Stanley Kubrick's history lessons: a great deal of reading, from a variety of unusual perspectives, into the life and work of the late great filmmaker.

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Although Stanley Kubrick was as obsessed with history as he was with filmmaking, the extent and importance of this fact has rarely been the central focus of those who write about his work. The tasks of researching a historical subject and period are generally delegated to specialists in the various aspects of film production. Few directors have matched Kubrick's personal investment and time consumed on historical investigation or the amount of preparatory reading he did before embarking on a project; the entire room of his library reportedly devoted to scholarship on Napoleon for a film he never made is only the most legendary example. Although scholarship on Kubrick himself does not quite compare, it continues to grow and now includes a Web site (www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0057/html), which reproduces valuable primary documents from the Kubrick files. But as the editors of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History assert, "The sea of literature on Kubrick is vast and, like any sea, has its depths and its shallows."

In the wake of that sea, this anthology, like other books under review, examines Kubrick's work from perspectives other than cinematic. And so we have The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus: Film and History, and "new essays" on 2001. All four anthologies have worthy material, although they do not entirely escape the "shallows." And despite the claim of the editors of Depth of Field that the collection is "unprecedented," several pieces were published in earlier versigns. Among these are Tim Krieder's smart reading of Eyes Wide Shut and Mark Crispin Miller's engaging piece on 2001. Krieder draws attention to the film's critique of class, stressing its sociological rather than its psychological dimension. He lambasts those "critical blueballs" (citing David Denby and Michiko Kakutani) who bemoaned the lack of erotic charge in the film's orgy sequence and thus missed the point: that its focus on death, artificiality, and emptiness mirrors the people and society in the film. If I have any reservation about Miller's essay, it is that he denies us the same delicious blow-by-blow account of the film's second half that he provides of its first. He sees 2001 as Kubrick's "most subversive film," belonging to what he calls a "period of great awakening" in American culture--the Vietnam era of the late 1960s and early 1970s--when other genre revisionists like Altman, Coppola, and Peckinpah were also deconstructing myths. Though made later, Full Metal Jacket (1987) continued on this path, as demonstrated by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi's analysis of the film as a text on "masculinity in the making."

The most provocative essay in the collection is Geoffrey Cocks's "Death by Typewriter: Stanley Kubrick, the Holocaust, and The Shining," which, in brief, suggests that Kubrick was so deeply affected by the Holocaust and his Jewish ancestry that he could not deal directly with either, a conclusion further suggested by the abandoning of "Aryan Papers," which was to be an adaptation of Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies. Cocks underestimates the more immediate reason Kubrick did not pursue the project, which had to do with bad timing, a factor that also doomed the Napoleon project and affected the box office of Full Metal Jacket. In all three cases, another big, though not necessarily better, production got there first: Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), in the case of "Aryan Papers"; Waterloo (1971), a bloated epic directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, in the case of "Napoleon"; and Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), released the year before Jacket. In a short essay on the genesis of "Aryan Papers" in the SKA book, Jan Harlan, Kubrick's assistant and brother-in-law, says it would have been "unthinkable to do this film in the UK," and that Kubrick would have had to go abroad, something he was loath to do. Since Harlan does not expound, one might ask: if Kubrick had reproduced a Vietnamese city in an English studio and transplanted palm trees for Full Metal Jacket, why did "Aryan Papers" present more formidable obstacles? An ironic footnote to all this is that an installation on the unmade film will run at the British Film Institute from February 13th to April 19th, 2009, comprising stills taken of the actress Johanna ter Steege who was to have had the lead role, cross cut with an interview with her conducted by Jane and Louise Wilson, the creators of the installation.

Cocks's hypothesis also underestimates Kubrick's perfectionism, which is to say the daunting challenge a film about the Holocaust would have been to his impeccable sense of esthetics. According to Harlan, novelist Isaac B. Singer, though flattered by Kubrick's request for an original screenplay on the subject, responded, "I don't know the first thing about it." That Kubrick immediately understood this reaction suggests that like many who have thought deeply about the events, he felt that any attempt to narrate or represent them was inherently doomed. Perhaps he shared the sentiments of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose book Remnants of Auschwitz (Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999) attests to the impossibility of "bearing witness" to what was essentially beyond the pale of human experience and thus incomprehensible. For Agamben, even the word "holocaust" should be eschewed because its ancient associations with religious rituals and sacrifices tends to give an obscenely inappropriate transcendent meaning to what took place in the concentration camps.

