Flawed paean to a heartless auteur

Christopher Bray

STANLEY KUBRICK WAS BORN IN NEW York, but lived more than half his life in the Home Counties. Even after reading Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams’s brick-thick Kubrick: An Odyssey, with its claim that “England offered him a freer intellectual life”, this move still seems curious. Kubrick had fixed on moviemaking at a very early age. Most movies were and are made in the country of his birth. Kubrick’s choosing Hertfordshire over Hollywood made as much sense as Joshua Reynolds seeking to extend his painterly range in Rotherham rather than Rome. My guess is that Kubrick crossed the pond the wrong way because of the auteur theory. We Brits fell for this French idea — that film is an art and the director the artist — far more than the…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2024

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