The movie was ordered up by the Russian revolutionary leadership for the 20th anniversary of the Potemkin uprising, which Lenin had hailed as the first proof that troops could be counted on to join the proletariat in overthrowing the old order.

As sketched by Eisenstein’s film, the crew members of the battleship, cruising the Black Sea after returning from the war with Japan, are mutinous because of poor rations. There is a famous closeup of their breakfast meat, crawling with maggots.

The Late Ivan Beshoff, the last survivor of the 1905 mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin said that the mutiny was in fact over poor food and that it was the first mass expression of discontent in Czar Nicholas II’s military.

After officers throw a tarpaulin over the rebellious ones and order them to be shot, a firebrand named Vakulinchuk cries out, “Brothers! Who are you shooting at?” The firing squad lowers its guns, and when an officer unwisely tries to enforce his command, full-blown mutiny takes over the ship.

Onshore, news of the uprising reaches citizens who have long suffered under czarist repression. They send food and water out to the battleship in a flotilla of skiffs. Then, in one of the most famous sequences ever put on film, czarist troops march down a long flight of steps, firing on the citizens who flee before them in a terrified tide. Countless innocents are killed, and the massacre is summed up in the image of a woman shot dead trying to protect her baby in a carriage – which then bounces down the steps, out of control.

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene.

The massacre on the steps is fictional, presumably created by Eisenstein for its dramatic venue and effect, as well as for propaganda and to demonise the Tsar and the Imperial regime. It is, however, based on the fact that there were widespread demonstrations in the area, sparked off by the arrival of the Potemkin in Odessa Harbour, and troops fired on the crowds with accompanying loss of life.

It is ironic that he did it so well that today; the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

“The Battleship Potemkin” is conceived as class-conscious revolutionary propaganda, and Eisenstein deliberately avoids creating any three-dimensional individuals (even Vakulinchuk is seen largely as a symbol). Instead, masses of men move in unison, as in the many shots looking down at Potemkin’s foredeck. The people of Odessa, too, are seen as a mass made up of many briefly glimpsed but starkly seen faces.

The level of appreciation for the film depends on one’s tolerance for this cinematic abstraction of reality that can explicitly shape events for maximum agitational effect. Of course, to criticize Potemkin in this way is to take it completely out of its important context. But then again, that is undoubtedly how the film is seen today.

Here is an essay I wrote almost a year ago for my Film module while I was at Digipen. Like all my essays this too earned me an A, not that it matters now. But I was told that this essay was the standard other students should aspire to. You be the judge of that.

History tells us that in the 1920s and 1930s, the three most enduring faces to Americans were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Charlie Chaplin.

Although much of today’s younger generation probably wonders what all the fuss was about, Chaplin remains one of the great figures of popular culture. He is a global comedic icon much like the Harold Lloyd and the unforgettable Three Stooges.

In a bit of irony, his final silent film, “City Lights” – regarded as his greatest work – was released in 1931; three years after “talkies” had arrived on the scene.

And then there is D. W. Griffith’s most accomplished fugue, “Broken Blossoms”. Filmed in a mere 18 days, “Broken Blossoms,” unlike Griffith’s best-known epics “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” sidesteps spectacle and pomp and concentrates on a simple love story.

Set in the misty gloom of London’s Lime house District, the story revolves around three ill-fated characters: Battling Burrows. a sadistic prize fighter; his daughter, Lucy, whom he brutally beats whenever he is drunk or angry, and Cheng Huan, a Buddhist who journeys from China to bring “a message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons.” Instead, he turns to opium, and “Lime house knows him only as the Chink storekeeper.”

Although “City lights” and “Broken Blossoms” are both silent movies, they are two different movies that were made for two, very different kinds of audiences.

Where “Broken blossoms” is a wonderfully atmospheric melodrama that deftly balances tenderness and violence, “City lights” on the other hand, is not so much about lost love, but rather a sacrifice (getting the blind girl an operation whatever the result) that elevates the human condition.

