continued to do a huge amount of research. Eventually, in Begley's novel (published in 1991), he found a book that was both intimate and authoritative.
    "It's a big, risky topic," Harlan says today of Kubrick's screenplay for The Aryan Papers. "It is not a drama that is over-the-top and has lots of action. It is a very silent film, a very serious film. The tension is in this horrendous, low valley of humanity that existed because of the Nazis."
    The role of Aunt Tania in Wartime Lies would have been extremely demanding. Ter Steege was to play a beautiful and acerbic Polish-Jewish woman who helps her young nephew Maciek escape the Nazis by pretending to be Catholic. "He [Kubrick] phoned me. We talked for 30 minutes on the phone. He asked me several questions about the films I had done - very specific questions," the actress recalls of her first talk with the film-maker. He had seen her films several times and was in deadly earnest about casting her. Ter Steege was summoned over to England to meet Kubrick for a screen test.
    Bizarrely, during their first meeting, Kubrick asked her questions about sport and about Richard Krajicek, the Dutch tennis player. He was cordial and polite: very different from his reputation as a Prospero-like hermit. "He was very, very interested in who you were. He was interested in me as a human being, not as an actress. He asked me political questions. We talked about acting. He asked me about the Germans - how I related to the Germans."
    The blonde Dutch actress, who grew up on a farm, had relatives who had been part of the Dutch resistance. She knew many stories: that her grandparents hid Jewish refugees from the Nazis; that her uncle had to flee the Germans. She wasn't Jewish herself but there was enough in her family experience for her to understand a character like Aunt Tania.
    Ter Steege recalls that she was first embarrassed and then grew angry when Kubrick kept on telling her she was the best actress he knew. "I said: 'Stanley, that's not true.' Then he said it again. Then I said: 'I really don't like it when you say that. First of all, it's not true and I always say that I am as good as my director. If you tell me I am the best actress you know, you give me a huge responsibility which I can't bear.'"
    In hindsight, she thinks that Kubrick was testing her. The flattery was designed to make her feel uncomfortable. "I think he liked it when I got a little bit angry. I felt that he was studying everything I did or said. I remember that he was studying the movements of my hands while we were talking." They met in the kitchen of Jan Harlan's house. Ter Steege had deliberately taken a seat with her back to the windows. "I thought, when he comes in, my face will be in the shadows. I will be able to see him first. He came into the kitchen and said hello. The second thing he said was: 'Can you take another chair?' He put me in the light."
    Kubrick filmed her with different lenses as he asked her questions about her childhood and earlier youth. "Sometimes he used lenses that made look very, very young and sometimes lenses which made me look old. In a way, we were working." Late in the evening, Kubrick stopped filming and said to her, "Let's open a bottle of champagne because you've got the part."
    In Ter Steege, Kubrick had seemingly found a muse for what would have been his most daring and contentious feature. The director was in great earnest about making the film. Although he was famously reclusive, Kubrick was prepared to leave England to shoot in Eastern Europe. "He [Kubrick] would very reluctantly have moved himself to Bratislava and to Brno. He wouldn't have liked that but it was no pain, no gain in this case. There was no way you could have done these locations in England," says Harlan. Kubrick had studied the early episodes of Edgar Reitz's Heimat in detail for ideas for the look of the film. He had even hired Reitz's art director. As preparations got under way, the leading actress was sworn to secrecy.
    Back in Holland, Ter Steege waited patiently. She was told that production would begin in three or four months' time. Nothing happened. Harlan called her regularly, telling her that shooting was postponed but not to worry. She didn't take other jobs. Then, after seven months, she was informed that Kubrick had decided not to make the film. News had filtered through of Steven Spielberg's plans for Schindler's List. Kubrick and the top brass at Warner Brothers were worried that The Aryan Papers would suffer commercially if it appeared after Spielberg's movie. It was widely accepted that the box office for his earlier Vietnam war-themed feature Full Metal Jacket had been affected by appearing after Oliver Stone's Platoon. Kubrick didn't want to suffer the same experience twice. The audience, he feared, wouldn't countenance two Holocaust films at the same time.
    Ter Steege reacted to the bad news by spending two days in bed with "my head under the blankets." For years, she wouldn't talk about it. Only now, with the Wilson sisters making their installation Unfolding the Aryan Papers, has she agreed to discuss it. She remains in contact with Harlan and with Kubrick's family. A few years after Kubrick's death, when she was appearing as Countess Geschwitz at the Almeida Theatre in a Jonathan Kent production of Franz Wedekind's Lulu, she was invited with her husband and daughter for Easter at Kubrick's house. "I remember my daughter searching for chocolate eggs near Stanley's grave because he is buried in the garden."
    The actress was told by Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, that Kubrick had grown very depressed "because of all the research he did" for The Aryan Papers. "We know that he [Kubrick] was a perfectionist. We also know the dangerous thing for a perfectionist is that, at a certain point, he comes to a zero," Ter Steege speculates as to other reasons why the film was never made. Harlan has suggested that Kubrick felt a measure of relief that the film didn't happen.
    It remains conceivable that The Aryan Papers project might be resurrected by another director. Warner Brothers hold the rights. Harlan insists that the family would have no objections to a new film version, as long as a capable director takes on the job. "It would have to be really a good director. In the wrong hands, this would become a very cheap movie. But if Ang Lee wanted to do it, I would jump to the ceiling!"
    Fifteen years after The Aryan Papers was abandoned, Ter Steege is still working as an actress. This month, she can be seen at the Rotterdam Festival in The Last Conversation, a single-shot, feature-length drama, entirely set in a car, about a jilted mistress making one last phone call to her married lover. When she looks back on the Kubrick film that never was, she can't quite hide the frustration. When Kubrick was preparing The Aryan Papers, top Hollywood agents were courting her. When the film didn't happen, they melted away. The offers which would surely have come her way as star of a Kubrick film failed to materialize."What can I say?" the actress asks. "I don't regret what happened. I still feel it as a huge compliment. It was a wonderful experience. The ending was very painful. There was a huge future... then it felt like a huge balloon was suddenly burst. Then, that's it. You have to go on. Not for the first time in my life, I realized that personal happiness has nothing to do with success."
    'Unfolding the Aryan Papers', the installation by Jane & Louise Wilson, is at BFI Southbank Gallery, London SE1 (020-7928 3232) from 2/13 to 4/19, a Kubrick film season runs at the BFI from 1/30 to 2/28/09

