Stanley Kubrick - The Shining (1980) (Repost)

Aspiring-writer Jack Torrance accepts a job as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel during an icy Oregon winter so he can write his book. But the hotel has a macabre history that soon begins to worm its way into the present through the medium of his psychic son, Danny. Elegantly disturbing images ensue as Jack's writer's block gives way to derangment and his son sensitivity to the paranormal peels back the layers of history.

Jack Torrance se muda junto con su familia al hotel Overlook, donde ha sido contratado como encargado de mantenimiento mientras las instalaciones permanecen cerradas durante el duro invierno de cinco meses. Su idea es escribir su novela al tiempo que cuida de las instalaciones durante esos largos y solitarios meses, pero desde su llegada al hotel Jack comienza a padecer inquietantes transtornos de personalidad, al mismo tiempo que en el lugar comienzan a suceder diversos fenómenos paranormales.





The Shining is creative director Stanley Kubrick’s intense, epic, gothic horror film and haunted house masterpiece – a beautiful, stylish work that distanced itself from the blood-letting and gore of most modern films in the horror genre. Kubrick deliberately reduced the pace of the narrative and expanded the rather simple plot of a domestic tragedy to over two hours in length, created lush images within the ornate interior of the main set, added a disturbing synthesized soundtrack (selecting musical works from Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki), used a Steadicam in groundbreaking fashion, filmed most of the gothic horror in broad daylight or brightly-lit scenes, and built an unforgettable, mounting sensation of terror, ghosts, and the paranormal.





The movie is less an adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick's movie is an existential Road Runner cartoon in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer, who's settled in for a long winter's hibernation.





As many have pointed out, King's protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him - all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director's fanatical demands for take after take after take. The Shining is terrifying - but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV miniseries (reportedly because of King's dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there, but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick's The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there's no place to hide...



My rip with meGUI from the Optimum Blu-Ray DVD.

Primera y única incursión de Kubrick en el género del terror, un género que parece raro para las características del director y el cual abordó con su habitual maestría, sin renunciar a su personal estilo. Kubrick se ha caracterizado por saber crear un clima enrarecido y dotar a sus películas de un ambiente pesimista e incómodo. Desde su perspectiva, El Resplandor es precisamente eso, un cúmulo de situaciones en los que la atmósfera rodea a los personajes y les engulle en su desarrollo. El director saca el 100% del rendimiento posible al Overlook, que se convierte en el personaje principal. El hotel hace que el film sea hipnótico, perturbador, la guerra psicológica con la que se enfrenta el personaje de Jack Torrance. Como es costumbre en Kubrick, su film no es una puerta abierta a conclusiones o exposiciones explícitas sino todo lo contrario; como en 2001, La naranja mecánica o su póstuma Eyes Wide Shut será el espectador quién ha de interpretar muchos de los aspectos que tendrá ante sus ojos.

Nadie ha logrado retratar mejor que Kubrick los "laberintos" de la mente humana, en esta extraña película bañada de luz y arropada por su sonido, amén de regalarnos proezas técnicas como ese travelling a ras de suelo que ha pasado por mérito propio a encabezar una de las mejores secuencias del cine de todos los tiempos.

Script/Guión: Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson (novel: Stepen King)
Music/Sonido: Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind
Cinematography/Fotografía: John Alcott
Cast/Reparto: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, Lia Beldman, Billie Gibson, Barry Denne, David Baxt, Manning Redwood, Kisa Burns, Louise Burns, Alison Coleridge, Norman Gay