According to Cocks, Kubrick insinuated his preoccupations with the subject into his other films, most emphatically The Shining (1980). He cites dozens of details of the significance of numbers, colors, mise-en-scene, and music selections in the film that suggest Kubrick's long preoccupation--conscious and unconscious--with the subject, an assertion he feels is confirmed by Kubrick's absorption in 1975 with Raul Hilberg's major study, The Destruction of the European Jews (first published in 1961; revised in 1985), a book he encouraged Harlan to read. Many of Cocks's connections are compelling: that the Overlook Hotel is built on Indian burial grounds, evoking ethnic cleansing of a different people; that the music of both Bartok and Penderecki links the film's darker themes of murder and violence to the rise of Nazism that affected both composers. For example, the letter's "Awakening of Jacob" is heard over images of Danny's vision of the elevator gushing blood and of his father's dream of murdering his family, thus linking Jack Torrance with Kubrick's father Jacob and the biblical figure Jacob, "renamed Israel ... whose sons are the ancestors of the twelve tribes."

The essay is drawn from Cocks's book, The Wolf at the Door, a quasi-psycho-biographical look at Kubrick from a very distinct angle, which despite some reservations, I think those interested in Kubrick should read. Cocks engages in lengthy accounts of Kubrick's background, his nonreligious Jewish parents and their Galician ancestors, some of whom were victims of the Holocaust. He speculates on the movies young Stanley would have seen at local theaters in the Bronx in the late 1930s and in the 1940s, and on the literature courses he may have taken at Columbia University. He traces his fascination with German culture before and after his marriage to Christiane Harlan, who he met while making Paths of Glory (1956) and whose uncle, Veidt Harlan, was a director (Jud Suss) under the Nazi regime, whom Kubrick met in 1957 and wanted to make a film about. Many readers will object that while Cocks lays out his material in detail, the bearing it had on the mindset of the young Kubrick is mere conjecture. For example, he not only assumes that Kubrick saw the movies in his neighborhood but that they had a lasting impact on his thinking about such things as war and violence. Was Kubrick's contract with Warner Bros. for his last five films unconsciously motivated by the fact that Warners was the lone Hollywood studio to risk anti-Nazi subject matter in the 1930s? I don't find such connections unreasonable, but I understand those who might.

Still, the volume and weight of the allusions Cocks amasses nearly undermine his point. Besides biographical data, he cites at length literary and film influences, from writers Hoffmann, Kafka, Conrad, Crane, and Mann, to filmmakers Lang, yon Stroheim, Ophuls, Hitchcock, and Bunuel. He devotes pages to Crane's "The Blue Hotel" and Mann's The Magic Mountain, explicating the significance of hotels in literature and film that may have affected Kubrick's conception of the Overlook in The Shining. Dozens of pages are devoted to the significance of numbers, especially the number seven and its obvious and hidden multiples. In the end, the reader may feel too dazed by overkill to separate Cocks's obsession with his thesis from the genuine insights his book offers.

Given the ambition of Kubrick's films, it is not surprising that The Shining should have other things on its mind. Its powerful deconstruction of the horror genre via its enactment of the Oedipal drama and its meditations on the American family, the media, consumer culture, and patriarchal violence are nothing to sneeze at. The question is whether the film's associations reveal Kubrick's obsession with the Holocaust, in particular, or simply the palimpsest of biographical, cultural, cinematic, and historical layers of his mind, irrespective of narrative subject. Nevertheless, that Cocks tries to read Kubrick's mind without diminishing his formidable artistic achievements is not unimpressive.

No film of Kubrick's has elicited as much response as 2001; all the more surprising, then, to find so many thoughtful new reflections on its meanings and importance in Robert Kolker's anthology. R. Barton Palmer surveys the mainstream press's dismissal of the film in 1968, but concludes with an appreciation of Annette Michelson's early (1969) and brilliant analysis (reprinted in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. Stephanie Schwam, New York: Modern Library, 2000). Michelson celebrated the film's ambiguity, embodied by the monolith, as a challenge to cognition and cinematic perception, an insight fully vindicated by the probing ruminations in this new volume.

