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

Cocks, Geoffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820471151 ISBN 13: 9780820471150

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2004

Synopsis

The Wolf at the Door explores the remarkable formal and substantive patterns of cinematic discourse on Germany and the Holocaust in Stanley Kubrick’s films. It is the first book on Kubrick to place his cinema into the full context of his life and times – his Jewish past, early years spent under the shadows of fascism and war, and his 1957 marriage into a German family of artists and filmmakers – all provoked his deeply ambivalent preoccupation with the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. While personal and artistic reservations caused Kubrick to abandon several plans for a film on the Holocaust, this preoccupation combined with related cultural discourses in the 1970s, and culminated in a curiously indirect but compelling Holocaust subtext in his 1980 horror film, The Shining. The Wolf at the Door draws on intensive study of all of Kubrick’s films, interviews with members of Kubrick’s immediate family, and archival research in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Israel.

About this title

About the Author:

The Author: Geoffrey Cocks is Julian S. Rammelkamp Professor of History at Albion College in Michigan. A graduate of Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, he earned his Ph.D. in history at UCLA in 1975. He is the author of Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Goring Institute and Treating Mind and Body; editor of The Curve of Life: Correspondence of Heinz Kohut; and co-editor of Psycho/History; German Professions, 1800-1950; Medicine and Modernity; and Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History.

Review:

«In ‘The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust’ Geoffrey Cocks has accomplished what had seemed impossible – to inhabit the inner-life of the great, and highly secretive film director. What Cocks finds in the subconscious mind behind the films are meditations on War, the Holocaust and the real and secret history of the world explored through Kubrick’s iconoclastic world view. ‘The Wolf at the Door’ applies an astute understanding of geopolitics and psychology to the detailed facts of Kubrick's earthly existence – the results bring insight into this mysterious twentieth century cinematic icon.» (Vincent LoBrutto, author of ‘Stanley Kubrick: A Biography’)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0820471151
• ISBN 13: 9780820471150
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 342