
Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
NEW TO STORE:
Mad Men, Sopranos AND
Biography Collections
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
In addition to being fully authorized, Stanley Kubrick, Director is a brilliant dissection of how Kubrick conceived, shot, and created his films, as well as a frame-by-frame examination of the inimitable style that infuses every Kubrick movie, from the pitch-perfect hilarity of Lolita to the icy supremacy of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the baroque horror of The Shining. The book's beautiful design and dynamic arrangement of photographic stills—by award-winning artist Ulrich Ruchti and journalist ands longtime Kubrick aficionado Sybil Taylor—promote nothing less than a complete ands incisive understanding of how Kubrick saw a film. Originally published in 1971, but revised for republication in 1999. This is the 1999 edition.
Slightly scuffed dust jacket, pristine/like new interior.
REVIEW
"A longtime friend of Kubrick's who remembers the days when the great director was mysteriously collecting Japanese science fiction movies in what turned out to be preparation for 2001, Walker rankled Warner Bros. and the Kubrick estate when he printed a rave review of Eyes Wide Shut weeks before the movie was released. In this book, he offers a similarly enthusiastic tour through the Kubrick oeuvre, from the first film (Fear and Desire, 1953) to the last (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999). Walker describes Kubrick as a guarded, suspicious, obsessive, controlling, paranoid workaholic, and makes us feel that he's bestowing a compliment. Each movie is given a thorough analysis, reinforced by the extensive use of stills in each case. He explains what that black obelisk in 2001 is, and elaborates the various parallels between Kubrick and the character Jack Torrance in the filming of The Shining. Perhaps unavoidably, however, the section on Eyes Wide Shut seems merely to be a synopsis and lacks the detachment and detail that characterize the other chapters. One can only wish that Walker had waited for some critical perspective on his friend's final work. Nevertheless, its eulogistic tone aside, Kubrick fans everywhere will relish this as the definitive book on the director.—Publisher's Weekly
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
“Please. Have mercy. I’ve been wearing the same underwear since Tuesday.”
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and the forthcoming The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently working on a memoir about his marriages and a feature-length documentary about his father, jazz musician and composer Dave Zoller.
His hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. He has the attention span of a gnat.