Several scholars underline how the film characters struggle with vision, from Danny’s “shining” glimpse of the elevator overflowing with blood to Jack’s hallucinated gaze at the woman in Room 237. are not comprehensible, it means they must hold some hidden meanings. Given the immensity of the labyrinth, the film fosters a worldview defined by humility, one in which human intelligence has to face its own limits to get out safely. That was Kubrick's original color timing for all the exterior night scenes, in the maze and behind the hotel. And yet the director proves how aware he was as to the challenge his film represented for whoever wished to give it an excessively coherent interpretation. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. It was based off of the movie The Shining and it was located in Soundstage 22. ). The horror of, is not a horror of the hidden, but a horror of the too visible, by which viewers feel dread when faced with an apparent surplus of information they are invited to decipher. Jack’s attempt to dominate space is also an attempt to negate its depth, to make the image a flat one. The scene begins with Danny running into the entrance of the hedge maze followed by a limping Jack carrying an axe. His is a winding, twisting path towards absolutely insanity… that eventually leads him to his death in the middle of the hedge maze. 6As a result, the progression of the film is not linear and does not culminate in a final revelation that would enable one to select one of those hypotheses over all others, as in a detective film. Thus, when Danny actually encounters ghosts in the hotel, he never shares Jack’s madness and keeps considering these beings as inherently Other. An index, Mulvey explains, is defined as “a sign produced by the thing it represents”, . We have seen how, all along the film, Danny does not deny the fantastic quality of his horrific visions, their alterity and therefore the impossibility to make sense of them. When Jack runs after him, he uses his small size to crawl out of the bathroom window, and then hides himself in the kitchen cupboards. The song is full of shrill, cacophonous violins that heighten the tension of the scene. Throughout the part of the scene taking place in the hedge, “Kanon” by Penderecki is playing nondiegetically. One of the five films chosen for the 2017 Halloween theme is the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film version of The Shining. ( Log Out / They first indicate specific time markers. 11 Umberto Eco, Les limites de l’interprétation. Given the immensity of the labyrinth, the film fosters a worldview defined by humility, one in which human intelligence has to face its own limits to get out safely. Jack’s face appears through the door he just tore down with an axe, so that Jack literally destroys the architecture of the hotel and invades the frame. Three 180° shots and countershots then reverse the position of the characters and objects within the frame as Grady asserts Jack is one of them. The scene where she walks backward up the stairs, crying and swinging a bat at Jack, was shot at least 35 times. Furthermore, Mulvey’s claim takes an extra dimension in. The hermetic viewer who would follow on Jack’s footsteps is therefore warned: Jack’s incapacity to accept the complex nature of the signs surrounding him has condemned him to be locked in a system of self-referential signs, seemingly disconnected from any reality. 1 Location 2 The Stanley Hotel 3 Styling 4 Depiction 4.1 The Shining (film) 5 Images 5.1 Hedge maze 6 Filming Locations 7 Appearances 8 Videos The hedge maze … Danny never stops perceiving the ghosts in all their ungraspable alterity. 14I would like to add, however, that the links between The Shining and hermetic thought run deeper. Both Jean-Baptiste Thoret and Sam Azulys note how Jack’s eye is submitted to an “excess of visibility”, . London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013, p. 12. Jack’s previously mentioned association with mirrors, with their fake sense of depth, also underlines his wish to flatten the image, to stick to a reassuring two-dimensionality (Figure 9). Like them, spectators have to face an open work, multi-layered and infinitely open to interpretation. The polysemy of the film is therefore established through the divide between narrative closure (Jack’s death) and the lack of semantic closure (his death certainly does not attenuate the hermeneutic craze of the spectator trying to figure it all out). The Shining is widely regarded as un film à clef, the hidden secrets of which only a handful of sufficiently smart and tenacious spectators could discover. 