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

by Geoffrey Cocks

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820471150
Publisher:	Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
Publication date:	09/28/2004
Series:	Studies in Film, Television, and Video , #1
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.03(d)

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.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
Chapter 1	Toward the Blue Mercedes	1
Chapter 2	A Jewish Past	18
Chapter 3	The Wolf at the Door	33
Chapter 4	A German Presence	49
Chapter 5	Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1953-1962	77
Chapter 6	Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964-1999	105
Chapter 7	Almost Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1953-2001	148
Chapter 8	The Horror, the Horror	161
Chapter 9	The Shining	172
Chapter 10	From Yellow Cabriolet to Eagle's Nest	196
Chapter 11	The Dream of Jacob	218
	Notes	257
	Filmography	317
	Bibliography	319
	Index	329

Editorial Reviews

«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’)

From the Publisher