Summary of The Shining by Stanley Kubrick - Movie Review Example

The Shining This is a story of a desperate family headed by Jack as the father and Wendy as the mother with two sons. Theformer teacher and an alcoholic who is on recovering, tries to get a job at The Overlook Hotel. The hotel manager informs Jack of the haunt cabin fever caused by the winter effects. He gives a psychic warning account of the former caretaker. Meanwhile, Danny experiences a seizure while communicating to an imaginary friend Tony. He has a vision of The Overlook hotel in a blood-splashing event in the elevator. This image is haunted in the film. Danny arrives at the Hotel and meets the head chef who realizes how telepathic Danny is. He resolves to speak to him in a psychological way and gives him an ice cream. The telegraphically sent pictures that glow resulted to a communication termed as “Shining.” The communication between Danny and Dick the head chef gets to a hint of a terrible happening and questions concerning room 237. The head chef declines to respond but gives a warning in relation to the room. Jack encounters rapid mental health deterioration while alone with the family. He had cryptography and irritations while the son stays wondering about the room 237 in dissolution. A scenario follows with Danny sees a ball rolling from room 237 and discovers the open door. He takes an encounter to discover what is in the room while Wendy comes from the basement at a sound of a scream. The confrontations are ending with an accusation towards Jack. The Shining’s narrative adopts a plopping sequence where the narrator flips back and forth between events in the history and future foresight events. The film has a subliminal structure that is mixed up making it difficult to unravel the chronology. This is because the film deceives the viewer with false surface narrative. It also has mark-up devices that can be used to categorize scenes into their appropriate places on the entire timeframe. This is by the use of unannounced dream sequences, cross symbolisms of characters and factual narrative. The film has a novel adaptation where the author complains loudly. Kubrick’s adaptation of the film does not make significant changes from the novel by Stephen King. The movie is scary and horrific in the same that the novel is. They have a similar setting of a hotel with a haunted past that depicts the mood that drives the film. The film was in directorial narcissism brash exercise that was not faithful to the source. The film is a classic, horror movie that holds extraordinary artistic accomplishment. It has an innovative soundtrack and modernist score. The film has a brilliant cinematography especially the early use of the Steadicam. However, Kubrick utilizes the setting, human figure placement, lighting and composition in creating the Mise-en scene. The night shots’ overlooks and the maze alongside the hotel provide the setting of the film. The horror sense of the film comes out the film constitutes a vision of inscrutable comic order of a human figure, swoop shots and combining it with soundtrack to generate a feeling of dread of the audience. The film uses protracted scenes that are uncompromisingly slow. This makes it tedious and self-indulgent igniting a charm of its own. The framing film uses extreme angles and camera settings. At one point, it is framed from directly below in a vertical camera position. Thus makes it difficult to work out the images that are seen to their right proportion. It also uses extremely wide-angle lenses to the extent that they cause barrel distortion. This was consistent with the general tone of the film. He also uses long tracking shots in which the camera moving backwards while the actor is walking facing the camera. This is evident in the shots of Danny riding his bicycle along the Hotel’s corridors. Kubrick also uses the legendary coldness in the film that extends to the overall film execution and tone. This does not appeal to the cinematic taste just like the interminable scenes. This film has a complex frame-line that connects the past and imaginations in a pictorial form. The vision frame depicts the ability of the filmmaker to go further beyond and explore how other framing manipulations create a compelling narrative. This gives illumination to Kubrick’s film. He works dualities of tone and structure on adapting aspects of building the narrative. The film director uses mode of narration, sympathies of audience, different visual tones, and genre in the film for juxtaposition. The film uses point of view in the determination of suspense. It does not only use the ability to create suspense but the ability for the viewer to share the suspense with the characters. The director creates tension by creating a pattern of suspense that operates within the whole narrative. He combines the juxtaposition of a local suspense with a global suspense in structuring narratory strands within the overall suspense pattern of the film. The director handles humor in a way that it reveals dynamic creation between character, audience and the filmmaker. Kubrick understands the complex structure of the film narrative. He deals with every visual convention from the use of voice-over, sound, shot composition and editing. He also goes further to graphic design adaptations. He uses time, repetition and space and segmentations of narrative. The use of suspense by