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Many of Stanley Kubrick's films are often interpreted as cold and ambiguous. Whether viewing Barry Lyndon, 2001, The Shining, or Eyes Wide Shut, there is a sense in which these films resist their own audiences, creating a distance from them. Though many note the coldness of Kubrick's films, a smaller number attempt to explore exactly how his body of work elicits this particular reaction. Fewer still attempt to articulate what it might mean to "feel" Stanley Kubrick's films. In The Kubrick Facade, Jason Sperb examines the narrative ambiguity of the director's films—from the voice-over narration in early works, including the once forgotten Fear and Desire—to the blank faces of characters in his later ones. In doing so, Sperb shows how both devices struggle in vain to make sense of the chaos and sterility of the cinematic surface. All thirteen of Stanley Kubrick's feature-length films are discussed in chronological order, from the little-seen and long-neglected Fear and Desire to the posthumous release of Eyes Wide Shut. Sperb also discusses Kubrick's importance to Steven Spielberg's AI. While exploring all of Kubrick's films, the author concentrates in particular on The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. This is also the first book-length study that focuses considerable attention on Fear and Desire and its relevance to Kubrick's larger body of work. In this respect, The Kubrick Facade is one of the first truly comprehensive books on narrative in the maverick director's films. It is also the first book to integrate a discussion of AI, and the first to fully explore the importance of the consistent visual emphasis on blank, silent faces in his post-Lolita films.
Many of Stanley Kubrick's films are often interpreted as cold and ambiguous. Whether viewing Barry Lyndon, 2001, The Shining, or Eyes Wide Shut, there is a sense in which these films resist their own audiences, creating a distance from them. Though many note the coldness of Kubrick's films, a smaller number attempt to explore exactly how his body of work elicits this particular reaction. Fewer still attempt to articulate what it might mean to "feel" Stanley Kubrick's films. In The Kubrick Facade, Jason Sperb examines the narrative ambiguity of the director's films--from the voice-over narration in early works, including the once forgotten Fear and Desire--to the blank faces of characters in his later ones. In doing so, Sperb shows how both devices struggle in vain to make sense of the chaos and sterility of the cinematic surface. All thirteen of Stanley Kubrick's feature-length films are discussed in chronological order, from the little-seen and long-neglected Fear and Desire to the posthumous release of Eyes Wide Shut. Sperb also discusses Kubrick's importance to Steven Spielberg's AI. While exploring all of Kubrick's films, the author concentrates in particular on The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. This is also the first book-length study that focuses considerable attention on Fear and Desire and its relevance to Kubrick's larger body of work. In this respect, The Kubrick Facade is one of the first truly comprehensive books on narrative in the maverick director's films. It is also the first book to integrate a discussion of AI, and the first to fully explore the importance of the consistent visual emphasis on blank, silent faces in his post-Lolita films.
There have been two common assumptions about Stanley Kubrick: that his films portray human beings who are driven exclusively by aggression and greed, and that he pessimistically rejected meaning in a contingent, postmodern world. However, as Kubrick himself remarked, 'A work of art should be always exhilarating and never depressing, whatever its subject matter may be.' In this new interpretation of Kubrick's films, Julian Rice suggests that the director's work had a more positive outlook than most people credit him. And while other studies have recounted Kubrick's life and production histories, few have offered lucid explanations of specific sources and their influence on his films. In Kubrick's Hope, Rice explains how the theories of Freud and Jung took cinematic form, and also considers the significant impression left on the director's last six films by Robert Ardrey, Bruno Bettelheim, and Joseph Campbell. In addition to providing useful contexts, Rice offers close readings of the films, inviting readers to note details they may have missed and to interpret them in their own way. By refreshing their experience of the films and discarding postmodern clichZs, viewers may discover more optimistic themes in the director's works. Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continuing through A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, Rice illuminates Kubrick's thinking at the time he made each film. Throughout, Rice examines the compelling political, psychological, and spiritual issues the director raises. As this book contends, if these works are considered together and repeatedly re-viewed, Kubrick's films may help viewers to personally grow and collectively endure.
Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Stanley Kubrick's last six adaptations—2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur. In particular, he can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, author Elisa Pezzotta concludes that, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.
On Kubrick provides an illuminating critical account of the films of Stanley Kubrick, from his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), to the posthumously-produced A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001). The book offers provocative analysis of each of Kubrick's films, together with new information about their production histories and cultural contexts. Its ultimate aim is to provide a concise yet thorough discussion that will be useful as both an academic text and a trade publication. James Naremore argues that in several respects Kubrick was one of the cinema's last modernists: his taste and sensibility were shaped by the artistic culture of New York in the 1950s; he became a celebrated auteur who forged a distinctive style; he used art-cinema conventions in commercial productions; he challenged censorship regulations; and throughout his career he was preoccupied with one of the central themes of modernist art – the conflict between rationality and its ever-present shadow, the unconscious. War and science are key concerns in Kubrick's oeuvre, and his work has a hyper-masculine quality. Yet no director has more relentlessly emphasized the absurdity of combat, as in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the failure of scientific reasoning, as in 2001 (1968), and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality, as in Dr Strangelove (1964) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The book also argues that while Kubrick was a voracious intellectual and a life-long autodidact, the fascination of his work has less to do with the ideas it espouses than with the emotions it evokes. Often described as 'cool' or 'cold,' Kubrick is best understood as a skillful practitioner of what might be called the aesthetics of the grotesque; he employs extreme forms of caricature and black comedy to create disgusting, frightening yet also laughable images of the human body, creating a sense of unease that leaves viewers unsure of how to react.
Considered by critics to be Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Barry Lyndon has suffered from scholarly and popular neglect. Maria Pramaggiore argues that one key reason that this film remains unappreciated, even by Kubrick aficionados, is that its transnational and intermedial contexts have not been fully explored. Taking a novel approach, she looks at the film from a transnational perspective -- as a foreign production shot in Ireland and an adaptation of a British novel by an American director about an Irish subject. Pramaggiore argues that, in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick develops his richest philosophical mediation on cinema's capacity to mediate the real and foregrounds film's relationship to other technologies of visuality, including painting, photography, and digital media. By combining extensive research into the film's source novel, production and reception with systematic textual analysis and an engagement with several key issues in contemporary academic debate, this work promises not only to make a huge impact in the field of Kubrick studies, but also in 1970s filmmaking, cultural history and transnational film practice.
This volume features a set of thought-provoking and long overdue approaches to situating Stanley Kubrick’s films in contemporary debates around gender, race, and age—with a focus on women’s representations. Offering new historical and critical perspectives on Kubrick’s cinema, the book asks how his work should be viewed bearing in mind issues of gender equality, sexual harassment, and abuse. The authors tackle issues such as Kubrick’s at times questionable relationships with his actresses and former wives; the dynamics of power, misogyny, and miscegenation in his films; and auteur "apologism," among others. The selections delineate these complex contours of Kubrick’s work by drawing on archival sources, engaging in close readings of specific films, and exploring Kubrick through unorthodox venture points. With an interdisciplinary scope and social justice-centered focus, this book offers new perspectives on a well-established area of study. It will appeal to scholars and upper-level students of film studies, media studies, gender studies, and visual culture, as well as to fans of the director interested in revisiting his work from a new perspective.
One of the most visually compelling films ever made, Barry Lyndon can--and should, argues the author--be seen as Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece. This comprehensive analysis examines such topics as the unique way in which Kubrick photographed the film, Kubrick's subtle understanding of cinematic storytelling, the deliberate upturning of generic expectation, and the eclectic use of music. It also provides a more rigorous reading of the film from a diverse range of theoretical approaches: structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytical, Marxist and postcolonial readings.