Philip Kuberski's review of Kubrick's films, Kubrick's Total Cinema, masterfully links the grandest themes of those films to the most intimate of physical details. He shows us Kubrick as the great poet of cinema who shapes his medium to take his viewers ever-deeper into the filmic event of sound, image, and music. In Kubrick we encounter love, war, technology and transcendence in a way that awakens the mind, something Kuberski calls cinematic thought. Deeply informed by a knowledge of film--as art and as history-as well as by a rich philosophical and literary past that Kubrick drew upon, Kuberski gives the films a resonance that is both enlightening and moving. He drew me back into Kubrick, revealing Kubrick's talent for realizing the mysterious in human life through the human moment. His descriptions of eating scenes alone make me want to re-watch the films. This book, couched in Kuberski's lucid prose, will please the fan of Kubrick's films, reward the scholar, and seduce the skeptic. -- Dennis A Foster, D.D. Frensley Professor of English, Southern Methodist University
Kubrick's Total Cinema by Philip Kuberski belongs to a vanishingly small number of books that treat the films of Stanley Kubrick with the delicate combination of critical virtues they demand and deserve: a thorough knowledge of the medium of film, a penetrating insight into the aesthetic and philosophical perspectives informing Kubrick's choices, a capacious imagination, and discerning taste. For the first time, Kubrick's cinema is understood in ways that fully acknowledge the cognitive, metaphysical, and spiritual themes that are pertinent to his art as well as the dazzling visual achievements for which the films are justly famous. Kuberski makes a persuasive case for Kubrick not only as an important filmmaker but as one of the great artists of the twentieth century - one who addressed the central aesthetic and moral issues of modernity in a manner that was both artistically unimpeachable and able to reach a popular audience. Kubrick's Total Cinema will find avid readers among those coming to the filmmaker for the first time as well as professionals in critical theory, film studies, and the humanities generally. -- Frederick M. Dolan, Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, Professor of Humanities, California College of the Arts
Kuberski attempts what would seem to be the impossible - refute standard views of Stanley Kubrick, then propose an entirely new view - and he succeeds[.]He treats film as a means of thinking, a notion that works well for the cerebral Kubrick. Philosophical applications range from Kant to Kristeva, dipping into the Jungian archetype at times. The result is a bold reading that shifts the paradigm on Kubrick's work. Summing Up: Essential. -- M.J. Emery, Cottey College * CHOICE *
