We'll Meet Again

Abstract

Abstract Though the films of Stanley Kubrick have long been recognized for their innovation, visual impact, and challenging subject matter, they also feature unique and provocative uses of music that define Kubrick's work and that have made a lasting impact on filmmaking and multimedia more broadly. This book takes the position that, for Kubrick, music is absolutely central to the themes, visual designs, and meanings in the films. The book traces ways in which music assumes an important place for Kubrick throughout the working process and in the reception of the films as well. The book is organized according to musical features and techniques that influence the design of the narrative, cast character relationships, and drive the drama. Kubrick's effective use of music's formal and stylistic qualities, associative potential, and rhythmic and temporal qualities shape the films. A focus on music also allows a closer look at Kubrick's debt to Max Ophüls, a director who likewise cast music as the master of his dramatic worlds. The author's research, supported by evidence in the form of documents from the Stanley Kubrick Archive and original analyses, renders a picture of Kubrick as a musically minded director who knew how to exploit music's formal, stylistic, and historical characteristics and who also strove to create films modeled on the concept of music broadly. The book reveals many details of Kubrick's working process for the first time and relocates Kubrick's aesthetic in musical territory to illuminate fresh interpretations of his work and their reception.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.