“Broken Blossoms” is a great visual poetry with an exquisite performance by Lillian Gish, paired with risible titles and a crude scenery-chewing villain. A Chinese robe and a few cushions however cannot match the film’s loving reconstruction of Lime house a century ago. But while retaining the pathos and innocence of the two lovers, the film also humanizes their nemesis; in crushing them, he only repeats what society has done to him.

Battling Burrows, once a feared prizefighter, now battles booze and his small daughter, Lucy. Her back bent like an old woman’s, she cooks her father’s dinner and eats the scraps. He rages that he has to keep her, often asking, “What have you done for me?”

When Burrows beats Lucy worse than usual, she stumbles into the shop of Cheng Huan, who worships her pale beauty. He caresses the child tenderly, and presents her with both her first pretty dress and her first toy. But Lucy’s brief happiness is fatal when her father sees her affection for someone even lower on the social scale than himself – “a slimy Chink!”

What ensues is a heart-wrenching scene performed by one of the most expressive actresses to grace the silent screen. In an attempt to escape, Lucy locks herself in a closet. Lucy more or less starts to behave like an animal. She screams and just like a rat in a trap, turns around and around.

Here, Griffith intercuts between three locations: the closet (where the fearful, Lucy is hiding), the living room (where the belligerent Burrows is attacking with an axe) and Cheng Huan’s bedroom (where he has found his room trashed and his girl gone). The suitor grabs a gun and leaves to try to rescue the young women. Finally, Burrows breaks through the door. Lucy‘s fear is unbearable. Griffith cuts to two subjective close-ups: one of Lucy and one of Burrows.

Burrows pulls his daughter through the shattered door. The scene is terrifying in its intensity and in its inevitability. Burrows beats his daughter to death. When our hero arrives, he finds the young woman dead and confronts Burrows, killing him.

The story rapidly reaches its conclusion. As Cheng Huan carries Lucy back to his house and says a prayer for her departed soul. And like much like the story of Pyramus and Thisbe only with the roles reversed, Cheng Huan ends his own life before the authorities can get to him.

Cheng Huan aka the Yellow man in my estimation is a more interesting character from a psychological standpoint than Charlie Chaplin in “City Lights”.

Virtue ethics demands the we decide the kind of training we should use, what sort of ethical character we should try to create, for this we will have to, like the deontologists and consequentialists, appeal to general rules, and like the consequentialists in particular, ask, “what kind of person do we want to train a young person to be.”

Although virtue ethics concerns training, not everyone can receive the training for every role; if someone shows a natural propensity for certain virtues, those virtues can be honed. But if someone strongly lacks certain virtues, it may simply be impossible to train such a person to take on role that requires those virtues.

Cheng Huan, for instance has the virtues of a honest man, but because of his deprivation largely attributed to his monastic life he had many suppressed sexual urges that we see him struggling with when he meets Lucy.

In terms of Cheng Hun’s ethical training, the Monastery seems to have failed in two ways: the Monastery failed in providing moderating virtues (Cheng Huan is seen smoking opium), and also in changing the underlying character of Cheng Huan’s capacity to lose control of himself in fit of anger.

On a cinematic standpoint, one would expect in this early fledgling industry, technique was up for grabs. Griffith seemed to know what he wanted but was never sure how to get it. The whole film looked like one long cinematic experiment down to the, soft or diffused-light close-up used extensively.

“City Lights”, the film with possibly cinema’s most memorable concluding scene where the once-blind flower girl finally sees Chaplin’s romantically frustrated Tramp figure and finds him wanting, also has a poetry of its own: He recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face.

The camera just exchanges a few close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.

What makes the “City Lights” conclusion the definitive example of comedy segueing to pathos? Well, Chaplin had been working toward this sort of high emotional ending for years. A special comedy component of the Chaplin has always been as a caretaker for vulnerable young heroines who often later broke his heart.

The Charlie of “City Lights” is competing with his own creation–the blind girl thinks her benefactor is a handsome young millionaire. The Tramp allows this innocent misperception to stand. Indeed, Chaplin tweaks his perennial outsider into the most unselfish of saviors. Falling in love with a beautiful blind girl, Chaplin moves the proverbial heaven and Earth to acquire the necessary cash for a sight-producing operation.

