Detail from a painting by artist Paul Laffoley, featuring the French phrase "elan vital".
I have been looking at a lot of Paul Laffoley artwork lately, I've always been an admirer, and only recently learned he left us in 2015. The focal point in one of his text-based works jumped out at me, the words "ELAN VITAL" - because all week I've been reading about Kubrick's loyal and long-suffering assistant LEON VITALI. The sync between the two names is potent.
After his role in "Barry Lyndon" and before his assistant gig on 1980s "The Shining", Vitali acted in another film, the relatively unknown Irish-Scandinavian project "Terror of Frankenstein". There is quite a synchronicity here, as the Bergsonian concept of the ELAN VITAL , or Vitalism, was on the mind of Mary Shelley when she wrote the original "Frankenstein". Its amazing that someone named Leon Vitali would land the role of Doc Frankenstein, the mad genius obsessed with the Elan Vital. The two names are near -perfect phonetic anagrams. Kubrick, the crypto-alchemist that he was, undoubtedly noticed the delicious "twilight language" at play here.
Also of note, Vitali and his wife at the time, Kersti, worked as costume designers on at least two films together. "Costumes" are one of the things available, along with "Fancy Dress", at the Rainbow Fashions store in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
Vitali as Red Cloak on the set of Eyes Wide Shut
Leon Vitali's name is famously inserted into the 1999 Kubrick film "Eyes Wide Shut", in the brief scene where Tom Cruise is reading a newspaper article about a very untimely drug overdose that shakes him to his core. Leon Vitali is the name of the "fashion designer" featured in the story by writer "Larry Celona". Kubrick scholars have debated for years as to what kind of meta-trickery is going on here, with Kubrick putting the name of his real-life assistant in the film. Lately I've been wondering if Stanley was simply using Leon Vitali for his initials, L.V., which are also the initials of the famous fashion design house "Louis Vuitton", now known as the LVMH conglomerate.
The aforementioned Larry Celona, whose name can be seen as the author of the newspaper article in Eyes Wide Shut, has again made the news this year in 2019. Bizarrely, Celona is the figure who first reported the stories of the controversial deaths of both Stanley Kubrick in 1999 and also Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Some sync-sleuths have noticed that Larry Celona is an anagram of Royal Lancer, a British military unit. Maybe Kubrick knew there was more than meets the eye in regards to this interesting nom-de-plume.
I enjoyed the documentary Filmworker, but couldn't help wondering at times if the project was a kind of "limited hangout" about Vitali where hard truth is mixed and blended with a bit of obfuscation to cloak key sensitivities. Vitali claims that Kubrick wasn't sending messages about the moon landing or secret projects in his films. Maybe he's right, he was there. But then again, this man is a trained actor, and there is just so much occult and parapolitical smoke around the Kubrick films, it stands to reason that there should be a little fire in there somewhere.
