Stanley Kubrick Studies – serie

Kubrick and Control is an examination of authority, order, and independence in the films directed by Stanley Kubrick, as well as in his personal life and working habits. This study explores the ways in which these central preoccupations develop and reformulate through the course of Kubrick's career, as he moved from genre to genre and shifted stories, locations, time periods, scope, and technical facilities. Separating the productions in accordance to their wider filmic classifications, the individual chapters examine a variety of productions, allowing for a categorical as well as a developmental approach to the works. In addition, following concurrently with each individual film discussed, details about Kubrick's life and evolving directorial practice are recounted in relation to these same concerns. In studying the stylistic and narrative features of his work, examples illustrate how Kubrick took these themes and applied them consistently yet with significant variation, manifest in relation to mise-en-scène construction (how Kubrick composed his images); characterization (individuals establishing, exerting, seeking, and/or abusing their authority); narrative (stories about characters and situations dependent upon order and control); and the actual filmmaking processes of the director (Kubrick was both praised and damned for his authorial management and obsession with order and perfection).

Directing Spartacus (1960) had a significant impact on Stanley Kubrick’s career. Although the director wasn’t involved in preproduction, the film clearly shows his stylistic influence. It was his first production for a major studio and he had to work with international stars. Moreover, the film was adapted by Dalton Trumbo from the novel Spartacus by Howard Fast; both had been blacklisted, and Trumbo had to work secretly until Kirk Douglas revealed his identity, so Spartacus is understood to be the film that ‘broke the blacklist’. Now it is a cult movie, widely discussed by fans and admirers but not receiving equal attention from an academic perspective.This collection of essays explores the film from a wide variety of angles: through its production history and the socio-historical context of its release; through the theme of gender, power, and sexuality; through close analysis in comparison with other epic movies, the literature preceding the film, and the rest of Kubrick’s oeuvre; and through its soundtrack and sonic style. Some chapters draw extensively on primary sources, especially those available at the Stanley Kubrick Archive; others apply a theoretical perspective. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach demonstrates how diverse methods can coexist and support each other to create a deeper knowledge of this important film.

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.

Twenty years after its release, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut remains a complex, visually arresting film about marriage, jealousy, domesticity, adultery, sexual disturbance, and dreams. This was the final enigmatic work from its equally enigmatic creator. It has left an indelible mark on our popular culture and remains as relevant as ever. Much maligned and much misunderstood when it first came out, Eyes Wide Shut has since been the subject of an animated debate and discussion among critics, fans and academics. It has been explored from a wide variety of disciplines and methodological perspectives. This collection brings scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds together with those who worked on the film to explore Eyes Wide Shut’s legacy, discuss its impact, and consider its position within Kubrick’s oeuvre and the wider visual and socio-political culture.

Kubrick and Control is an examination of authority, order, and independence in the films directed by Stanley Kubrick, as well as in his personal life and working habits. This study explores the ways in which these central preoccupations develop and reformulate through the course of Kubrick's career, as he moved from genre to genre and shifted stories, locations, time periods, scope, and technical facilities. Separating the productions in accordance to their wider filmic classifications, the individual chapters examine a variety of productions, allowing for a categorical as well as a developmental approach to the works. In addition, following concurrently with each individual film discussed, details about Kubrick's life and evolving directorial practice are recounted in relation to these same concerns. In studying the stylistic and narrative features of his work, examples illustrate how Kubrick took these themes and applied them consistently yet with significant variation, manifest in relation to mise-en-scène construction (how Kubrick composed his images); characterization (individuals establishing, exerting, seeking, and/or abusing their authority); narrative (stories about characters and situations dependent upon order and control); and the actual filmmaking processes of the director (Kubrick was both praised and damned for his authorial management and obsession with order and perfection).

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.The Stanley Kubrick Archive is a collection held at the University of the Arts London that contains material related to the life and work of Stanley Kubrick. But even though the archive has been branded as being about one man – Kubrick – its contents are much more diverse. There are records and objects about the wider industrial, cultural, and social history of film production in the latter half of the twentieth century; records and objects about the histories of fashion, stationery, photography, communication and media technologies, and urban development; historical resources pertaining to events such as the Holocaust, the life of Napoleon, and the American Civil War; and ephemera that has no immediately obvious research use.Media historian James Fenwick argues that the Stanley Kubrick Archive has been misunderstood as being solely about Kubrick and that it has much greater interdisciplinary potential. Fenwick opens up the discussion of the meaning and purpose of the Stanley Kubrick Archive by considering its material realities via a critical survey and archaeological analysis of its contents. By undertaking such an analysis, Fenwick moves beyond the mythic status of the archive being Kubrick’s archive and instead foregrounds the wider cultural value and significance of the collection and uses the archive to reveal histories, stories, and ideas beyond a focus on Stanley Kubrick, proving that the Stanley Kubrick Archive doesn’t just have to be about Stanley.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.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.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.The Stanley Kubrick Archive is a collection held at the University of the Arts London that contains material related to the life and work of Stanley Kubrick. But even though the archive has been branded as being about one man – Kubrick – its contents are much more diverse. There are records and objects about the wider industrial, cultural, and social history of film production in the latter half of the twentieth century; records and objects about the histories of fashion, stationery, photography, communication and media technologies, and urban development; historical resources pertaining to events such as the Holocaust, the life of Napoleon, and the American Civil War; and ephemera that has no immediately obvious research use.Media historian James Fenwick argues that the Stanley Kubrick Archive has been misunderstood as being solely about Kubrick and that it has much greater interdisciplinary potential. Fenwick opens up the discussion of the meaning and purpose of the Stanley Kubrick Archive by considering its material realities via a critical survey and archaeological analysis of its contents. By undertaking such an analysis, Fenwick moves beyond the mythic status of the archive being Kubrick’s archive and instead foregrounds the wider cultural value and significance of the collection and uses the archive to reveal histories, stories, and ideas beyond a focus on Stanley Kubrick, proving that the Stanley Kubrick Archive doesn’t just have to be about Stanley.

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.