While his assorted odd jobs, from street sweeper to boxer, do not pan out, his sometimes friendship with a forgetful millionaire (who only remembers the Tramp when he has been drinking) proves more profitable, but there is an unfortunate catch.

Shortly after receiving the money, an unrelated robbery attempt at the millionaire’s mansion makes it appear that Charlie is a thief. Though Chaplin initially escapes and gets the operation funds to the blind girl, he ultimately is caught and does jail time.

Now, flash forward to sometime in the future. The Tramp is just out of prison, and he has not looked so bedraggled since his Mack Sennett beginnings (1914). The blind girl is not at her normal flower-selling location, but one knows she is on his mind because of the attention Chaplin gives a discarded flower in the street. Put upon by some thoughtless pea-shooting newsboys, the Tramp accidentally finds himself on the street which houses her new florist shop.

The comic altercation between Chaplin and the newsboys amuses the now obviously sighted flower girl, who views the Tramp through the glass window of her shop. Still clutching the flower, often symbolic of the fragility of life and love in the Chaplin world, Charlie suddenly sees her and is frozen in place. He is overjoyed that she can see, yet overwhelmed about what this means for them.

While Chaplin envisions yet another idealized heroine on a 19th century romanticized pedestal, she and her assistant see only a laughable clown apparently smitten by her beauty.

She expresses her pity by offering the Tramp a coin and a fresh flower. Embarrassed, Charlie shakes off his shock and starts to move away. She, however, comes into the street and manages to stop the Tramp, placing a coin and a flower in his hand. This is a brilliant stroke by Chaplin, since this touch allows the once blind girl to realize the Tramp is her benefactor.

Now it is her turn to be shocked. “You?” she hesitantly asks. Giving her a humiliated smile, Chaplin answers with a nod. Still finding the scene hard to comprehend, the Tramp has to ask via a title, “You can see now?” Responding as if in a stupor, yet looking directly into Charlie’s sad eyes, she dully states, by way of a title, “Yes, I can see now.” In a series of close-ups between the two, the camera ultimately stays on the Tramp. The haunting image of his face is the picture of pathos- The difficult smile that somehow acknowledges that this romance certainly is at an end.

Despite the apparent feelings of the heroine at the picture’s close, the ambiguous, open-ended quality of the conclusion makes “City Lights” all the more attractive to a realist. Ambiguity is synonymous with existence itself–multiple meanings to a given experience. So little in life is cut and dried. Of course, besides appealing to realists, this element of hope also is alluring to romantics who prefer this treatment to the rather tragic tale of Broken Blossoms.

Other directors have won more awards, made more money and received more lavish critical acclaim. But it’s doubtful that any other movie maker has approached the craft with Stanley Kubrick’s intensity and independence, and none of them has attained such lofty goals.

While other directors search for ways to connect with the audience by giving them characters to identify with, plots that make the path easy to follow and a few jokes to lighten even the most burdensome themes, Kubrick will have none of that.

Although his body of work is relatively small, it is a remarkable collection that ranges from historical pieces to science fiction, from comedy to horror, from realism to fantasy.

And then there was Krzysztof Kieslowski who not only made films that engage viewers on multiple levels, but spoke and wrote about them and himself in a voice that remains very much alive, years after his death. His disinclination to make claims for his films, or, indeed, to make claims for himself as anything but a man working at a craft leaves a great deal of space for theorists and critics to fill in. Still, his vibrant, dry, and witty voice remains in the consciousness of Kieslowski devotees. Kieslowski’s style generates a unique universe, one imbued with theological and philosophical meaning that permits viewers to respond to it and relate to its metaphysical implications.

“Bleu” the first installment of Kieslowski’s trilogy tied to the French tricolor is an arresting, heartfelt and finally nobly idealistic study of Julie Vignon (Juliette Binoche) as a grief-stricken widow who lost her composer husband and 5-year-old daughter in the same car crash she survived. Humanely and imaginatively, it braids the stages in her grieving, recovery and reintegration into the human community with the concept of European unity. Her husband had been working on a concerto saluting the idea before he died. Ordering the unfinished work destroyed, she systematically begins paring her life down to bare essentials, wanting no complicated emotional alliances or connections.