Barry Keith Grant's essay is a fascinating, at times unnerving scrutiny of gender issues raised by the film's departure from conventional sci-fi and its ironizing of the imagery associated with the genre. For him, the "obstacle" to evolution is "phallic masculinity," the transcending of which "would restore ... a sense of wonder that modern man has forgotten in embracing a masculine quest for scientific mastery." Marcia Landy traces the film's "configurations of the brain--animal, human, computer, cinematographic" to arrive at a conclusion that echoes Michelson: the film offers "the spectator a version of cinematography as an instrument for reflecting on consciousness."

She provides a lively description of HAL as central character, whose quirky behavior suggests that he is "not a flawless expression of a new and higher form of thinking but a reminder of humans' evolutionary limitations in relation to thinking and action." HAL is the main subject of Michael Mateas's contribution, a model of clarity and exposition, which demonstrates that HAL was not only an authentic example of "classical AI" as conceived by scientists at the time but an indication of where research would go.

George Toles's essay is as scholarly as it is a stirring meditation on Kubrick's art. While he acknowledges that 2001 is "unusually receptive to drastically conflicting emotional and intellectual responses," a film in which "everything ... wishes to be disclosed and veiled at the same time," he does a fine job of explicating its kinship with the fairy tale. "Embarked on a journey through a dark wood," the astronauts are like "untried youths who set off for a distant kingdom to perform impossible tasks and solve daunting riddles." Toles eschews the optimistic reading of the ending many take for granted, suggesting that the images of the star-child are ambiguous, "Janus-faced." In the juxtaposition of the two shots of this figure, he sees a "movement from infant softness to a sense of command," in which the star-child's gaze is both "sentient and (possibly) secretive." He writes of the star-child's unique birth as "cleansed of obligation to anything that preceded ... no parents with whom to contend," thus no psychology. It "seems programmed with a will to power ... the greatest housecleaner of consciousness: no more clutter, vacillation, and self-division ... not, at any level, an image that suggests dependence, or the need for an apprenticeship in thought and feeling."

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As far as I know, this is the closest any writer has come, avowedly or not, to equating the transcendent star-child with the filmmaker himself, whose laments over the inherent weakness of human nature and whose determination to control every aspect of his work reflect fantasies of rebirth at a higher level of existence. Indeed, one can read Kubrick's speculations about our not being alone in the universe as a wish to believe that a greater, more benign intelligence is at work somewhere.

We should remember that 2001 is no longer a film about the future, but about the past--the 1960s, in fact--the Zeitgeist of which (flower children, LSD trips) would have made it unlikely for most viewers--or mainstream critics--to discern dubiety in the star-child's gaze. Pauline Kael cited this very appeal to criticize the film. What we have learned since then about Kubrick's overall view of the world makes us question such one-dimensional sentiments. And yet, as its title declares, Julian Rice's Kubrick's Hope sees more optimism than despair in Kubrick's work and bases its premise on the ending of 2001. Whereas Toles discerns ambiguity in the gaze of the star-child, Rice sees positive replays of it in Danny's ability to "shine" (The Shining), Joker's embrace of duality (Full Metal Jacket), and Alice's reconciliation of blindness and insight, of marital naivete and the readjustment that only comes after disillusionment. Rice's thesis eschews consideration of the films before 2001 although some of them (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita) get pulled in at times to make a point. Nevertheless, centering his study on a feature that other scholars judge, at best, to be one aspect of Kubrick's thinking, inseparable from his skepticism, is a risky move, so that despite some terrifically detailed and original readings of the films, Rice's determination to conclude in most cases on a note of hope is often strained.

He does an excellent job differentiating the Marines in Full Metal Jacket along the lines of the duality theme, and makes a convincing case for the relevance of the personality and behavior of Lt. William Calley--the U.S. Marine tried for slaughtering 347 unarmed civilians in a Vietnam village, which came to be known as the My Lai massacre--to the conception of characters in the film. Even the relatively decent Cowboy, when asked by a newsman if America belongs in Vietnam, responds, as did Calley, that he certainly belongs. Rice is especially sensitive to parallels between the Marines' attitudes toward "nonwhite enemies" and historic American attitudes toward Native Americans, a subject on which he has published three books.

