The Shiningdirected by

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick1928-1999

• - He received Best Director Academy Award® nominations for Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.

• - Each of those films also earned Kubrick Best Screenplay nominations, as did Full Metal Jacket.

• - In addition, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon received Best Picture nominations.

• - Kubrick’s only Oscar® came for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• In 1997, he received the D.W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Directors Guild of America.

• - Kubrick always needs complete creative control over any film he creates.

Kubrick Quotes

- "I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker--in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business."

- "I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was."

- "I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it."

Kubrick’s death and what he was working on at the time… (IMDB.com)

• The last movie Kubrick completed before he died was “Eyes Wide Shut” in 1999. It starred the then married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

• It was not successful in the box office, but Kubrick claimed it was his best film to date. It took two years to complete and was masked in complete silence and secrecy.

• One of the big projects to be finished by another directed (Steven Spielberg) was “A.I.” (2001). Kubrick was trying to roll with the times and start working on a film with more special effects. During pre-production, Kubrick suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep.

• Spielberg said the two directors were talking about the concept together and that is why he decided to finish the movie after Kubrick’s death. If it is what Kubrick “really” envisioned, we will never know.

The Film• In 1980, 5 years after Barry Lyndon,

Kubrick released his contribution to the horror genre, The Shining, based on the novel by Stephen King. This time the film was a financial success but critics were generally not as receptive and there were no Oscar nominations at all.

The Concept of Doubles• The film is filled with doubles, cycles, people existing

in two time frames at once different incarnations, and conflicting personas which are battling for supremacy.

• Danny Torrance who is gifted with extra-sensory perceptions manifests this confusing part of his psyche with the persona of Tony. (Danny in the mirror in the beginning)

• Jack Torrance’s first moment of assimilation into the hotel and the idea of his having another personality is shown to the audience through the viewing of Jack through a mirror as he talks to Wendy.

• Mirrors play an extremely important role in the character of Jack Torrance. He often seems to be addressing mirrors in lieu of actually communicating with people. This is seen in his interacting with Lloyd at the bar, Grady in the bathroom (notice the mirror right behind him), Wendy, and his son. It’s fair to say that Jack is very much in his own world, with reality materialized (and presented to the view often) through the mirror view.

The doubles just keep coming…

• Wendy realizes that Jack may be planning to kill her when she sees Danny’s scribbling on the door in the mirror. He writes redrum and when reflected it reveals the word murder.

• The Grady sisters consistently make themselves seen to Danny Torrance. A good deal of the horror from this famous element of The Shinning is directly tied to duality. If the presence of these girls would be terrifying enough, two that look exactly the same up the horror ante. There is something unnatural in their symmetry, they are not identical, but very nearly so. In keeping with Kubrick’s control over every element of his filmmaking, the choice in not casting identical twins was a brilliant one. They look as if they have been forced to look the same even though at 8 and 10 they are two years apart. This ‘forced symmetry’ is more disconcerting than a natural one.

• While in a lustful state of mine Jack encounters another two-sided occupant of the Overlook Hotel. The woman who apparently choked Danny lies waiting for Jack Torrance in the bathtub of room 237. Yet again, we find that appearances can be deceiving, as the beautiful young occupant of the room has her illusion stripped away when Jack looks into the mirror.

• Once you’ve been a caretaker, always a caretaker, as Jack learns on his descent. Mr. Grady seems to get around. Introducing himself as Delbert Grady after ushering Jack into the bathroom, Jack recognizes him as Charles Grady, the former caretaker who murdered his wife and children. The Overlook is a timeless institution, and both Grady and Torrance have spent at least two periods of time in its employment. Grady, as Delbert, in the 1920’s as a butler, and as Charles the caretaker in 1970. Jack as the caretaker of 1980, but Grady reassures him that he always been I in the hotel. This assertment is confirmed at the very end of the film, when a long tracking shot zeroes in on a picture of Jack Torrance in a 1921 Overlook ball photograph.

Film Style• Events that seem to take place in the present may be re-

enactments or simply memories of the past. To take The Shinning at face value is a mistake. It has no face, only masks, and it has no value, only implications.

• Shelley Duvall’s performance as Wendy Torrance, like Nicholson’s, shows very little true development. This is not an oversight on the part of the director or actors. Jack and Wendy arrive at The Overlook Hotel with their personalities fully formed. They are like two characters picked off park benches. One look a them and you know they’re nuts.

• The Shinning is not about internal character development. It questions the extent to which a character shapes his environment or to which the environment shapes him. Does the place drive you crazy or are you crazy in the first place? Are these people ghosts already dead, having been driven to crazy deaths? Or are they ordinary fold infected by the frightening past of the monster hotel?

• The parallel with the past, real or imagined, is deliberately inexact. Why? Because the world has changed. This is the comment of The Shinning on the facile convention of horror writing and filmmaking. In most films the present reproduces the past. But not in this film. As in life, things turn out quite differently in this horror story.

Supernatural collides with Reality• The psychic powers of young Danny and of

Hallorann, the black cook, who leaves the hotel at the start to go to his home in Florida, are genuine. The two recognize each other from the beginning. The act of recognition, the act of one person seeing another what he understands, is crucial to our understanding of the characters in The Shinning.

• The scene in which Jack meets the lady in 237 is a rewrite of the shower scene in Psycho. In Psycho it is the lady in the shower who is threatened by the monster outside. In The Shinning this is reversed. Jack is the ‘monster’, scared by what might emerge from the shower behind the curtain. This reversal of well-known horror conventions is one of many in the film.

• The Shinning is not an enigmatic film. It is actually about enigma. That is why Kubrick is instinctively drawn to technology in his work, camera technology in particular. The machine is better able to cope with enigma than the human hand.

Camera Techniques and Set• In the film, Kubrick plays with the Steadicam like a toy. It is

essentially childlike. He wants to find out all the things he can do with is latest acquisition. Danny’s visions are represented in cuts and in montage.

• Many of Kubrick’s tremendously convoluted sets were designed with the Steadicam’s possibilities in mind and were not, therefore, necessarily provided with either flyaway walls or dolly-smooth floors. One set in particular, the giant Hedge Maze, could not have been photographed as Kubrick intended by any other means.

• The artificial daylight that was created too 700,000 watts of light outside the window. It was 110 degrees inside the building.

• Roy Walker designed the sets.

• The Overlook hotel exists only on film. All principal photography for the film was shot at the EMI studios in Borehamwood, England. While the exterior, establishing shots of the Overlook are of a real hotel--the Timberline Lodge near Mt. Hood in Oregon--the interior of that hotel is completely different than the Overlook depicted in the film, and there is no hedge maze outside. A facade of the rear of the Timberline Lodge and the hedge maze were built on the studio lot in England. The interior sets were modeled on various hotels from around the United States. For example, the blood red mens-room was modeled on a mens-room in a hotel in Arizona designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The opening sequence showing the car driving up mountain roads was shot in Glacier National Park in Montana.

Stephen King’s InspirationThe Stanley Hotel in Colorado

Stanley Hotel Cont.www.stanleyhotel.com

• Stanley Hotel located in Estes Park, CO is said to be Stephen King’s influence for writing The Shining.

• You can visit the Stanley Hotel and say in the Stephen King room or the Ghost Hunter’s Room.

• You can even sign up to participate in a ghost hunt while staying at the hotel.

• The television mini-series “The Shining” was filmed here.

Pictures of the Stanley Hotel

30 Seconds to Mars“The Kill”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF1wZQzpeKA&feature=PlayList&p=7CF79A408070B193&index=7