Krzysztof Kieslowski wanted to explore the very interior nature of the heroine’s mind and predicament in “Bleu”. Kieslowski was aware of death, he was aware of those who he had loved and who had died. He was perhaps on some level on his own death. I believe there is a kind of dark sense of sensibility that death is present and one feels in the film “Bleu”.

The word liberty does not have any political component in the film. It’s about an attempt of a young woman who has lost her husband and daughter in the car accident to live essentially free without memory, without work, without a past; with no connections. He redefines the concept of liberty that could have been a political sphere to an intensely personal, psychological and emotional one.

We have in “Bleu” are darker portrayals of a female spirit. It’s darker because she hides her pain. In the film she is not talking and speaking with silences because she is really tired from life and she is resisting life somehow.

If you want to explore the theme of liberty on a very personal level in 1992 Europe then obviously you need to have a character who is financially stable because the liberty that Kieslowski is going for is more emotional, psychological, philosophical.

Kieslowski is basically saying that if a person like Julie has enough money to live on and she doesn’t have to work for a living is it possible for her to simply exist? Can she just get up in the morning after a cup of coffee and vanilla ice cream, breathe and smoke? Is that enough?

At moments it appears that it might be enough because we see her swimming always in a pool. She seems to spend a lot of physical energy in the pool kind of avoiding other kinds of things. We get the sense of a woman who wants to live without connections to anything that will cause her pain.

By the end of the film, she realizes that it is not possible. She cannot help but open up to the people in her immediate proximity. She cannot help even once she learns that her husband has a mistress, to reach out to the mistress and offer her the family home that she was living before.

It’s a very strange kind of motion picture because we realize that things need to live. Human beings need to live. A music score that is written needs to be preformed. There is somehow a responsibility to life continuing and that goes against liberty which Kieslowski embraces at the end.

Even the choice of her exerting her physical energy is metaphorically. The surface of water is the thin fine line between the surface and bottom; life and death.

There is one moment in the film when Julie is just about to get out of the water, the music starts and since water is essentially about going back to the first step, babies and all that, Julie goes into a fetus position, essentially telling the audience of her upcoming resurrection.

Always questioning what makes a good person. Are we capable of altruism? Are we able to put ourselves in the place of another? These are very abstract questions. In “Bleu” Kieslowski makes it very concrete because up until the last part of the film, Julie has great deal of control and restraint.

She is not somebody we want to get close too. We don’t get the feeling that she is all that generous. All we know is that she is very good at shutting everybody off, often living her own little life. But once she starts to reach out to others, once she gives her family home to her husband’s mistress we realize that, that was always there. However her circumstances couldn’t allow her opening up to anyone.

One of the things “Bleu” is about is unless you confront the loss, go through the morning process, all of that avoidance and escape is just a flurry of activity that will result in the return of the repress.

Unlike Jack Nicolson in ““The Shining”” who is pretty animated and loud, Juliette Binoche ‘s performance in “Bleu” is definitely her finest. It’s a film that requires her to say very little and express a great deal. Kieslowski was right to choose her because she can be a very restraint actress in a way. Certainly between Kieslowski and Binoche they came up with a performance quite extraordinarily in its intensity in exploring grief.

As an audience we know every second of the film on what she is thinking and feeling even though she has no words at lot of times to tell us.

One shining example would be with the lollypop scene. It’s the silence of anger and pain and to bite and stay silence like that and not to scream or resist is more horrible that a scream because there is so much resistance.

In a scene in which Juliette Binoche, 40 to 50 minutes into the movie meets Oliver. There is music playing. We don’t know where it’s coming from. Later we realize there’s a musician playing the flute in the street. Kieslowski did the very same thing in white. There’s scene where Karol plays the harmonica in the subway. At this moment, Julie turns down this Oliver and he leaves. We then get to see where the music is coming from, from the musician on the street.

Then an extreme close up of a sugar cube is about to fall in the cup of coffee. What does this obsession with close-ups mean? Simply Kieslowski is trying to show the heroine’s world from her point of view.

To show that she sees these little things, things that are near her, by focusing on them in order to demonstrate that the rest doesn’t matter to her. She’s trying to contain, to put the lid on her world and on her immediate environment.

