Archive Histories

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

The Stanley Kubrick Archive is a collection held at the University of the Arts London that contains material related to the life and work of Stanley Kubrick. But even though the archive has been branded as being about one man – Kubrick – its contents are much more diverse. There are records and objects about the wider industrial, cultural, and social history of film production in the latter half of the twentieth century; records and objects about the histories of fashion, stationery, photography, communication and media technologies, and urban development; historical resources pertaining to events such as the Holocaust, the life of Napoleon, and the American Civil War; and ephemera that has no immediately obvious research use.

Media historian James Fenwick argues that the Stanley Kubrick Archive has been misunderstood as being solely about Kubrick and that it has much greater interdisciplinary potential. Fenwick opens up the discussion of the meaning and purpose of the Stanley Kubrick Archive by considering its material realities via a critical survey and archaeological analysis of its contents. By undertaking such an analysis, Fenwick moves beyond the mythic status of the archive being Kubrick’s archive and instead foregrounds the wider cultural value and significance of the collection and uses the archive to reveal histories, stories, and ideas beyond a focus on Stanley Kubrick, proving that the Stanley Kubrick Archive doesn’t just have to be about Stanley.