The Shining Movie Analysis

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No Escape

The Shining is based off a novel written by Stephen King in 1977 and later produced as a horror film by Stanley Kubrick in 1980. The summary of the film is of a family that heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future. Kubrick takes the study called phenomenology, which is the development of human consciousness and self-awareness as a preface to or a part of philosophy to the big-screen. The Shining camera motion mimics this film environment by putting messages in the film that our consciousness may be receptive of but we may not fully be aware of it. Kubrick’s camera movement enhances a maze of its own within the movie. A psychological mental entrapment of motion by keeping viewers claustrophobic with no room to escape. The passage of tracking filmic techniques echoes an entanglement of its own. The resort is mapped out to be physically impossible of escape. They have Danny ride his Big Wheel around the resort and each corner he turns does not add up to the model of the resort. Many
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Kubrick added in the maze scene, which was not in the book to mirror the effect of perplexity of entrapment. There is a hedge maze outside the hotel, as well as a model of the maze in the hotel’s lobby. In Anthony Vidler’s article The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary would call the maze a phenomenology of the space, “ constructed out of walls at once solid and transparent, fissured and veiled, camouflaged and endlessly disappearing, presented in a forced and distorted perspective that presses space both backward and forward, finally overwhelming the spectator’s own space, incorporating it into the vortex of the whole movie,”(Vidler 47). This creates a space of horror when Wendy and Danny take a walk to explore the maze one

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