There are a few details like this in the movie. Kieslowski made a very tight shot of the sugar cube sucking up the coffee to show the nothing around her matters to her, not other people nor their business, nor the boy, the man who loves her and went through a great ordeal to find her, she just doesn’t care. Only the sugar cube matters and she intentionally focuses on it to shut out all the things she doesn’t accept.

It seems easy to film a sugar cube soaking up coffee, sucking it up and turning brown. If we start a stopwatch, it should take five and a half seconds or five seconds to be completely soaked.
Kieslowski’s detail to attention is much like Kubrick’s own attention to his camera work. How to make sure that a sugar cube only takes five seconds to soak up coffee? Not as easy as it sounds.

Kieslowski knew such a detail shouldn’t last more than five seconds. For half a day, he actually had his assistant test all kinds of sugar cubes to find one that would get soaked in exactly five seconds.

What do we care about a sugar cube sucking up coffee? Unless of course, we are for a moment in our heroine’s own world. Julie dips a sugar cube in her coffee and focuses on it to reject the offer that the man who loves her just made her.

She wants to reject this offer, forget this man, and forget the music that doesn’t stop because this music reminds her of something she denies. Kieslowski mastery over film is his exceptional knowledge of timing because he knew just how long an audience needs to be exposed for a scene.

The sugar cube has fallen, the coffee is spilled, and the heroine approaches the musician. There is dialogue…in which she learns that different people in different places of the world but at the same time think about the same things.

This theme is almost an obsession. People in different places and for various reasons think about the same things. Kieslowski was trying to talk about things that unite people in his film.
That is the case for the feeling and for the music. All these notes exist, scattered somewhere, waiting for the one who will assemble them, put them in order.

The fact that different men, at different moments, at different places, with different social status, can assemble these notes in the same way is, to Kieslowski, a sign of what unites all men.
The ending Julie is making love to Oliver. It appears as though it was shot through a glass. It looks like a fish tank, like an aquarium. It’s a kind of rebirth for Julie. In the beginning, she’s dead and then she lives again.

If one thing can be said about Kieslowski is that he loved playing with the film. Changing things, tweaking things, make one scene stand out here and taking another out. Editing is discovering the soul of the movie and Kieslowski more than any director seem to truly understand its power.

Kieslowski mastered the different possibilities of editing as well as the experimental, “laboratorial” side of editing. Kieslowski is known to film different options in case anything would happen while he was editing. He did so because he just to have ways to escape, to have other possibilities. And a mark of a great director is that they are always prepared.

The best example is in “Bleu”. When Julie wakes up at the hospital after the accident, there is this close up of Julie’s eye with the reflection of the doctor. The reflection of the doctor, Claude Duneton, is the subjective mode. It seems very strange because in fact it does suggest something subjective, but we see from the outside.

This shot lasts a very long time. Unusually long compared to the rhythm of the movie. Although it lasts a long time it tells a great deal. It is known that Kieslowski had everything shot in reverse angle on the doctor in order to go back to something more academic, if needed.

This is why it is so important to have enough material, to be able to tighten, elevate the rhythm of a film. Get rid of what isn’t good, less interesting, or unnecessary to tell the story. It’s true that is very important to have enough material, to be able to synthesize all this and go straight to the point.

Kieslowski punctuated the film with long dissolves in order to make some room for the music and all at once reveal emotions or things by fading to black. It is not the traditional way of fading to black.

Traditionally it’s used to mark a pause, dissolves are used to mark a short pause, but for longer pause, we fade to black. In “Bleu” Kieslowski fades to black in the middle of a scene to create a suspension in time.

The scene where Julie learns about her husband’s lover, it’s like punctuation. There is something peculiar about Kieslowski’s way of editing, great rhythmic breaks and sometimes there are long moments, long beats, and sometimes the opposite, a much faster pace.

Kieslowski’s editing is very special. It is what sets his movies apart, a very unexpected way of editing films, with many variations in rhythm.

