I began teaching Stanley Kubrick in 2007 shortly after I moved to Bangor University. In 2012, I embarked on a research project exploring what I called Kubrick’s ethics, ethnicity and archives. It was during that research, which was published as Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual in 2018, that I began to notice how the work of Franz Kafka echoed down the corridors of Kubrick’s work.
Kubrick was born in 1928 and in the decade that followed, Kafka’s work began to appear in English. Kubrick became an avid reader of Kafka’s fiction and later named him “the greatest writer of the century, and the most misread”. “People who used the word ‘Kafkaesque’ had probably never read Kafka”, he told his friend the journalist Michael Herr.
Later, when publicising his film A Clockwork Orange in 1972, Kubrick compared himself to the author: “I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I’m not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering.” It was an interesting comparison, one that suggested more parallels than it dispelled.
