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Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's
Maze (2000).
by Thomas Allen Nelson.
Paperback.
ISBN-13: 978-0253213907
Stanley Kubrick ranks among the
most important American film makers of his generation, but his work is often
misunderstood because it is widely diverse in subject matter and seems to lack
thematic and tonal consistency. Thomas Nelson's perceptive and comprehensive
study of Kubrick rescues him from the hostility of auteurist critics and
discovers the roots of a Kubrickian aesthetic, which Nelson defines as the
"aesthetics of contingency." After analyzing how this aesthetic
develops and manifests itself in the early works, Nelson devotes individual
chapters to Lolita, Dr. Stangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange,
Barry Lyndon, and The Shining. For this expanded edition, Nelson has added
chapters on Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, and, in the wake of the
director's death, reconsidered his body of work as a whole. By placing Kubrick
in a historical and theoretical context, this study is a reliable guide into –
and out of – Stanley Kubrick's cinematic maze.
