Kubrick 2.0 (SCMS 2016 Panel)

full name / name of organization: 
Dru Jeffries / University of Toronto
contact email: 

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
Hilton Atlanta, March 30 - April 3 2016

As an American filmmaker equally canonized in the popular and high-art spheres, Stanley Kubrick occupies a unique position in film culture: indeed, in this regard Alfred Hitchcock may be his only peer. Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining are not only considered influential pieces of film art, but those same films have also penetrated the cultural consciousness in a way that few cinematic works do, let alone dense, adult-oriented art films. In the wake of Kubrick's death in 1999, preceding the release of his final film Eyes Wide Shut, the notoriously reclusive and obsessive filmmaker's archives have been opened, made available to the public, and become fodder for books, documentaries, film and television projects, and toured across the world as a travelling museum exhibition. Simultaneously, his films and signature authorial style ("Kubrickian") have been endlessly evoked, reworked, and renewed in countless texts and media across the whole of popular culture, including cinema but also running the gamut from comics and cartoons to music videos and YouTube mash-ups.

With only thirteen features released over a forty-six-year career, but countless pastiches, parodies, and homages continuing to be made well beyond his death, Kubrick's continued relevance in contemporary film culture (and popular culture more generally) owes largely to the ways in which his films have been appropriated by and disseminated through these various cultural niches. This panel seeks to understand the ways in which our understanding of Kubrick today has been shaped by such transformative works, as well as the various discursive forms that always condition our understanding of his films. Any new, unusual, or novel approaches to studying Kubrick are also welcomed.

Suggested topics include:
• Adaptations or parodies of Kubrick films (in any medium)
• Documentaries about Kubrick and/or his films (e.g., A Life in Pictures, Room 237, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes)
• Fictional(ized) representations of Kubrick
• Kubrick fandom
• The "Kubrickian" as a stylistic mode (e.g., in recent films like Interstellar, Ex-Machina, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Under the Skin, etc.)
• Particular uses of Stanley Kubrick Archive materials

Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words (bear in mind SCMS's 2500 character limit for individual proposals), a bibliography (3 to 5 titles), and a short author bio to Dru Jeffries at dru.jeffries@utoronto.ca by August 3, 2015. All authors will be notified by August 10, 2015.