Joy McEntee - Böcker

It is a commonplace to say that Stanley Kubrick’s cinema is a world of men created by a man for men. And yet, as Kubrick and Women argues, women are central to Kubrick’s films, if often only as paradoxically phobic objects of desire. The centrality of women is well camouflaged, to be sure, by Kubrick’s focus on male fear. As Michael Herr observed, it takes a great respect for women to make them as dangerous as Kubrick sometimes did.Kubrick and Women responds to a question asked by Stella Louis: ‘what if women were the main character(s) in Stanley Kubrick’s films?’. It argues that Kubrick cannot comfortably be labelled either a feminist or a misogynist. The book does not damn Kubrick for misogyny nor rescue him from accusations of it but mobilizes Tania Modleski’s insight about Hitchcock, ‘the misogyny and the sympathy actually entail one another’, and applies it to Kubrick. This is, obviously, to yoke together contradictions, but this yoking creates an unease and ambiguity that renders complex truths about the relationships between men and women.

Kubrick and Race investigates race and racism in Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. At first glance, Kubrick’s films are very white, but his work with race is complex. Sometimes he addressed race covertly, indirectly, in hidden ways, or in the background, so that race becomes a palimpsest that is visible through the foreground story. Did Kubrick repress and deny racial inequities? Do his works condone and participate in racism, or did he represent it as a lived reality? This volume asks these questions, opening a discussion that is long overdue. Operating from a clear understanding of the contemporary context, the book spans past, present, and future, offering readers a chance to witness – afresh – ways in which Kubrick and his prolific work allow one to criss-cross academic disciplines as varied as communication, literature, psychiatry, media, film, and Black studies. This collection of essays opens new routes to and from Kubrick, in and out of the academy, convincingly and exhaustively.