KOLKER, ROBERT PHILLIP

Robert Kolker was an associate professor of film studies in the Department of Communication Arts and Theater at the University of Maryland, College Park, when he wroteA Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese,Altman,published by Oxford University Press in 1980. In this survey of directors constituting an “American New Wave,” Kolker’s extensive chapter on STANLEY KUBRICK runs to 70 pages, paying particular attention to Kubrick’s recurrent themes of isolation, helplessness, violence, passivity, solitude, and doomed heroism. Kolker considered Kubrick’s films “more intellectually rigorous than the work of any other American filmmaker. ” The book was organized around a clearly defined thesis and represented an original approach. Kolker described the book as “deeply opinionated, but hardly final. ” The revised, expanded edition was published in 2000.

J. M. W.