Gabriele Biotti – författare

This study examines the presence of the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny in a selection of films by Stanley Kubrick. Through a close analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the book explores how the idea of the uncanny found its way into the director’s work, producing a radical and fascinating unsettling of our subjectivity as spectators and film readers, and asking important questions about our relation to images and the audiovisual.The author argues that Kubrick’s cinema, one of the most remarkable examples of artistic expression in the twentieth century, makes the uncanny a concept capable of expressing the dynamic and vital nature of the unconscious in the context of modernism and beyond. In so doing, he investigates the boundaries and the rich dialogue between cinema, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and modernism.

This collection of essays aims to analyse the uncanny as a concept developed in the field of the arts, from a variety of perspectives axed in the literary field, in the media context, and in film studies, with references to contemporary thought. The book aims to provide readers with a methodological updating on this psychoanalytic concept, starting from its basic rethinking, under the light of the different cultural backgrounds of the authors whose essays are collected.The book’s specific focus is in the research on the many faces the uncanny took in different experiences, forms of writing, ideas of art, theories, discourses, and experiences in creation. This shows, still today, not only the concept’s richness in defining our contemporary cultural context, but also its plasticity and its identity of notion-hinge between eras, ideas of representation, and forms of writing of various types.