16 Most interpretations in Room 237 are thus based on either freeze frames or various audiovidual manipulations permitted by DVDs and computers. The Shining . The best way to deal with a contingent world, The Shining suggests, is to create a work of art which embraces its openness, its multiplicity, and becomes an interpretative maze. 8This ultimate scene is one of the main alterations from Stephen King’s novel. But in this case, the maze is an especially good symbol for Jack Torrance's descent into madness. Later on, however, the captions only refer to deictic markers like “Wednesday”, which can only make sense if one knows when it was written and by whom, which is not the case in a movie with no established external narrator. The film’s over-exposure provides an almost constant depth of field which accentuates the three dimensional quality of the hotel, and of the outside maze. The labyrinth which the film is is therefore denied its aesthetic. She walks through a red-pink room (shown below) to see the bright red elevator door open and crimson blood pouring out (amidst the tuba pulses of Penderecki’s “Untenja- Kanon Paschy”). Usually, for Horror films, the lighting that is used the most is low-key lighting. One may keep in mind that the film’s final screenplay contained an extra ending scene, in which Ullman visits Danny and Wendy at the hospital8. King and Kubrick did not see eye to eye on creative decisions for The Shining, but regardless the movie remains a classic. The Shining is an adaptation of Stephen King’s claustrophobic tale of a boy’s special gift and his father’s descent into madness while secluded in the snowbound Overlook Hotel. 10One’s impossibility to hang on to any set of codes to make sense of what one sees and hears is a powerful source of terror in the film. On the contrary, it seems that each scene opens a new interpretative path, and that each viewing hypothesis is eventually condemned to look like a dead-end. https://www.thethings.com/the-shining-movie-behind-the-scenes-secrets To warn Wendy, Tony writes Murder backwards, a word that needs to be read through a mirror: up until the end, Danny does not reduce the fantastically ungraspable nature of his vision to a more understandable, everyday reality. They first indicate specific time markers. Faced with the depths of the maze, Hermetic spectators run the risk of digging into the film to, paradoxically, negate its depths and stick to a limpid, reductive reading hypothesis. In the process, they may, like Jack, get lost within the semantic maze of the film, “for ever and ever”, by digging ever deeper into the work in an attempt to, paradoxically, better negate its depth. The 1980 movie The Shining, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, used aerial shots of Timberline as part of its opening scene. From shop UkPrintingShop. Jack’s path is thus similar to that of the hermetic spectator who, frightened by the sense that what one sees is only the surface, digs ever deeper only to restore an appearance of perfect coherence through overinterpretation. 6 Umberto Eco, L’œuvre ouverte. 4I would like to argue the maze of The Shining suggests that there is no hidden centre, no secret key which would unlock all its mysteries and provide a clear reading. 5In this labyrinthine film, there is no one good path to follow, at the exclusion of all others. One who can unlock mysteries and decode secrets becomes in his turn the bearer of some unique knowledge, as Georg Simmel –quoted by Eco– explains: “the secret gives its bearer an exceptional position and is attractive for purely social reasons. In doing so. To respect the intention of the film, any attempt to interpret it must therefore acknowledge its own limits and the coexistence of equally valid hypotheses. Tony prevents Danny from going through the looking glass by underlining the alterity of his visions. This makes the hotel seem as cold (figuratively) and sinister as the maze outside. Jack’s face appears through the door he just tore down with an axe, so that Jack literally destroys the architecture of the hotel and invades the frame. In the game room during his first scene within the Overlook, Danny must step on a chair to take down the darts he was playing with, since the target is too high. This interpretation is forced upon reality, in a series of assertions terrifying because of their very simplicity, such as his famous claim that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. I suggest that, as highlighted by the motif of the labyrinth, Kubrick constructed a hermeneutic maze in which Jack –subject to hermetic thought– loses himself while Danny, whose humility enables him not to fall into the traps of an organising reason striving to make sense of a world impervious to human logic, escapes. This confusion is of course accentuated by the coexistence of three different timelines –the 1980’s, 70’s and 20’s– across which Jack evolves effortlessly. … Faced with the depths of the maze, Hermetic spectators run the risk of digging into the film to, paradoxically, negate its depths and stick to a limpid, reductive reading hypothesis. The search for meaning in crisis », Essais, Hors-série 4 | 2018, 79-104. To further enhance what the director wants us to see. This specific horror encourages some spectators to dig into the film, to overinterpret it, in the hope of finding some secret code that would relieve the tension of openness, and bring a sense of definite, all-encompassing closure. The polysemy of the film is therefore established through the divide between narrative