Precious footage of the auteur at work: framing, accessing, using, and cultifying Vivian Kubrick's Making the Shining

This paper aims to explore the centrality to Kubrick’s cult reputation of a
touchstone resource for Kubrick fans: Vivian Kubrick’s 1980 documentary
Making the Shining. Through an analysis of the documentary itself, as well as
a charting of its circulation from original broadcast on television to its
dissemination and discussion via a prominent Kubrick fan site, alt.movies.
kubrick (amk), the paper will explore the shifting valuations of this crucial
Kubrick-related paratext in relation to Kubrick’s status as cult auteur and to
forms of technological change which have impacted on this documentary’s
history of distribution and dissemination. In particular, the paper will attempt
to problematize the notion that the cult status and value of particular texts
automatically diminishes when they become readily available on DVD, by
focusing on the range of ways in which Making the Shining is valued by amk
users, subsequent to its shift in status from a rare object (swapped on secondand third-generation video copies of off-air recordings) to a key DVD extra, in a remastered form, on DVD releases of The Shining from 1999. Embargo until 09/06/2016