But the closer Rice comes to the sniper finale and its effects on Joker, the more he feels compelled to reach beyond the rich associations and allusions he has made to icons of popular culture in the mise-en-scene, and rely on Jung and works of Eastern mysticism to argue that since Joker's first kill is, in effect, a mercy killing requested by the victim herself, he has survived with his humanity intact in a "world of shit" without surrendering to the death-giving nihilism of fellow Marine Animal Mother. It's difficult to see how survival in a world so described is remotely related to the transcendent gaze of the star-child. Nor is it easy to see Joker and Mice (in Eyes Wide Shut) as "extraordinary individuals who are clearly apart from 'the herd.'" Rice contrasts them to Alex de Large (A Clockwork Orange) and Barry Lyndon who manifest "creative possibilities" but in the end are stuck in the past along with Jack Torrance (The Shining).

In light of such exceptions, one comes to feel that "hope" is not the operative word in Kubrick's world view. Consider the end of Clockwork, which has Alex triumphing over the authoritarian banalities of bourgeois institutions. It was Kubrick's genius to disturb us by posing two unacceptable options and make us consider the lesser evil, not to have us cheer at the victory of a thug. Rather than hope as a primary theme, then, it seems that Ku brick's films give us an unvarnished view of the worst in human nature, but that he remained unwilling to concede the ground to a wholly dystopian perspective. Is that a stance of hope or a realistic assessment of the inherently imperfect human condition?

One aspect of Rice's book exemplifies a troubling trend in film studies. From all the evidence, it appears that he has used DVDs, exclusively, as the basis for his observations and analyses. Nowhere does he claim the contrary, nor does he seem to think it an issue. While this may be the inevitable course for future film scholarship, we are not yet at the point where it is the only course, and it is certainly not the preferred one. It is especially telling, in his chapter on Eyes Wide Shut, which is full of wonderfully observed details, that Rice mildly chides film scholars who have not "delved more deeply into Kubrick's use of color ... since he was as much a cinematographer as a director."

Indeed, he was. And a scholar who feels strongly about this and devotes as much space as Rice does to the use of color in Kubrick's films should not have relied exclusively on DVDs, however excellent they may be, any more than an art historian analyzing color in Caravaggio should depend on reproductions in books. It's not a matter of misidentifying a primary color, but of the impossibility of registering the saturation of any color, its tonal quality and density, not to mention the affect it produces through the sheer size of the image when projected on a big screen illumined by the lamp of a projector. These qualities do not transfer to any alternative technology--at least, not yet. The blood that pours from the elevator in The Shining is neither as vivid nor as frightening as it is on the big screen. The blues in Eyes Wide Shut, to which Rice devotes loving attention, are nowhere near as cool or distancing as they were the nine times I saw the movie in a theater. Let's not even talk about the black immensities of outer space or the creamy interiors and orange astronaut suits in 2001, or the enveloping sonic environment that a theater provides. These are not just bonus items: they alter the meaning of the films.

DVDs are an indispensable tool, and as Rice and others demonstrate, citing the exact location on a DVD of a shot discussed is invaluable. But the originals, though not easily accessible, are still available, and to examine a filmmaker of Kubrick's ambitions, it is equally indispensable that a scholar make every effort to track down and see the work as it was meant to be seen as many times as possible. It is no coincidence, I think, that Rice speaks at length about color while giving scant attention to Kubrick's astonishing use of tracking shots and zooms since the latter simply cannot he fully experienced or appreciated except when projected in 35mm or 70mm. Although Kubrick was far too practical to ignore how alternative technologies would change the way most people would see his films, the fact remains that he worked in a medium whose scale and gauges were exploited precisely because they accommodated his larger-than-life visions and outsized imagination.

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I wish Michel Chion's book on Eyes Wide Shut were as thrilling as his study of 2001. A series of musings aimed not to constitute an argument, it is guided by his desire to avoid "too closed an interpretation." He advises the critic to "watch [a film] several times with no precise intentions ... [to] abandon any simplified Overall judgment, along with everything we already know about the director through his previous films and media presence." Is he kidding? I'm all for going back to the Garden of Eden and starting over, but this flies in the face of everything we know about cultural assimilation, ideological assumptions, and plain old-fashioned memory.

