The Shining Light of the Future. Bringing together Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (original) (raw)
Related papers
Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 Film Adaptation of “The Shining”
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021
The aim of this study is to analyze and compare The Shining, the 1977 novel written by Stephen King and the 1980 film adaptation produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The main issue considered is the subjective perception observable in the work of each of these artists. While Kubrick deliberately changed a myriad of elements to fit his own narrative, King was concomitantly quite upset with Kubrick's interpretation of the novel and the artistic liberty he took with writing the screenplay. An investigation into the theory of adaptation studies and the underlying issues concerning the adaptation process will be conducted and applied to the analysis of the novel and film. The viewpoints and criticism, from both the novelist and filmmaker will be taken into consideration to further explore the general issue of film adaptations. This study should point out the fundamental issues such as "faithfulness" to the novel, the filmmaker's conveyance of the story, and the artistic differences in both works of art.
The Uncanniness of The Shining.
Yedi: Journal of Art, Design & Science, 2020
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining has been examined and analyzed countless times up until today. Even though 40 years have gone by since its release, the film's full meaning and the events happening to the Torrance family are still unclear. The film unfolds in a limbo-like state, between dream and reality. While writing the script, Kubrick states that he was inspired by Sigmund Freud's Das Unheimlich (1919) essay. According to Freud, things or people that arouse feelings of dread and horror belong to the realm of the uncanny. The uncanny is related to what is frightening, but more importantly it entails a duality, an ambiguity because it encompasses the familiar with the unfamiliar. This study aims to locate the uncanny elements in The Shining, while also examining how conflicting desires that have been repressed can come to the surface through the dream-like setting of the Overlook Hotel.
Do you speak Kubrick? Orchestrating Transgression and Mastering Malaise in The Shining
Image & Narrative, 2011
In The Shining, Stanley Kubrick appropriates the codes of gothic horror and uses them to create both an extremely effective film and a commentary on the workings of horror. Ironically, it is through his obsessively controlling and all-encompassing directorial style that Kubrick best conveys the gothic themes of transgression, ambiguous identity, and the monstrous/abject. Kubrick's idiolect combines original source material (Stephen King's novel, Bartók's music) and cinematic technique, transforming them in ways which force the spectator into an uneasy dialogue based on Kubrick's filmic language. Résumé: Dans son film, Shining, Stanley Kubrick s'approprie les codes génériques de l'horreur et du gothique, créant à la fois un film efficace et un commentaire sur les rouages du genre. Il est ironique que Kubrick se serve de son style notoirement autoritaire et méticuleux afin de transmettre les thèmes gothiques de la transgression, le brouillage de l'identité et l'abject/monstrueux. L'idiolecte cinématographique Kubrickien transforme ses sources (le roman de Stephen King, la musique de Bartók), forçant ainsi le spectateur à dialoguer avec le film dans un langage qui le met mal à l'aise.
Feeling on Edge: Kubrick's The Shining Between Horror and Comedy
2020
Included in a dossier marking the 40th anniversary of The Shining, this essay considers how Kubrick's film operates in a mixed tonal range that combines horrific and comic elements. The essay closely examines how editing transitions generate anxiety. It also considers the phenomenon of repeat viewings and the ways in which it alters one's affective and perceptual experience of the film over time. http://sensesofcinema.com/2020/the-shining-at-40/feeling-on-edge-kubricks-the-shining-between-horror-and-comedy/ horror, humor, comedy, Kubrick, montage, emotion, affect, cinephilia, atmosphere, mood
Archaeologies of Hauntings: Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis in The Shining
The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is ostensibly a film about hauntings within a hotel. More specifically, it is a film about hauntings as a particular articulation of the traumatic past erupting into the present. In this case, the trauma centres on the hotel’s foundations as being built upon an ancient Indian burial ground. In this paper, I aim to interrogate what The Shining can tell us about the nature of the past, especially as it articulates itself as an irrecoverable depth, which can only be understood in archaeological rather than experiential terms. The usage of “archaeological” here refers to a past that is less one of experience and more a layer of sedimented meaning that effects the present without ever being reducible to the present. To this end, the very experience of horror—such as horror is able to maintain an experiential dimension—is the limit the film’s characters contends with in the face of a past violates the present but at the same time refuses to integrate with the present. In short, an archaeology of the past provides us with the conceptual language to understand how artefacts such as The Overlook Hotel can retain a latent history that is marked by a sense of depth rather than being a distance “behind” us. Indeed, one of the insights of The Shining is to show us that the past is the ground beneath oneself, contemporaneous with the present, rather than consigned to a void. To understand this relation between the trauma of the past and the materiality of the present, I draw on both the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the late psychoanalysis of Freud. As I argue, only by staging phenomenology and psychoanalysis together can the sedimented burial ground of the past be brought to life in such a way that we can begin to understand the nature of The Shining as a film as much about what Kubrick terms the “murderous bidding” of Jack Torrance as it is the eternal recurrence of a time that can never be assimilated into the present.
Do Not Overlook Room 237 and the Dismemberment of The Shining
Few movies in the history of cinema have been as enigmatic and thought-provoking as Kubrick's horror masterpiece The Shining (1980). The movie's maze structure and archetypical background of mythical reminiscence have challenged many film scholars and cinephiles to unravel the intricate pattern that Kubrick created. In 2012, the young filmmaker Rodney Ascher made Room 237, a documentary not so much about The Shining itself as about the many interpretations generated from Kubrick's movie. Assembled from movies' excerpts and archival materials, and with commentary by five people with different interests but united by an authentic obsession with The Shining, Room 237 is an enlightening journey into the most obscure regions of cinephilia, where repeated viewings of movies and overlap between cinema and everyday life confuse different levels of reality, causing an interpretation of the world mediated by cinema. Furthermore , the fragmentary structure of Room 237, constituted by a wide variety of material (from found footage to the visual analysis of The Shining's most compelling scenes), embodies and represents the progress of cinematographic spectatorship, from the movie theater to the home video years, and the Internet era with its digital streaming services. The article's main goal is to show how Kubrick's The Shining is particularly suitable for repeated compulsive viewing that encourages sensory overload and a potentially infinite cycle of interpretations. Furthermore, analysis of Room 237 will highlight the distinctive traits of contemporary remix aesthetic, which Ascher seems to choose as a vehicle for a reflection on the different ways of modern cinephilia.
New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2015
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 second and 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.
This essay deals with two connected questions: "is the horror genre really the most productive framework to understand "The Shining?" and "how does the use of psychoanalysis figure in this work?" My discussion deals with psychoanalysis as a meta narrative, as it is adapted for artistic expression and making sense of the irrational side of human behavior. The analysis here is NOT the proper structuralist, text-bound psychoanalytic reading of a film text. Coming from Cultural Studies: I'm interested in how psychoanalysis has become a form of popular knowledge and how it is being used, appropriated, imagined and polemicized. In my research of Kubrick, it is evident that he has psychoanalytic ideas in mind in working out the entire project of The Shining. My focus on Kubrick's use and articulation of psychoanalytic knowledge also reopens the question of intentionality in film studies. As I understand it, the culturalist turn often subjects authorship to broader cultural reading and interprets the work of individual agency to be functions of institutional constraints. Perhaps because I'm also an artist myself, I am drawn to analytical approaches that allow personal desires and private intentions to be brought back for scrutiny.