James Naremore's "On Kubrick"

Have anybody seen this book yet? ~ Genevieve

Book Description from Amazon.com (on preorder):
On Kubrick is a critical study of Stanley Kubrick's career, beginning
with his earliest feature, Fear and Desire (1953), and ending with his
posthumous production of A.I., Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Organized in six parts ("The Taste Machine," "Young Kubrick,"
"Kubrick, Harris, Douglas," "Stanley Kubrick Presents," "Late
Kubrick," and "Epilogue"), it 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.
The book 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 often the
subjects of his films, and his work has a hyper-masculine quality; yet
no director has more relentlessly emphasized the absurdity of combat,
the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in
masculine sexuality. The book also argues that while Kubrick was a
voracious intellectual and a lifelong 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. No less than Diane Arbus (who was his
contemporary), he makes his viewers uneasy, unsure how to react either
emotionally or politically.

About the Author
James Naremore is Emeritus Chancellors' Professor of Communication,
Culture and English, Indiana University. Previous publications include
More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (University of California
Press, 1998).

Boaz wrote: "deliberately confusing the animate
with the inanimate."

And this is, at its purest, the very definition of the Gothic (of
which the grotesque, the weird, and the uncanny are features),
which, from its beginnings, poses the challenge that it might no
longer be possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate,
the organic from the inorganic, and where to have some notion of
agency or an independent 'free will' is not necessarily to be alive
(consider, for instance, how 2001's HAL appears to have more actual
foreboding presence than any of the human characters). Apart from its
association with architecture, much of 18th and 19th century
literature is unimaginable without it (Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker, Poe,
Goethe, Byron, Jane Austen, the Bronte's, and countless others [even
Shakespeare: the first use of the word 'weird' in the English language
was in Macbeth). Indeed, its 20th century forms, from Expressionism to
the horror novel or film, to cybernetics and cyberpunk, are
ubiquitous. Needless to say, films like The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut
are distinctly gothic meditations, and then there's AI.


On Jul 17, 6:54 pm, wrote:


>
> I would also like to read about the book's argument "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."
> This is something that writers barely mention in biographies or
> critical studies.

Perhaps the notion that he was "one of the cinema's last modernists"
has not received adequate consideration, but it is certainly the case
that many critical studies of his work assume that he was indeed a
modernist (works by Michel Ciment, Thomas Allen Nelson, many of the
articles at The Kubrick Site, etc). In fact, the whole post-WWII
movement in film (as in other areas of the arts) was distinctly
modernist in the sense that many of the film-makes of that generation
were characterised as having a consistent set of themes and concerns
(an 'artistic vision', a focus on 'big ideas', the absence today of
which Boaz is referring to in another thread). This movement blossomed
during the period from the late-1950s to the mid-to-late-1970s: in the
US, Kubrick, Hitchcock, and so on, up to the early Scorsese's and
Coppola's; in Britain, the social realist turn; in France, Godard,
Truffaut, Antonioni, Bresson, Resnais etc; in Russia, Tarkovsky etc;
in Italy, Fellini, Visconti; in Japan, Kurosawa, Ozu, Oshima etc; in
Poland, Polansky, Waida, up to Kieslowski; in Germany, Fassbinder,
Herzog, Wenders; and so on. So yes, directors like Kieslowski and
Kubrick, both dying within a few years of each other in the
late-1990s, were in many ways among the last of the great post-War
modernist film-makers. Most of today's directors, alas, have embraced
the postmodern turn in that they exemplify, rather than critique, the
postmodern condition: depthlessness, willful emptiness, pastiche,
ahistoricism, satire that fails to satirise, endless references and
allusions ('homages') producing the illusion of being 'Deep', no
context, no comment, no authorship, no serious engagement with ideas
or affects, manipulative melodramatic hysteria, narcissism, a cynical
and conformist fatalism, and so forth. The vast majority of films [big
budget commercial, and much of so-called 'indy' movies] today are so
indistinguishable, aesthetically, philosophically, politically,
narratively, they could really be indifferently made by anyone. This
is not to say that there are no good, challenging films being made,
but with the present rigid, vertically integrated industrial structure
of the film industry and the commercial commodification of film
product, such films hardly even register on the media radars ...