Chion floats through the film, as if riding on one of Kubrick's elegant tracking shots, commenting on this or that, reluctant to link things together toward a conclusive reading. This doesn't stop him from proposing a number of doozies, the most outlandish being his fanciful assertion that the couple going home to "fuck" at the end of the movie will conceive the star-child--a male, yet--of 2001. Some of his intuitions are dazzling, as when he links Bill's roamings through the night with "the eternal story of Ulysses who, still far from home before his return to Penelope and the marital house, is 'taken in hand' by a series of more or less protective, tempting, or maternal women (Calypso, Nausicaa, and the goddess Athene), who are all echoes of his wife." That he leaves such associations hovering over the film and in our minds without pursuing them seems exactly his intention. His sentimental reading of the ending is unpersuasive, certainly at odds with both Tim Krieder's critique and that of Pat Gehrke and G.L. Ercolini in the Cocks anthology who conclude that Bill and Alice "are caricatures of the rote behavior of day-to-day life ... no less ... than Alex [in Clockwork] is a caricature of unruly youth."

Jerold Abrams's anthology belongs to a series of books of dubious character and purpose, primarily because, as its collection of varied claims would seem to testify, it is highly unlikely that there is such a thing as "the philosophy" of any filmmaker. To argue a filmmaker's consistent perspective on life, which is the aim of any good auteurist study, is not equivalent to establishing a philosophical posture, except in the loosest sense, even if the proponent is trained in philosophy. Many essays in the book seize upon a concept and apply it to a film, one writer so bent on proving that Dr. Strangelove illustrates Camus's notion of the absurd that you'd never guess the movie is a hysterically funny satire.

The best contributions, including Abrams's on Lolita and 2001, avoid such schematic reduction. R. Barton Palmer's "The Shining and Anti-Nostalgia," which should be read in conjunction with Geoffrey Cocks's approach, concludes that Jack Torrance is "the perfect image of the failing artist in postmodernity: trapped between times, unable to find within or without anything worth saying." And if I correctly understand Steven Sanders's examination of The Killing, the film, in failing, in his judgment, to coherently convey Kubrick's "ideas about fate, mortality, and meaningful life," amounts to saying that Kubrick was not a philosopher. Exactly.

Despite efforts to contextualize Kubrick, none of the authors of these books and essays questions his status as an auteur, something academic film criticism of twenty years ago might have done. Even Grant's and Willoquet-Maricondi's arguments on gender (in Kolker and Cocks et al., respectively) assume Kubrick to be far more sensitive to this question than was once alleged. Cocks's psychoanalytic scrutiny of Kubrick's work in light of cultural phenomena, far from demystifying his godlike posture, confirms his genius for being able to integrate personal obsessions with cultural and historical influences.

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In this context, it is a disappointment to report that James Naremore's On Kubrick is not the strong addition to the body of scholarship one anticipated in light of the author's previous work. Naremore, as always, is exceedingly generous, citing the insights and contributions of others, as well as sources on production circumstances, especially in respect to the early work. As his book on acting would suggest, he is at his best parsing the fine points and subtleties of performances. Few might claim that Sterling Hayden, in Dr. Strangelove, dominates his scenes with the inimitable Peter Sellers, but as soon as I read it, I felt it was true. Ditto, Naremore's characterization of "Sellers' improvisatory skills [in the chapter on Lolita], which had the effect of a jazz musician's rifting on a basic melody." He notes how Shelley Winters's film persona affected one's perception of her in Lolita, but appreciates "her ability to appear both annoying and touching." James Mason's "blend of refinement, ineptitude, and romantic agony" lets us see both "the dark shadow of Humbert's obsession and his ignorance of a modernist world." Few film scholars are as nuanced in their appreciation of actors in Kubrick's work.

The book is strongest on the early period where Naremore compares the "look" and editing of the films to Hollywood style, offers a close reading of Fear and Desire, and compares the films to contemporary generic examples. But his treatment of the later work is unsatisfying, as if he were reluctant to go beyond the insights of others. His introduction suggests that an "esthetics of the grotesque" is at work in the films, but he fails to develop this idea in a substantive way throughout the text, in part perhaps because the concept is overwrought, only minimally applicable and at odds with the sheer gorgeousness of Kubrick's films. Discussions of 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut pale compared to the exciting work already discussed, as do, unfortunately, the poorly reproduced frame enlargements that accompany each chapter. On occasion there are whopping errors--e.g., citing Wagner (instead of Richard Strauss) as the composer of the Thus Spake Zarathustra theme that opens and closes 2001; referring to critic Alexander Walker as Andrew. Phraseology often misleads, as when he refers to A.I. as "appear ling] posthumously under the direction of Steven Spielberg." Posthumously? He surely cannot mean that Kubrick's screenplay is synonymous with Spielberg's movie. As every writer who worked with Kubrick would, begrudgingly, attest, his screenplays tell us very little about the finished film. And all evidence confirms that Kubrick was congenitally incapable of resorting to the narrative and visual cliches and sentimentality that typify Spielberg.