Kubrick Holocaust film to be told in installation
Mark Brown | The Guardian 1/3/09

Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest, and often demanding, film directors of all time, making movies from Spartacus to Full Metal Jacket. And if it had not been for his friend Steven Spielberg, there may also have been one called Aryan Papers, set in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto. The story of the movie Kubrick never made - despite investing enormous energy into it - is to be told through a new art installation at the British Film Institute in London by the Turner-prize nominated artists Jane and Louise Wilson.
    The twin sisters were invited to delve into the Stanley Kubrick archives at the University of the Arts in London and come up with a piece of work to coincide with a major Kubrick season on the South Bank this year. What they alighted on was the fascinating story of Aryan Papers, a film that he was adapting from Louis Begley's 1991 novel, Wartime Lies. It tells the story of a young Jewish boy hidden as a Catholic by his aunt. The Wilsons had a wonderful time in the archives. "We did feel a bit like kids in a sweetshop and there is so much there you could easily spend days in there, it really is incredible," said Louise. "Of course the films he has made are so well known we wanted to concentrate on something he hadn't done."
    Kubrick, a secretive obsessive perfectionist by any standards, spent months on preproduction for Aryan Papers, even casting the Dutch actor Johanna ter Steege in the lead role. The Wilsons came across intriguing stills of Ter Steege in different costumes, shot at different angles and in different lights and, taking these as a starting point, then approached the actor herself. The resulting film will cut between the stills and their interview with Ter Steege.
    "It is a sort of bittersweet story," said Louise. "The film would have been a major thing to happen for her, or for anyone. It was memorable for her to meet [Kubrick] and work with him, she had to keep the whole thing quiet for eight months. It was obviously a tremendous blow that the film never happened. She had never had that kind of rigor from a director."
    Kubrick put an awful lot of effort into Aryan Papers: writing the screenplay, casting Ter Steege and traveling to the Czech town of Brno as a possible location for wartime Warsaw. That the film was never made seems to be due to a combination of factors. Spielberg's Schindler's List came out in 1993 and Kubrick may have felt beaten to the line. He may also have got sidetracked by his project to make the film AI -which Spielberg ended up making after Kubrick's death. Or the whole project may have been too much for him. Louise said: "Having spoken to Johanna, it sounds like he got very depressed. He was so immersed in this research I think he found the process quite disturbing and upsetting."
• Jane and Louise Wilson's installation will be at the BFI Southbank, London, from 13 February to 19 April.

