Twenty years after its release, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut remains a complex, visually arresting film about marriage, jealousy, domesticity, adultery, sexual disturbance, and dreams. This was the final enigmatic work from its equally enigmatic creator. It has left an indelible mark on our popular culture and remains as relevant as ever. Much maligned and much misunderstood when it first came out, Eyes Wide Shut has since been the subject of an animated debate and discussion among critics, fans and academics. It has been explored from a wide variety of disciplines and methodological perspectives. This collection proposes to bring together scholars and fans from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and those who worked on the film to explore Eyes Wide Shut's legacy, discuss its impact, and consider its position within Kubrick's oeuvre and the wider visual and socio-political culture.
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction, Nathan Abrams and Georgina Orgill
PART ONE: PRODUCTION
'Infidelity troubled him deeply': A journey to the root of Eyes Wide Shut, Filippo Ulivieri
A Choreographic Liaison: Collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on the Masked Ball for Eyes Wide Shut, Yolande Snaith
Stanley Kubrick's last film and the question of authorship, Manca Perko
PART TWO: THE FILM
'If You Men Only Knew': Stanley Kubrick's Failed Attempt to Explore Female Sexuality in Eyes Wide Shut, Catriona M. McAvoy and Karen A. Ritzenhoff
What about the daughters? Parenthood in Eyes Wide Shut, Joy McEntee
'Lucky to Be Alive': Clockwork Models and the Logic of the Inanimate in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Ohad Landesman
Eyes Re-opened: Elucidation and Enlightenment Through Music in Eyes Wide Shut, Marie Bennett
PART THREE: RECEPTION
Framing Eye Wide Shut as a Late-90s 'Quality' Blockbuster: Authorship and Stardom in Kubrick's Final Film, Eddie Falvey
A cloaked and masked film: some things Eyes Wide Shut may (really) be about, Jeremi Szaniawski
Eyes Wide Shut: A Cult Film?, Matt Melia
Afterword, Robert P. Kolker
Index
Nathan Abrams has written widely and extensively on Kubrick (as well as film in general). Abrams 2018 book, Stanley Kubrick: Jewish Intellectual, examines the contentious issue of Kubrick's ethnicity and how it both shaped and is reflected in his films. Based on a detailed working knowledge of the Kubrick Archive and other archives. He collaborated with Robert Kolker on Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), the most comprehensive history of that film to date, based on extensive research, archival material, and interviews with the leading participants. It was chosen as one of the ten best film books of 2019 by the British Film Institutes journal, Sight and Sound. He edited the Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (2021) with IQ Hunter and is currently writing a biography of Kubrick to be published by Faber & Faber in 2024. He has also been responsible for organising various Kubrick events, bringing together scholars, fans, as well as those who worked on the films and/or with Kubrick, including '2001: Beyond 50' (2018), 'Stanley Kubrick, Life and Legacy' (2019), and 'Behind Eyes Wide Shut' (2019). He is also a founding member of the Kubrick Studies Network, which has some 70 subscribers worldwide and is growing. Georgina Orgill is Senior Archivist at The Stanley Kubrick Archive. She has previously contributed to the Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (2021), co-edited a volume on A Clockwork Orange, and written on archival cataloguing and access for the teaching and learning journal SPARK (2019).