Since we have all shed tears on far more mundane movies, it would be churlish to fault Naremore's affection for A.I., to which he devotes twenty-two pages. But this is questionable in a book devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick, especially since there is nary a paragraph on Spartacus, which Naremore dismisses, "like most other commentators," on the grounds that Kubrick disowned it. But if he wants to align himself with Kubrick's choices, how then justify extended analysis of Fear and Desire, a film Kubrick preferred left ignored? It would seem that a scholar embarked on yet another auteurist study of Kubrick should go beyond other commentators.

Spartacus warrants closer attention not because it is a major work, but because it was an excellent testing ground of the relationship between Hollywood, with its big budgets and stars, and its most celebrated maverick filmmaker. If Kubrick had more control over his work after Spartacus than any other commercial American filmmaker in history, a careful study of exactly what transpired on the set and a close visual analysis of the film in relation to those before and after would be revealing. This would require formidable research, tracking down memos, letters, and production notes, many of which may no longer exist, in order to demonstrate just what went on day by day and how Kubrick made decisions, however contentiously.

A sense of that investigation can be glimpsed in the material on Spartacus provided in Part 2 of The Stanley Kubrick Archives. Incidentally, the film is also represented by forty frame reproductions in the book's lavishly illustrated Part 1, whereas the only images relating to Fear and Desire accompany Gene Phillips's essay on the early work in Part 2. Amidst the posters, on-the-set photos, and sample pages of the heavily-edited script of Spartacus, there is a shot of Kubrick at the camera with Russell Metty, the cinematographer who was frustrated by Kubrick's efforts to direct the shooting. There is also a shot of Kubrick in the cutting room where, "my talented and patient film editor Bob Lawrence slaved seven days a week with me for about six months." Kubrick may have disowned the movie but such evidence suggests that his desire to control everything might have made him underestimate his contributions to the final look and structure of this film.

It is more than ironic, then, that among the most gratifying books in the recent crop is one devoted entirely to Spartacus. Admittedly, it is not exclusively about Kubrick's film, but, as its title, Spartacus: Film and History, exclaims, about the historical Spartacus. It is edited by Martin Winkler who has a record of assembling well-researched essays, mostly by Classics scholars, on spectacles with historical ambitions--or, pretensions, depending on one's point of view. Like his volumes on Gladiator and Troy, this one has fascinating information and impassioned arguments. It opens with Duncan Cooper's superbly researched, evenhanded account of the production history of Kubrick's film, its combative executive and artistic negotiations, the disputes over the writing and rewritings of the screenplay, and the overall ego jockeying that pervaded the scene. Equally invaluable are Frederick Ahl's less than idolatrous account of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's relationship to Hollywood and his work on Spartacus and Exodus, and several contributions on various aspects of Roman history and military strategies.

In addition to his introduction, Winkler authored two essays. One, on the marketing of Spartacus, traces a tendency towards religious and "culturally significant" subjects in Hollywood history that led to biblical spectacles like Samson and Delilah (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), and Ben- Hur (1959). Producers hired historians as advisers who could endorse a film's accuracy and educational value, although their advice was not always compatible with what would sell. His other essay argues Spartacus's place within American culture and the nation's "holy cause of freedom" as articulated by the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Whitman, and Martin Luther King, among others. He reminds us that the theme of the black fighter as a savior for whites had a long tradition in American culture. It is an interesting argument, but suffers, in the end, from the same romantic view of freedom, slaves, and Spartacus that was the source of disagreement between Kubrick and Trumbo. Whereas both the latter and Kirk Douglas conceived the protagonist as a symbol of freedom, the more skeptical Kubrick recognized that Spartacus's revolt lacked such an ambitious goal and was not a factor in the fall of the Roman Empire since the "empire" at the time was barely on the rise.

