Flying Padre
1951 · 9m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Father Fred Stadtmuller, a Catholic priest serving many scattered rural parishes in New Mexico, flies between isolated towns in his small plane, the Spirit of St. Joseph, to reach them all.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Kubrick documentary about a priest flying to remote parishes sounds like the setup for a subversive deconstruction, but it's oddly sincere—which is either the most contrarian move or the least interesting thing he ever made, and I'm still not sure which.
Shot in the early 1950s with a formal, almost liturgical patience, Flying Padre sits at the threshold between Flaherty's romantic documentary and the crystalline precision Kubrick would later demand; it's a film already aware of its own place in cinema history.
Kubrick's decision to treat the small plane itself—the Spirit of St. Joseph—as the true protagonist, framing it against vast New Mexico emptiness, transforms what could be pious PR into something genuinely architectural and lonely.