Is it time to revisit Stanley Kubrick's definitive masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and his other films? Always ahead of his time technically and aesthetically, Kubrick's movies (Paths of Glory, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut) were often misunderstood by critics and audiences. They were cinematic events that transcended the limitations of the medium, challenging the status of cinematography and special effects (2001, Barry Lyndon), narrative techniques (adapting Nabokov, Thackeray, Burgess, Schnitzler, King) and the experience of "time and space" (critical issues in film aesthetics) reinventing outer space, "inner" space, the past, the future, the present. This seminar will center on formal and narrative analyses of Kubrick's techniques (FX, cinematography, music, editing, narrative structure, literary and philosophical allusions, etc.) in order to understand the intersections of form and content in arguably one of the most complex, ambitious directors of the century. Papers may address these and other questions of style, literary adaptations, cinematic, aesthetic and narrative techniques, content, meaning, Kubrick and theory, etc. The seminar may conclude with a discussion of Kubrick's "vision" of our new millennium in terms of technology, aesthetics, philosophy, humanity, divinity, etc.
Contact: Prof. Ernesto Acevedo-Muņoz, Film Studies, Campus Box 283, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0283. (Acevedoe@Colorado.EDU)