But Winkler supports his essay with visual analyses. He breaks down the shots of Spartacus and Draba, the black African gladiator, waiting to enter the arena where they will fight to the death. Although his reading ignores Cooper's delineation of the film's production history, the sequence as described has a tension and deployment of space in relation to the characters that resemble that of the three soldiers awaiting execution in Paths of Glory, as well as a photo shoot Kubrick did for Look magazine in 1949 of the boxer Walter Cartier waiting to enter the ring (nicely described by Gene Phillips in the SKA book). While we don't know how much of what Winkler says is attributable to Kubrick, this is the kind of analysis that should be encouraged.

The only personal account of working with Kubrick under review is Matthew Modine's thoroughly engaging Full Metal Jacket Diary, illustrated with his own photographs. Modine records the travails of the production and his fluctuating reactions to Kubrick who at one point he calls "a Devil," provides details of his volatile relationship with Vincent D'Onofrio, as well as poignant profiles of such figures as Leon Vitali, the Lord Bullingdon of Barry Lyndon who became Kubrick's assistant and whose sad persona Modine attributes to his being like a "moth attracted to the flame." According to Modine, the difficulty he had nailing his character paralleled his difficulty understanding the Vietnam War, the very mindset that made his character "the living contradiction of this film," in which he wears a peace symbol and a helmet inscribed, "Born to Kill."

If it is not easy to describe the pleasures of perusing the nearly 800 frame reproductions in Part 1 of the Archives book, it may be because many evoke the seductive power they have on screen--although since some overlap facing pages, in the interest of design, material gets lost in the inner stitching. (Is it mere coincidence that the only one of these that fully distorts an actor's face is of Kirk Douglas?) As to its "archival" status, the book is more of a tease than the treasure trove its title promises: screenplay samples with Kubrick's notations, along with reproductions of notebook pages and programs are nice to have, along with the many photos of Kubrick manning cameras from every angle or taking light readings; a page from the script of Paths of Glory preserves the original ending in which the men are pardoned rather than shot; one appendix has drawings and plans for the unfilmed projects, "Napoleon" and "A.I." But these are more directed at the general reader or aficionado, not the film scholar.

Yet if one requires convincing that Kubrick was a born filmmaker, one need only turn from the gorgeous frames of his films in Part 1 of this book to the stunning photo stories he did for Look magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s (in Part 2), and recall what he said to Michel Ciment: "[Y]ou may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography." Kubrick picked up that talent early, but as the essays and books reviewed attest, he spent his life learning about everything else.

Books Reviewed in This Article

The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick

Jerold J. Abrams, ed. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. 278 pp. Hardcover: $35.00 and Paperback: $19.95.

The Stanley Kubrick Archives

Alison Castle, ed. Made in cooperation with Jan Harlan, Christiane Kubrick and the Stanley Kubrick Estate. London: Taschen, 2004. 544 pp., illus. Hardcover: $70.00.

Eyes Wide Shut

by Michel Chion. London: British Film Institute (Distributed in the U.S. by the University of California Press), 2002.96 pp., illus. Paperback: $14.95.

Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History

Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, and Glenn Perusek, eds. Wisconsin Film Series. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 330 pp., illus. Hardcover: $60.00 and Paperback: $27.95.

The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust

by Geoffrey Cocks. New York/Washington, D.C./Baltimore: Peter Lang, 2004. 338 pp., illus. Paperback: $29.95.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays

Robert Kolker, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 189 pp., illus. Hardcover: $74.95 and Paperback: $35.00.

Full Metal Jacket Diary

by Matthew Modine. New York: Rugged Land, 2005. 294 pp., illus. Hardcover: $29.95.

On Kubrick

by James Naremore. London: British Film institute (Distributed in the U.S. by the University of California Press), 2007. 299 pp., illus. Hardcover: $102.00 and Paperback: $27.50.

Kubrick's Hope: Discovering Optimism from 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut

by Julian Rice. Lanham, MD/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2008. 281 pp., illus. Hardcover: $40.00.

Spartacus: Film and History

Martin Winkler, ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 267 pp., illus. Hardcover: $84.95 and Paperback: $31.95.