the director can be built through how one uses narrative conventions. It is constructed, maintained and dissipated through mechanisms that are inherent in the media to which it is applied. Moreover, he develops a detective approach structure of the story and applies it to graphic design methods. The Shining enacts a mode of cinematic thoughts that operate at a high pitch which creates a collision of distant historical epochs. The filmmaker adopts pre-existent cinematic genre upon historical status within the American scene. His adoption of genre codes entails an immanent critique for the codes and their viability contemporarily. His genre work seems to create instructive dissonance instead of holding up film-savvy citation and smirking quotation marks. He uses a layer of history and privilege of American origin to the Gilded Age through the twentieth centuries and the hotel’s apparent heyday. The layer of competing time draws attention to class of consciousness. It is extremely impossible to separate the historical specifics of haunting in the film. This is because there is no known relation that existed between Charles Grady and Delbert. Neither is there any fact of their indifference in personality as conflated by the hotel’s bent chronology. The shining establishes an identity of the brain and world. The director creates a structure where past and present are fully coterminous time images of which the Overlook hotel-as-mind has equal accessibility. The form of historical thought at work in the film is one which is articulated across both spatial, gender and racial divides. It is also articulated through the director’s attention to the film medium properties. Sounds can drive dread to the audience’s heart in the way they are used in films. Music can be used to determine when an audience is afraid and when to take keen listening for consequential acknowledgement in films. The music ceases when Halorann drives up in the time of Jack’s rage. In this scenario, the audience receives a break from the tension that was there before. Fear is one of the most bases of emotions. Sometimes the film’s focus is on fear whereas other time there is a need for informing the audience. There is no music when Jack is talking to Lloyd the bartender. In this scene, the audiences need to hear and understand what the actors are talking about. The true measure of film success lies in the ability to institute a relationship with the audience. Therefore, the horror film genre must be aware of this relationship and carefully manage it. Moreover, the purpose of a horror film in not mainly thought invocation but to invoke emotional reaction from the audience. The Shining uses frightening images, disturbing characters and thrilling sequences to create fear. This is practicable by the use of “tried and true” genre method in evoking fear to the audience. Horror genre employs the method of serial killer” around the corner” and monsters under the bed to guarantee a scare from the audience. The film comes along to the depth and possibilities of the relationships. This form is presented in a way that it attaches itself inside the human psyche and remains there for a long time after the film is over. Through the use of imagery and sound, the film gets beauty, becomes terrifying and thought evoking. The shining becomes more violent as the drama proceeds and results to paranoia. The violence results to confrontations that cause anger among the characters. The image changes from an angry hedge animal to ghost with the ability to destroy human flesh by causing bruises. The Shining portrays a supernatural image that has some deep nature. This is the way which, they explore the sufferings and motivations of the human heart. This is an act of describing the extrasensory perception. Both Halloran and Danny have psychic visions. The pain characterized by alcoholism because of its abuse often relate well with violence. The innocent perception of alcoholism through Danny reveals the shining theme that affects human resource power. The desire for the strong drink by jack leaves him vulnerable at a glance. There is a time-lap in twisted logic that creates a state of mingling between the dead and the living. The novel reveals the challenge in knowing what the future holds visa vie the power to change. The facts about reality and human perceptions can be masked in the ways of trying to make sense over realities. The search for truth at the Overlook hotel concluded in acknowledging the unbelievable and supernatural. This can be impacted by one’s personal past, alcoholism and stress or reality perception. “It’s a slang term for the catastrophic reverse movement that can occur when people are secluded for a long time. The claustrophobic feeling is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with.” (Torrance) Isolation effects are more than a closed stay in a hotel. The mental ghosts in the Shining contribute to isolation. Deeper isolation progresses from human isolation to the mental isolation. The isolation crisis can be broken through with courage and love. Language and communication are essential as proved in the story. Danny’s ability to know his parents mind affects the degree of communication by limiting or expanding. Communication breakdown affects to the lives of the characters. Works Cited The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Jack Torrance. 1980. DVD. Read More