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Pezzotta, Elisa. Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 230 pages.$60 hardcover.
Pezzotta's book offers a thoroughgoing analysis of the aesthetics of Kubrick's films from 1968 until his death in 1999, each of which adapted an earlier print text. Pezzotta looks at these films as transmedia adaptations that re-imagine the stories of their ostensible sources by using not only the resources of cinema but also by using, citing, and adapting texts from other media: dance, painting, and, most importantly, music. She reads Kubrick's ability to make these idiosyncratic films with Hollywood studio backing and minimal studio interference as symptomatic of the intersection of cultural and commercial forces that brought self-consciously auteurist filmmaking into the Hollywood mainstream during the age of so-called New Hollywood. However, Pezzotta argues that Kubrick deviates from other, contemporary art-cinema and New Hollywood directors in his use of adaptations to stage sublime experiences in genre films. Kubrick's adaptations deny audiences the subjective realism typical of art cinema, and instead push viewers to meditate on the power of art itself. Pezzotta's book achieves its aim to situate Kubrick's aesthetic historically and "to challenge the tendency in adaptation studies to depend too much on literary studies" (4). She understands Kubrick's films as complex aesthetic objects, hypertexts where, in addition to the "primary" source text, much of each film's ostensible meaning emerges from juxtaposed quotations that re-purpose other, "secondary" texts, from Hindu scripture to Triumph of the Will to the avant-garde compositions of György Ligeti. However, the book's approach is more formalist and narratological than historicist; what it does not offer, but instead calls for, is an analysis of "the history of cinema" "from the perspective of adaptation studies" (153). We can read Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime as a prelude to such a history.
Pezzotta situates Kubrick's work in both the commercial and avant-garde cinemas of its time,...