On The Allegorical Modes Of Stanley Kubrick’s Film Adaptation

Stanley Kubrick,by virtue of the constant,international influence of his works,has been generally recognized as an “auteur director” who cannot be overlooked in film history.However,his identity as an “adapter” has not yet been sufficiently studied.As a matter of fact,for Kubrick,adaptation is not only a method for selecting materials,but also a strategy used to convey an allegorical reading experience.Thereby,the audience,playing the role of “allegory readers”,experience a series of adventures in which they repeatedly “encounter others” together with the films’ characters.Meanwhile,faced with the increasing “crises of narrative and representation”,Kubrick’s film adaptations demonstrate a response by use of the allegorical modes.And it can be considered as a powerful device for rethinking and inquiring into the dilemmas in human reality.The first,or introductory section of this dissertation provides an outline of Kubrick’s career and adaptations,and presents a literature review of related domestic and overseas studies.Besides,it includes an overview of the theoretical background of allegory.Following the introduction,Chapter 2 focuses on the relationship between the industrial,aesthetic,social,and personal factors and Kubrick’s view of adaptation.In this chapter I argue that the paradigm shift in film adaptation offers Kubrick impetus and space to break the rigid symbolic system.At the same time,the elements,including Jewish identity,the countercultural wave and the “self-exile”,contribute to Kubrick’s experience of being "the other".And through the experience he gains an insight into the “unsaid” and “unknown” amidst the allegorical fragments.In Chapter 3,I attempt to explore the allegorical features of the narrative structure in Kubrick’s adaptations,and illustrate the postmodern consciousness within the works from the three textual perspectives(plot,language and characters),whereby the films achieve a breakthrough in traditional views on time,language,and human nature.This analysis suggests that the “restructuring” of Kubrick’s adaptation neither aim to reach a new totalization nor tend to reduce everything to signifiers floating superficially,falsely,and discursively.Instead,through the allegorical modes of the practice,the structural elements of plot,language,and characters become sites of negotiation,which highlight participatability and flexibility,thereby activating the performative function and critical power of the narratives.In the light of the theoretical frameworks put forward by Levinas,Agamben,Bataille,and Deleuze,Chapter 4 focuses on certain common types of images in the films,i.e.,face,carnival,and labyrinth,which are either selected from the sources or added and highlighted by the filmmaker.This discussion investigates the appearance of “nonverbal” images through which films approach the real ruptures generally sutured or obscured by everyday and official languages.And the ruptures can be considered as places where “others” inhabit.As allegorical images being both included in and excluded from the illusionary reality,on one hand,they loosen the signifying chains constituted in the original texts,on the other hand,thanks to the endless becoming-other in the time-image,the images inject into the films energy to resist the resymbolization.Based on the analysis above,in Chapter 5,we will mainly examine the inspirational significance and values of Kubrick’s filmmaking as allegorical adaptations.At the artistic level,by offering a reading perspective for “looking at things”,a“weakened” authorial identity,and the existence of the image “in itself”,the allegorical adaptations,as a conversation between art forms which remains open to events and others,can be seen to be a starting point for a “non-zero-sum” view of art.And at the cultural level,allegorical adaptations reveal a different way of thinking than the traditional identity politics and its classification models while facing the other.Thus,how to respond to the others in the stories both effectively and justly,whether for original authors,adapters,or audience,is not only a problem that extends to everyday life and requires constant thinking,but also a core theme Kubrick lays stress on and explores from an ethical-cultural point of view.In conclusion,by conveying his own experience of allegorical reading,Kubrick uses adaptation as a strategy to construct postmodern allegorical-images,while also making the films become borderless territories where viewers could “encounter others”at any time.In this sense,it can be understood why his adaptations would be worth recalling and pondering in a postmodern or even post-postmodern era.