By A.J. Goldmann | Haaretz 8/22/05
    When Stanley Kubrick died during the post-production of his film "Eyes Wide Shut" in March 1999, he left behind several pet projects he had been working on for decades. These included a science-fiction riff on "Pinocchio" - later completed by Steven Spielberg as "A.I." - a biopic on the life of Napoleon and a Hoolocaust project with the working title "Aryan Papers."
    The recently released "Stanley Kubrick Archives," an unwieldy coffee-table tome (edited by Alison Castle, Taschen) sheds new light on the famously secretive director's aborted project. An essay by Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and producer, details Kubrick's long-time pursuit of the Holocaust as a subject for a film. Harlan writes of his trip to New York in 1976 to try and interest Isaac Bashevis Singer in contributing an original screenplay. What Kubrick sought from Singer was a "dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell." Singer, who - unlike many of his friends - was not a Holocaust survivor, declined, saying, "I don't know the first thing" about the Holocaust.
    Kubrick shelved the project until 1991, when he read Louis Begley's short novel, "Wartime Lies," about a Jewish boy and his aunt who survive the war by snaking their way through Poland posing as Catholics. Begley's autobiographical tale so intrigued Kubrick that he was willing to shoot the project abroad - a dramatic decision for the director, who hadn't left England for more than three decades. Kubrick got the go-ahead from Warner Brothers - which publicly announced the project as "Aryan Papers" (a reference to the documents required to escape deportation) in 1993 - and he got fairly far along in the pre-production, hiring set and costume designers and casting several of the main roles. For the role of the boy's aunt, Tanya, Kubrick considered Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman. However, preparations ceased when it became known that Spielberg had started working on "Schindler's List." Fearing competition, Kubrick shelved the project for a second and final time, and devoted his energies to "Eyes Wide Shut."
    Kubrick's life-long fascination with the Holocaust coexisted with extreme doubt as to whether any film could do the subject justice. In 1980, he told author Michael Herr that what he wanted most was to make a film about the Holocaust, "but good luck in putting all that into a two-hour movie." Frederic Raphael, who co-authored the screenplay for "Eyes Wide Shut," recalls Kubrick questioning whether a film could truly represent the Holocaust in its entirety. After Raphael mentioned "Schindler's List," Kubrick replied: "Think that's about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn't it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. `Schindler's List' is about 600 who don't. Anything else?"
    Scholar Geoffrey Cocks has written extensively about Kubrick's fascination with the Nazi era. In numerous essays and a book, "The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust," he argues that the Holocaust serves as the "veiled benchmark of evil" in many of Kubrick's films, especially "The Shining." According to Cocks, the failure to bring "Aryan Papers" to fruition had to do with a profound awareness of "the problem of how to do ethical and artistic justice to the depiction of the horror of mass extermination," a problem that has - in one form or another - plagued all postwar artists. Unlike Harlan, who recalls Kubrick's great enthusiasm for the project, Cocks quotes Kubrick's widow, Christiane, as telling him that Kubrick was horribly depressed throughout his work on "Aryan Papers."
    The Holocaust was such a sensitive issue that Kubrick's reaction took the form of approach-and-avoidance, argues Cocks. Though Kubrick never confronted the subject head-on - and the rare appearances of Nazis in his films take the form of parody (as in "Dr. Strangelove" and "Lolita") - Cocks writes that "[as] a Jew in a gentile world, Kubrick would use his position as an outsider with a deep sensitivity to social injustice to expose the dark underside of society." A quote from Kubrick on the connection between rape and Beethoven in "A Clockwork Orange" illustrates Cocks's thesis: "[It] suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it didn't do them, or anyone else, much good."

Pictures

Johanna ter Steege black outfit costume test
Johanna ter Steege white top under clock facing forward costume test

Synopsis

Tania is a Polish Jew trying to save herself and her family from the Nazis.

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