Filmworker

Leon Vitali was a rising actor in Britain in the seventies. He took an important part in a film by Stanley Kubrick. When the shoot ended he gave up acting and went to work for Kubrick. The job has no name: casting, checking prints, supervising dubbing, the archive, the telephone. For the next film he met thousands of children. For twenty years he worked sixteen hours a day, his own name appeared in small letters in the credits, and after Kubrick died he went on checking the prints of his films. Tony Zierra directs. Leon Vitali, Ryan O'Neal, Danny Lloyd, Matthew Modine and members of Kubrick's family speak in it. It is an American production. The documentary screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. The matter it treats is labour that goes unnamed; the film puts cinema's invisible worker at the centre. The documentary neither exalts nor accuses Kubrick; the relationship is shown from both sides. The narrative also describes how Vitali bound his health and his family to this work. The archive material is wide; set photographs, notes and letters are used. The film gives concrete detail about how Kubrick's films were made. Vitali is tired and modest in front of the camera and does not present himself as a hero. The ending looks at where he is now. Its limit is reach; the narrative is tied to one person, it repeats, and some passages are long. Who it is for: people curious about what happens behind a film and viewers of Kubrick. Who it is not for: the subject is narrow, it repeats, and the ending is sad.