About the Book
Taking at its starting point the idea that Kubrick's cinema has constituted an intellectual, cerebral, and philosophical maze in which many filmmakers (as well as thinkers and a substantial fringe of the general public) have gotten lost at one point or another, this collection looks at the legacy of Kubrick's films in the 21st century.
The main avenues investigated are as follows: a look at Kubrick's influence on his most illustrious followers (Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, and Lars von Trier, to name a few); Kubrick in critical reception; Kubrick in stylistic (camera movements, set designs, music), thematic (artificial intelligence, new frontiers- large and small), aesthetic (the question of genre, pastiche, stereoscopy) and political terms (paranoia, democracy and secret societies, conspiracy theories).
The contributions coalesce around the concept of a Kubrickian substrate, rich and complex, which permeates our Western cultural landscape very much to this day, informing and sometimes announcing/reflecting it in twisted ways, 21 years after the director's death.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: 1999–2019, and Beyond: A Post-Kubrickian Odyssey (Jeremi Szaniawski, UMass Amherst, USA)
1. Stanley Kubrick's Prototypes: the Author as World-Maker (Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
2. “Kubrick's Cube”: Stanley Kubrick, Judaism and his Jewish Heirs (Nathan Abrams, Bangor University, UK)
3. Kubrick's Inheritors: Aesthetics, Independence, and Philosophy in the Films of Joel and Ethan Coen (Rodney F Hill, Hofstra University, USA)
4. Blurring the Lines between Victim and Perpetrator: Yorgos Lanthimos and Stanley Kubrick's legacy (Pierre Simon Gutman, ESRA, France)
5. Glimpses of Eternity: Stanley Kubrick's Time Machines (Jeremi Szaniawski, UMass Amherst, USA)
6. Kubrickian Dread: Echoes of 2001 and The Shining in Works by Jonathan Glazer, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch (Rick Warner, UNC Chapel Hill, USA)
7. Excessive and Incomplete: Kubrick's Turing (Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University, USA)
8. Thus Spoke Kubrick: “Guide Pieces,” Modes of Citation and the Rise of the Temp Track (Adrian Daub, Stanford University, USA)
9. Fade to Crude: Petro-Horror and Kubrick's The Shining (Pansy Duncan, Massey University, New Zealand)
10. The Anxiety of Interpretation: The Shining, Room 237I, and Film Criticism (Daniel Fairfax, Frankfurt am Main University, Germany)
11. Political Opacity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (John Pitseys, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, France)
12. Coping with the Unknown in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar (Mircea Deaca, University of Bucarest, Romania)
13. Biopolitical Abjection and Sexuation: Stanley Kubrick's Political Films (Seung-hoon Jeong, NYU Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
14. Kubrick at the Museum: Post-cinematic Conditions, Limitations, and Possibilities (Jihoon Kim, Chung-Ang University, South Korea)
15. The Dead Kitten: Sacrifice in Barry Lyndon (Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University, USA)
Appendix: Interview with Gaspar Noé (Pip Chodorov, Dong-Guk University, South Korea)
Index
About the Author :
Jeremi Szaniawski is Assistant Professor of comparative literature and film studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. He is the editor of Directory of World Cinema: Belgium and the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox (both 2014), as well as the translator, into French, of Thomas Elsaesser's and Malte Hagener's Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2011) and Alexander Sokurov's V tsentre okeana (2015).
Review :
[T]reads new ground in Kubrick-ademia.
Here is a collection of lambently written and fascinating explorations of an important filmmaker's scintillating career. Admirers and students will rightfully cherish After Kubrick for its unprecedented depth, its smart variety of approaches, and the intense light it shines on films that have become classics.
These fascinating, often ingenious, and always insightful essays explore the complex legacy of one of the great artists of the 20th century.
Never sentimental, fawning, or uncritical, this collection tackles the complex subject of the legacy of Kubrick's films with the most promiscuous possible sense of aesthetic influence. Kubrick, or, rather, 'Kubrick,' thereby becomes a machine, a form, a process, a method, a medium, an excuse, a vibrant philosophical conceit, enabling the revisiting of some of the most pressing contemporary debates in the study of representation-the aesthetic status of affect; the post- and trans-human relation to technology and artificial intelligence; environmental catastrophe and the machinery of war; in addition to film-philosophical concerns with cinematic time; the grotesque and violent; and the status of aesthetic form itself. Grounding its far-reaching considerations in exemplary close readings, and with a particularly rich editorial introduction, After Kubrick thereby brings out the etymological debt of the word 'influence' itself: from the Latin influere, to flow into, an undetermined streaming of energy, fluid, or even unobservable forces, demonstrating that aesthetic influence is the unpredictable and impersonal capacity to produce new and surprising effects.
After Kubrick represents an infusion of rich blood into Kubrick studies and contemporary cinema studies. Contributing authors are among the finest in those fields, but this volume is not a collection of “the usual Kubrick suspects”: it extends much further than that in its inclusiveness and in its ambitious scope to cut new pathways back into Kubrick's work and forward into emergent work.