closure (Jack’s death) and the lack of semantic closure (his death certainly does not attenuate the hermeneutic craze of the spectator trying to figure it all out). The cinematographer is central in the execution of the lighting; whether it is intense or a lack thereof. Even if you can’t walk around in a snowy hedge maze, or encounter creepy little girls in blue dresses, Timberline Lodge has a great deal to offer. In The Shining, Jack Torrance fits all the conditions of the hermetic spectator: in front of a scary, multi-layered world he cannot control, Jack will fall into an all-encompassing interpretative strategy which gives him back an illusion of control: it is by killing his family, the source of all his problems, that Jack will finally be a part of the careless high society he aspires to, and that the ghosts tease him to become a part of. de la Transparence, 2011, p. 301. Anon, “The Shining Screenplay”, SK/15/1/38, Stanley Kubrick Archives, University of the Arts London. 26Jack’s rigid interpretative processes therefore parallel the hermetic spectators’. So to … Without access to what the mirrors display, the audience is encouraged to consider that this time, Jack fails to see, or refuses to see, the oscillation of his own situation. Until now. 12Moreover, the reputation of Stanley Kubrick certainly enhanced this hermeneutic craze. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Its multiple paths enable Danny to hide himself. Shelley Duvall & Jack Nicholson on the set of The Shining, 1980. The hotel, already being a maze, makes you lose your orientation easily, which is an extra trigger for Jack to lose his mind and for the rest of his family to feel lonely and scared. Film of the exterior of the Timberline Lodge is also used for some establishing shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel throughout the movie. Like them, spectators have to face an open work, multi-layered and infinitely open to interpretation. As Roger Luckhurst wrote, “one must chart the structure of the maze rather than arguing there is only one way through it”55. Thus, truth becomes identified to the unsaid or the obliquely said and must be understood beyond appearances”11. Such as with there being several perspectives for the "shining" in Room 237. During this party, Jack accompanies Delbert Grady to the bathroom and seems to go through the looking glass. Michel Chion explains how the changes made for the European version of the film –a shorter version, modified after the American release– tend to suppress the causal links binding the sequences together, thus making of each scene a separate part of a puzzle which it is up to the viewer to piece together. During this first vision, the brevity of the images is interspersed with close ups of a terrified Danny, shot before a black background which disconnects him from all diegetic spatiotemporal situation. Danny cunningly elaborates a strategy –using his own tracks– to get out of the labyrinth without trying to solve its mysteries. Mirror images are flat and two dimensional, its depths are mere illusions, thus suggesting Jack gets trapped in a world of reflections and appearances. Looking at the maze’s model, Jack tries to distance himself from the maze’s depth, to tower above it and to dominate it, whereas a cut connects this shot to a plunging low angle shot of the maze. Concluding Feelings: 5/5 stars. Danny ultimately uses the maze to disorient and trap his father while escaping from the maze to reunite with his mother. Each sequence, each scene, is a “semantic knot” which encourages spectators to multiply viewing hypotheses. In the early scenes, Jack also seems crushed by the size of the hotel –all the characters do in the first tracking shots crossing the great hall. Later on, however, the captions only refer to deictic markers like “Wednesday”, which can only make sense if one knows when it was written and by whom, which is not the case in a movie with no established external narrator. An apparent sense of closure is thus contradicted with the opening of countless new potential interpretations. Faced with a world he cannot fully comprehend, Jack sticks to an illusory interpretative strategy. Jack becomes an aberration, a necessarily ungraspable representation, just like the ghosts he did not perceive as such. This attraction is fundamentally independent from what the secret reveals”. I really liked that you talked about how the camera was from Jacks point of view and made it appear that he was much closer to Danny than he is in actuality. The cartons of the film are a case in point. The ideal viewer of the film is therefore a child, characterized by his smallness in the gigantic setting he evolves in. Deleting this scene thus focused the ending on the semantic opening provided by the revelation of the photograph. He uses its immensity to his advantage. Thus, truth becomes identified to the unsaid or the obliquely said and must be understood beyond appearances”, . “Closing Day” thus refers to a specific date, October 30th, and a specific event.
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