Video Essays Around The Shining: A Selection Miguel Marías July 2020 The Shining at 40 Issue 95 Featuring a brand new, original video essay by Miguel Mira and Olena Pikho, made especially for this dossier, this is the opportunity to look at a series of brilliant and often jubilant videos engaging with The Shining—attesting to the film’s legacy and wide-ranging appeal. The Shining – Embodying ghosts through movement (Miguel Mira and Olena Pikho, 2020) “The Shining” (1980) revolutionized the horror genre and quickly became one of the most acclaimed films in history. We pay tribute to its cinematography and camera movements: they not only tell a daring story, but are also unique in the way in which the novel Steadicam technology, designed just a few years prior by Garrett Brown, was transcended from a seamless, gliding camera prop, into embodying a different and new cinematic agency, and becoming a part of the narrative as an uncanny gaze of sorts–a surveilling entity that contributes, like the other ghosts of the Overlook hotel, to instilling angst and terror in the protagonists as well as the audience. Accompanying this original video essay, here is a series of classics—a cherry picked selection out of the hundreds of video essays, spoofs, and deep fakes populating the internet and paying homage to the The Shining. The Shining in 30 Seconds (and Re-enacted by Bunnies) (Jennifer Shiman, posted 2014) The title says it all. The rest is bunnies. The Shining 8Bit Cinema (David Dutton, posted 2013) The Shining as 8 bit computer game. Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will feel more than a hint of nostalgia in this creative mashup of The Shining and adventure games that populated our PCs in the age of 8Bit and EGA graphics. The Shining (sweded) (Daniele & Chris, posted 2013) Following the success of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind (2008), fans around the world started ‘sweding’ their favorite films. At least half a dozen such “sweded” versions of The Shining exist readily available on Youtube and Vimeo, and here is one. Before The Shining (Candice Drouet, posted 2017) Drouet’s long-standing, brilliant video essay traces a few of the most important (but not always evident) films to have influenced Kubrick’s film. The Red Drum Getaway (edited by Simon Philippe, Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, posted 2015) This work of hipster, ironic genius reconnects Hitchcock and Kubrick in a way that is at once visionary and wickedly playful. ‘Shining’ – a recut trailer (Robert Ryang, posted 2005) One of the first great subversions of The Shining to have circulated online, made by author Robert Ryang for a contest, here recut to the identical in HD version. The Shining starring Jim Carrey: Episode 2 (Ctrl Shift Face, posted 2019) Of late, the ‘deep fake’ technology has emerged as a new potential player in media criticism and manipulation. It is used here to more uncanny than comic effect in a series of sequences of The Shining, where Jack Nicholson’s face has been replaced with Jim Carrey’s. The Wedding (Noces Macabres) (Jeremi Szaniawski, La Hulpe, 2007; New Haven, 2011, posted 2011) This intimate video is an oblique evocation of the uncanny yet intimate horror, generic interplay, and atmosphere of dread and insanity, which pervade The Shining. The Wedding deals primarily with coming of age, and the sense of loss of a home, a hearth, a womb.
