Book review – The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust

29 March 2006

Geoffrey Cocks. The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2004

The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust is the ambitious attempt by author Geoffrey Cocks, a Professor of History, to view the films of Stanley Kubrick as a personal discourse on the horrors of the Holocaust. Having written previously about both the Holocaust and Kubrick, Cocks has combined his two interests in The Wolf at the Door to conclude that The Shining (1980) is Kubrick’s “artistic and philosophical response to the horrors of the Second World War. (2)”

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Posted by Thomas Caldwell

The Master of Consensual Manipulation

25 July 2003

Contribution to The Question Spielberg: A Symposium

The films of Steven Spielberg are often derided for their populist appeal. However this quick judgement is often made without an attempt to examine why Spielberg has maintained such a high level of box office success over the past three decades. Prominent in Spielberg’s filmic style is his mastery of techniques of cinematic manipulation, techniques that paradoxically have made his work both commercially successful and critically undervalued. Yet Spielberg’s trademark use of swelling music, emotive dialogue and intimate close-ups, and his thematic concern with family trauma, innocent children in a hostile world, and the child who never grew up, contribute to a powerfully engaging and satisfying filmic experience.

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Posted by Thomas Caldwell