Kubrick’s Mitteleuropa: The Central European Imaginary in the Films of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was arguably one of the most influential American directors of the post-World War II era, and his Central European Jewish heritage, though often overlooked, greatly influenced his oeuvre. Kubrick’s Mitteleuropa explores this influence in ways that range from his work with Hungarian and Polish composers Bela Bartok, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki to the visual inspiration of artists such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and other central European Modernists. Beyond exploring the Mitteleuropa sensibility in Kubrick’s films, the contributions in this volume also provide important commentary on the reception of his films in countries across Eastern Europe.

Jeremi Szaniawski is Associate Professor of comparative literature and film studies, and the Amesbury Professor of Polish Language and Culture in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the editor of After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2020), and of the online dossier ＂The Shining at 40＂ (Senses of Cinema, 2020), as well as the co-editor, among others, of Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2022), and Gender, Power, and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick (Routledge, 2023).