Encounter 2 - The confrontation with genres

After his debut film, Kubrick confronted one of the most important elements of American cinema, the genre system. Thanks to his desire to be independent, Kubrick made The Killer's Kiss (1955), halfway between noir and gangster-movie, in which he experimented with the symbolic use of images and the subjectivity of narration. He continued with Armed Robbery (1956), another ‘genre film’, but constructed through the fragmentation of the narrative. In the subsequent war-movie Paths of Glory Kubrick subverted the epic-militarist rhetoric of the genre, in which it is space that determines the action (and not vice versa), until the historical film Spartacus (1960), in which he accentuated the linguistic elements of modernity.