Kubrick's Total Cinema: Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Whatever people think about Kubrick's work, most would agree that there is something distinctive, even unique, about the films he made: a coolness, an intellectual clarity, a critical edginess, and finally an intractable ambiguity. In an attempt to isolate the Kubrick difference, this book treats Kubrick's films to a conceptual and formal analysis rather than a biographical and chronological survey. As Kubrick's cinema moves between the possibilities of human transcendence dramatized in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the dismal limitations of human nature exhibited in A Clockwork Orange, the filmmaker's style "de-realizes" cinematic realism while, paradoxically, achieving an unprecedented frankness of vision and documentary and technical richness. The result is a kind of vertigo: the audience is made aware of both the de-realized and the realized nature of cinema. As opposed to the usual studies providing a summary and commentary of individual films, this will be the first to provide an analysis of the "elements" of Kubrick's total cinema.

Reviews

Philip Kuberski's review of Kubrick's films, Kubrick's Total Cinema, masterfully links the grandest themes of those films to the most intimate of physical details. He shows us Kubrick as the great poet of cinema who shapes his medium to take his viewers ever-deeper into the filmic event of sound, image, and music. In Kubrick we encounter love, war, technology and transcendence in a way that awakens the mind, something Kuberski calls cinematic thought. Deeply informed by a knowledge of film--as art and as historyas well as by a rich philosophical and literary past that Kubrick drew upon, Kuberski gives the films a resonance that is both enlightening and moving. He drew me back into Kubrick, revealing Kubrick's talent for realizing the mysterious in human life through the human moment. His descriptions of eating scenes alone make me want to re-watch the films. This book, couched in Kuberski's lucid prose, will please the fan of Kubrick's films, reward the scholar, and seduce the skeptic. -- Dennis A Foster, D.D. Frensley Professor of English, Southern Methodist University
Kubrick's Total Cinema by Philip Kuberski belongs to a vanishingly small number of books that treat the films of Stanley Kubrick with the delicate combination of critical virtues they demand and deserve: a thorough knowledge of the medium of film, a penetrating insight into the aesthetic and philosophical perspectives informing Kubrick's choices, a capacious imagination, and discerning taste. For the first time, Kubrick's cinema is understood in ways that fully acknowledge the cognitive, metaphysical, and spiritual themes that are pertinent to his art as well as the dazzling visual achievements for which the films are justly famous. Kuberski makes a persuasive case for Kubrick not only as an important filmmaker but as one of the great artists of the twentieth century - one who addressed the central aesthetic and moral issues of modernity in a manner that was both artistically unimpeachable and able to reach a popular audience. Kubrick's Total Cinema will find avid readers among those coming to the filmmaker for the first time as well as professionals in critical theory, film studies, and the humanities generally. -- Frederick M. Dolan, Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, Professor of Humanities, California College of the Arts
Kuberski attempts what would seem to be the impossible - refute standard views of Stanley Kubrick, then propose an entirely new view - and he succeeds[.]He treats film as a means of thinking, a notion that works well for the cerebral Kubrick. Philosophical applications range from Kant to Kristeva, dipping into the Jungian archetype at times. The result is a bold reading that shifts the paradigm on Kubrick's work. Summing Up: Essential. -- M.J. Emery, Cottey College * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Philip Kuberski is Professor of English at Wake Forest University and the author of three books and a number of essays on modern literature and its relations to science, technology, and mythology.