Stanley Kubrick: New York Intellectual

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Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) demonstrated a commitment to the dynamics of ethics and ethnicity that informed his craft. Tracing the development of Kubrick's work over his entire career, I will examine the subtle link between then moral and intellectual vision that distinguishes his films and its foundation in Jewish thought, values and cultural experience, which have been insufficiently acknowledged or understood hitherto.This project is the first major study to investigate the intellectual, religious, ethnic and moral foundations upon which the aesthetic vision of a seminal figure in postwar film are established. It will explore the impact of personal experience upon aesthetic vision to illustrate the presence of substantive Jewish content and methodology. It will also investigate how Kubrick fuses identity with Jewish cultural experience and moral imperative in films seemingly devoid of ethnic reference and where the deliberate suppression of the explicit reference to Jewish culture and historical experience appears evident.Kubrick's first principles were informed by Jewish cultural and historical experience. Although not immediately noticeable or obvious in his films, Kubrick's Jewishness 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 historian Paula Hyman has observed, 'Even secularized Jews were likely to retain a strong ethnic Jewish identification, generally internally and reinforced from without' (1997: 91). For example, Kubrick displayed a pattern of casting such identifiably Jewish actors as Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Peter Sellers, Miriam Karlin and Sydney Pollack in key roles in his films.The first tropological study of Kubrick's work, this project explores Kubrick from a cultural, historical, intellectual and ethnic perspective, exploring the diction, discourse, depiction and disconnected nature of Kubrick's characters who by conduct or particularized portrayals invite identification as Jews. Close scrutiny of Kubrick's canon reveals that Jewish thought and values are not a digression but an intrinsic, integral element of his work fundamental to his artistic vision.Frustratingly, however, unlike his contemporaries (Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, David Mamet, Arthur Miller), Kubrick refused to affirm his Jewish identity and offers us no easy way into ethnic identification in his work (but then Kubrick offers us no easy way into anything!). As a New York Jew, with a central European background, Kubrick shared with his coreligionist emigre filmmakers-Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Josef von Sternberg-a reluctance ever to explain his intentions (Ciment 2003: 59). Stripped of overt, explicit Jewish reference, Kubrick's films appear severed from his ethnic and cultural roots, ostensibly the least Jewish of the twentieth century's Jewish filmmakers. It is not my intention, however, to reduce Kubrick to a single message or to suggest that he had 'Jewish films', whatever that may mean, with purely literal and exhaustive meaning. Indeed, Kubrick's work can be enjoyed without recourse to its Jewish aesthetic or vision. Yet to do so, is to fail to read it backward, to understand the impact and sweep of history that inform his canon. Rather than diminish the universality that he has achieved in his cinematic oeuvre, I will illuminate the sources and scope of Kubrick's body of work in the hope of enhancing our understanding of his artistic expression by intensive and comprehensive re(viewing) of the work of the US' foremost postwar filmmaker. The principal output of this Fellowship will be an 80,000-word monograph on Kubrick.