Film Expert to Examine Final Kubrick Movie

Laleen Jayamanne, a lecturer in cinema studies at the University of Sydney, will present "Where the Rainbow Ends: An Examination of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut" on Wednesday, January 23. The first Critical Forum lecture of the spring semester will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Handwerker Gallery. The talk is free and open to the public.

Eyes Wide Shut, the 1999 movie starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, is hardly a mainstream movie despite its big-name stars. Kubrick’s swan song explores the underpinnings of a couple’s relationship: even the thought that his wife might have cheated on him sends the husband on a bizarre odyssey through the streets of New York. That the leads were a real-life married couple at the time the picture was made adds to the film’s intensity.

"In the paper on which I will base my talk, I look at Kubrick’s authorship and analyze the virtual/actual couples of Bill and Alice/Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman," Jayamanne says.

Jayamanne’s books include Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment, The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok, and Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Her articles have appeared in Screen, Discourse, and the Australian Journal of Screen Theory. She is also a filmmaker; her work includes A Song of Ceylon and Rehearsing.