Disinterring Johanna ter Steege: Aryan Papers and the Materiality of the Stanley Kubrick Archive

The critical orthodoxy about Stanley Kubrick’s realized projects is that he was a profoundly androcentric director. However, evidence from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, including new, uncatalogued material, reveals that his unrealized project Aryan Papers focussed on a woman. Where LouisBegley’s novel Wartime Lies is narrated from the perspective of a boy, Maciek, Kubrick was developing Aryan Papers so as to centralize his Aunt Tania. Kubrick’s plot modifications include a rape scene and three alternative endings, in one of which Tania takes violent revenge. However, this Tania remains unrealized. Perceiving overwhelming competition from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Kubrick abandoned Aryan Papers. The traces in the archive reveal interesting things about this woman-who-might have-been. Casting suggestions included stars of the calibre of Sigourney Weaver, although the role eventually went to Johanna Ter Steege. Ter Steege had previously appeared as the murder-victim-by-live-burial in George Sluizer’s Spoorloos (The Vanishing, 1988). Traces of the Tania Johanna Ter Steege would have made remain in a video art installation by Jane and Louise Wilson entitled Unfolding the Aryan Papers, but even that trace remains elusive, as the exhibition is currently difficult to see. Even the copy in the Stanley Kubrick Archive is corrupt and unviewable. The abandonment of Aryan Papers amounts to burying Johanna Ter Steege for a second time. This chapter prompts a reconsideration of dominant critical approaches to Kubrick, which focus on his work with men (see, for example, Richard Rambuss’ Kubrick’s Men, 2021), to open fresh avenues of enquiry into to his work with women.