Few figures in Anglo-American cinema history have achieved quite such a monumental stature as the producer-director Stanley Kubrick (1929–1999). Revered as a visionary artist by those who admire him, reviled as cold and inhumane by those who don’t, he and his films still provoke argument and debate quarter of a century after his death.

Kubrick’s notorious perfectionism meant that he made few films: only thirteen completed features and three shorts over a career lasting nearly fifty years. Some of them are regularly acclaimed, by both critics and fellow filmmakers, as being among the greatest ever made. Yet for others his reputation is grotesquely inflated and an exemplar of everything that is wrong with a film culture built on excessive reverence for the Great Male Auteur.

Recent scholarly research – some of it based at Sheffield Hallam University – has sought to explore neglected aspects of Kubrick’s work by examining the contributions of his collaborators, who have not usually had the recognition enjoyed by the director himself. In this course we will consider the case for bringing the monument down from his plinth and building an alternative critical biography.

No previous experience of Film Studies is necessary – just an interest in cinema and enthusiasm for talking about it!