Kieslowski’s cutting is artful, especially when he uses morally double-edged TV images to mark milestones in Binoche’s life — the funeral of her husband and daughter, the new focus of her senile mother in a nursing home, the source of an important piece of information she didn’t know about her late husband. It’s boldly old-fashioned for Kieslowski to conclude that all you really need is love (although it doesn’t seem to help her addled mother), but he brings it off. In addition to his technical adroitness and Binoche’s spellbinding tour de force as a good woman recovering from a devastating blow, “Bleu” achieves a genuine spiritual dimension.

It may not be too much of a stretch to claim that Stanley Kubrick’s ““The Shining”” is the most underappreciated film of his career. This neglect is undoubtedly attributable to the fact that as the cinematic adaptation of a Stephen King novel which is equally under-rated, ““The Shining”” may be categorized as a horror film-and it is, but it is also one which exists on a much more profound level than the garden-variety pulp flicks that give the genre its widespread disrepute.

Interestingly, popular film critics in America tended to rake “The Shining” over the coals upon its release because it did not adequately fulfill expectations based on Hollywood convention (some critics complained that the film was too complicated and didn’t make sense, others that it was too slow, still others that it was not scary enough), while academic film critics apparently steered clear of it because it was a horror film and as such not worth paying attention to. But what all of these critics failed to realize was that with “The Shining” Stanley Kubrick has created a film that is unnerving precisely because of the tension produced by the conflict among the horror film conventions in its surface plot, the indictment of American racist and sexist ideology in its subtext, and the satirical streak that runs throughout this political commentary and surrounding time-honored Gothic trappings.

Perhaps most impressively, Kubrick also manages to implicate us as an audience in this tragic-comic scenario in many ways, some visceral and some intellectual, all of which serve to expose our race and gender stereotypes; and it is no surprise that Kubrick, a director who indulges his penchant for using mirrors as cinematic devices in “The Shining”, ultimately suggests that his film is horrific not because it’s about ghosts, but because it reflects us, its audience.

“The Shining” is hypnotic; you just can’t help watching it. It’s one of those movies where you know terrible things are going to happen. But you can’t look away.

It’s underlining story of a murderous father’s hate for his child and wife is a very frightening one. There some moments in the film that were chilling as any moment ever seen in film; just surprising surreal images.

The making of “The Shining” is very much influenced by the concept of the making of the clockwork orange. Kubrick saw that he was being outpaced by various people who were doing better than him; he wanted to do something so great that they will be blown out of the water.

Kubrick said that you shouldn’t worry too much about your successes; you should be worried about your failures. Because your failures mean you are limited by the opportunities for the future.

“Barry Lyndon” was a fabulous movie who unfortunately didn’t make a lot of money. So Kubrick couldn’t make Napoleon, his dream project. So he had to find a project that would perhaps make him money.

For a long time, Kubrick was not interested in horror stories, but gothic stories, stories that were sinister and stories that had a slightly mystical and ghostly element to them. Kubrick was particularly been influenced by a story by Stephen Crane called “The Blue Hotel” which he read as a young man. He did like the idea that a person might arrive at a place with a death wish, so years later when he was offered “The Shining” by Warner Brothers he didn’t want to do a conventional horror movie and as a director who painstakingly oversees and plans out every nuance of his films, Kubrick infused “The Shining” with as much complex subtlety as possible.

This is true of all aspects of the film, including its ostensibly simple screenplay, which Kubrick collaborated on with Diane Johnson (an English Lit professor whose specialty is Gothicism). Taken at face-value, the general story line is indeed standard enough Gothic fare, if somewhat modernized. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a caretaking job at a posh Colorado summer resort hotel that closes down during the winter season. A former schoolteacher turned writer, Jack is looking forward to the isolation and time the job will provide him with, both of which he thinks will benefit his writing career. Accompanying him for the duration of the job are his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his 7 year-old son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who has the “shining,” a psychic ability which enables him to see in part past and future events as well as to probe the minds of others. Jack is a tenuously reformed alcoholic who has hurt Danny in the past as a result of his drinking, and the caretaking job, it is implied, is his chance to get his act together and make a new start.

