ABSTRACT
Although not immediately noticeable or obvious in his films, the Jewishness of Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) was indelibly inscribed, forming the bedrock of his filmmaking, what George Steiner referred to as “the pride and the burden of the Jewish tradition” (1961: 4). As Paula Hyman observed, “Even secularized Jews were likely to retain a strong ethnic Jewish identification, generally internally and reinforced from without” (1995: 91). Geoffrey Cocks put it thus, “there in fact was – and is – always one Jew at the center of every Kubrick film. The one behind the camera: Stanley Kubrick” (2004: 32). Using Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining (1980), as the author’s case study, in this chapter he will outline a midrashic approach to film studies that originated both before and beyond the Euro-American/Western/Eurocentric traditions in order to allow space for non-Western influences, experiences, and modes of thinking and theorizing Western film.
