One suspects that [Kubrick] did not find it disagreeable to know that the only traceable print of [Fear and Desire] was in private hands and not easily available for public screening. --Alexander Walker, 1999 Nearly forty years passed before Stanley Kubrick's...

The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism. By J. B. BULLEN. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1998. viii + 248 pp. + 23 illus. 35 [pounds sterling]. As the millennium approaches, the English Aesthetic Movement appears to have taken on...

Fear and Desire is a fascinating effort containing a host of ideas, images, and themes which continue to appear in Kubrick's later films. (p. 18) The first theme in Fear and Desire, stated in the poem at the opening, is that the story is made up of "imaginary worlds": each man's "war," "enemies," and "conflict" are his mind's way of dealing with the enigmatic events and inconsistent behavior that surround him. This is objectified t...

Kubrick's is a unified, coherent oeuvre, in the best auteur tradition. And yet, for myself I find there is always something in Kubrick's films, brilliant though most of them are, that seems to stop short of the total creative involvement of the true auteur. Is it perhaps that he is keeping back something vital of himself, that the films seem in a way like so many masks assumed by their maker rather than various aspects of his own face?… Technically [Fear and Desire] leaves little to be ...