Via the sublime Joanne McNeil, news of The Shining screened backwards and forwards. And why not?
It’s not just for purpose of spectacle that this film was projected this way; it seems that Kubrick filmed (and edited) with an intuitive balance and geometry. Objects in the two layers of projections routinely matched up with each other, characters were positioned in similar places far too often to be chalked up as odd coincidence. The film is a mirror, and to appreciate it one must first determine on what side of the mirror a particular scene is taking place. The screening was inspired by my friend mstrmnd’s essay on it, which is easily among the best writing on film I’ve ever read. Read the whole thing. Kubrick is creating the uncanny, moving objects, building impossible structures, scene by scene, “the movement, sidedness, and multiple mirrors (implied or actual) indicate Kubrick has a passing knowledge of neuroscience.” I don’t want to spoil this, but the biggest surprise during the screening was discovering what was the exact middle of the film — the moment the dual projections matched up.
Makes perfect sense to me. And an excerpt from the incredibly dense treatise referred to above:
The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards. The human mind may find ways of playing it backwards subconsciously. Tricks are used to play with your memory.
There are several reasons why backwards is viable as a viewing order. 'End credits' begin the film, blue-turquoise filled helveticas rise as if the film is coming to an end (and Kubrick does not utilize rising end credits, ever). It also recalls how paper is scrolled in a typewriter, upwards. Like many other subtle combinations of camera movement and storytelling/activities, seen backwards, the first shot of the film can become the end of the film: the final image the horizontal/horizon, mountain and reflection, a state of hybrid native American perfection: eye-bliss. Another example: Wendy reads Jack’s typed book ‘backwards’ in the film’s forward, ie: she reads the page in the typewriter then the top page and continues down. The film itself is a series of reflections, each scene possesses a mirror scene of the other (ie: Danny and Wendy’s campfire/roadrunner meal is doubled beginning and end.) Kubrick stages certain interactions with characters that walk confrontationally, ie backing up. Seen reversed, a baseball bat wielding Wendy appears to be coaxing Jack ‘back’ into himself, similarly Danny backs up to fool his father in the snowy maze. Shock cuts: the film is actually scarier backwards since Kubrick has reversed the order of conventional horror-film storytelling. Viewers have always commented on the film’s inability to shock, with the scariest imagery appearing at the tail of each ‘scary’ scene, diffusing any effect. Backwards these effects increase their shock value. Most importantly, the film is a series of zooms, tracking movements some to and from awakenings. Many of these tracking sequences exhibit characters from far away, enough so that movement is primary to the scenery rather than plot. And the end is set in the past, not the present or the future, in the flash of a photographic bulb. Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade.
Press play.
