ABSTRACT
The evidence for Stanley Kubrick’s importance and influence as a director of English-speaking cinema in the second half of the twentieth century lives in numerous pages in the scholarly and critical literature dedicated to the man and his craft, on fan web pages and in the blogosphere, and in perennial homages, parodies, references, and imitations in popular culture. Kubrick is famously preoccupied with man’s individual and collective self-destructive tendency. His films witness the spectacular unraveling of the best-laid plans, failsafe devices, robberies, computers with no record of error, and men who become perfect killing machines. Characters’ personalities are flattened out in favor of a focus on the social hierarchies and other systems that circumscribe them; workings of the military and issues of class difference recur across his oeuvre. Kubrick’s world is harsh, but often beautiful and not without hope. His visual language includes languid tracking shots, expansive pacing, meticulously crafted lighting and effects, and an array of striking frame compositions—the product of a photographer’s mind, and ready-made for iconic posters—that suggest his intensive care for the overall look of things. But counting and cataloging these attributes still does not add up to Kubrick. Most important in Kubrick is really what cannot be seen and what is not said—the deep substrata of human drama, moral fissure, and psychology. He seems to want us to be uncomfortable enough that we long remember and mull over his cinematic confrontations with difficult themes and problematic characters.
