Synopses & Reviews
Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March 1999 at his Hertfordshire home, having finished the editing of his last film.
Eyes Wide Shut was released later that year. Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Viennese novel
Dream Story, relocated and updated to contemporary Manhattan,
Eyes Wide Shut stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a prosperous couple whose marriage is tested in the aftermath of a series of sinister events. The film baffled many of its first audiences. It had all the lavish attention to detail of a Kubrick film but it seemed slow, enigmatic, too much of a dream.
Michel Chion's extraordinary study of Eyes Wide Shut makes the case that it is one of Kubrick's masterpieces and a fitting testament. To appreciate this, though, it is necessary to look at what happens on the screen without bringing preconceptions to bear. The film needs to be taken at face value. Looked at this way, Eyes Wide Shut reveals itself to be a deeply moving film about characters who are not so different from real people, a film about life in which questions of meaning and motive lose their value.
Review
"Like Kubrick's film, Chion's book deliberately confounds....since in EWS, as in life, 'there is no signified, there are only signifiers.'...More persuasive is the in-depth analysis of Kubrick's precise editing, and of the dialogue, strewn with 46 examples of 'parroting.'" The Village Voice
Synopsis
Michel Chion's extraordinary study of Eyes Wide Shut makes the case that it is one of Kubrick's masterpieces, a fitting testament and reveals itself to be a deeply moving film.
Synopsis
Michel Chion's study of this film makes the case that it is one of Kubrick's masterpieces and a fitting testament. To appreciate this, though it is necessary to look at what happens on the screen without bringing preconceptions to bear.
About the Author
Based in Paris, Michel Chion has written many books on the cinema, including a series of groundbreaking works on film sound as well as David Lynch (BFI, 1995) and Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey (BFI, 2000).