The Uncanny in Stanley Kubrick's Cinema

This study examines the presence of the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny in a selection of films by Stanley Kubrick. Through a close analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the book explores how the the idea of the uncanny found its way into the director’s work, producing a radical and fascinating unsettling of our subjectivity as spectators and film readers, and asking important questions about our relation to images and the audiovisual.

The author argues that Kubrick’s cinema, one of the most remarkable examples of artistic expression in the twentieth century, makes the uncanny a concept capable of expressing the dynamic and vital nature of the unconscious in the context of modernism and beyond. In so doing, he investigates the boundaries and the rich dialogue between cinema, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and modernism.