The Overlook Hotel, where the family will be residing, is the site of an atrocity involving an earlier caretaker who murdered his wife and daughters while employed in the same capacity. The hotel, of course, turns out to be haunted, and Jack seems doomed to follow in the former caretaker’s homicidal footsteps. Again, this is fairly common, if serviceable, suspense film protocol. But it is in the sub textual content lurking just below the surface of these narrative conventions where the screenplay manifests its complexities, many of which can be seen as highlighting Kubrick’s thematic concern with the dark side of white American psychology and its connection to politics, sexuality, and family. As such, it will be useful here to examine each of these three topics as subtexts and finally to consider the film’s satiric content and Kubrick’s subsequent implication of the audience.

“The Shining” is less about ghosts and demonic possession than it is about the murderous system of economic exploitation which has sustained this country since, like the Overlook Hotel, it was built upon an Indian burial ground.

Here the horror film convention of explaining supernatural events by having the haunted house built on a burial ground takes on political implications, although the first-time viewer will likely be led to believe that the ghosts of the Indians who were fought off of their land by the builders might haunt the hotel. (“I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks while they were building it,” Ullman, the manager, tells Jack and Wendy in the amused conversational tone of the worldly man who is above such concerns as he gives them the grand tour in one of the opening sequences.) But in fact, all of the hotel’s ghosts (both male and female) are white.

Also significant with regard to this subtext are the only two adults in the film that are positive male characters, both of whom are African-Americans: the Overlook head chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), who shares “The Shining” with Danny and makes the exhausting trip from his winter home in Florida in an unselfish attempt to intervene on behalf of the boy and Wendy when Jack brandishes his wickedly gleaming fire axe and goes hobbling and drooling after them during the latter part of the film; and Larry Durkin (Tony Burton), Hallorann’s friend who owns a service station on the outskirts of Denver and who aids Hallorann in reaching the Overlook by providing him with a Snowcat to travel the otherwise impassable, blizzard-clogged route to the hotel.

Earlier in the film, Jack has a conversation in an adjoining bathroom with the ghost of the former murderous caretaker Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), who appears as a haughty English butler during an obviously ironic July 4, 1921, costume party in the hotel ballroom (attended exclusively by white revelers).

He informs Jack that Danny has used his shining to “bring an outside party into this situation.” Jack is nonplussed. “Who?” he asks Grady, and Grady replies from within what critic Richard T. Jameson terms “the quaint snobbery of his anachronistic, English-accented cultural frame”. “A nigger? A nigger cook!” The most disturbing racial/political implication of the film’s subtext becomes clear at this point, according to Jameson, when “Jack repeats, ‘A “nigger?”‘ on the verge of disbelieving laughter. Jack is also fascinated by the new ripple of self-congratulating possibility here. Whose sensibility is in charge?.

This, of course, is the crux of the matter; at a never-ending 1921 Fourth of July party in one of America’s most ritzy hotels, the sensibility in charge is very likely that of the wealthy American white male, and the message to Jack here is clear-if he wants to join this party, and if he wants to benefit from doing so, he will have to shed his enlightened liberal schoolteacher/writer personality and adopt the racist views seen as constituting a valid claim to authority by wealthy, white, pre-Depression and pre-World War II American societal circles.

But there are other attitudes Jack will have to embrace along with that of the wealthy white racist if he wants to join this exclusive and eternal Fourth of July costume party where the whisky flows free of charge and where erotically mysterious women in cat masks and elbow-length black velvet gloves sit with gingerly-poised cigarette holders between their fingers. Paramount among these attitudes is that of the non-committal, swinging, chauvinistic single guy, and Jack slips into this role with little difficulty when he first encounters the Overlook’s ghostly bartender, Lloyd:

Though the attraction of booze is primary, Jack’s banal and clichéd bar-fly conversation with Lloyd is mostly about women. Jack and Lloyd reveal that Jack thinks of women in the coarsest possible terms: he describes Wendy as “the old sperm-bank” and “that bitch.” Wendy enters and interrupts this repellent male conversation with the news that a “crazy woman” in one of the hotel’s rooms has tried to strangle Danny. Jack evinces no interest until Wendy mentions that the woman is in the bathtub, and thus is sexually available.

Now the Overlook, having just provided Jack for the first time with alcohol, offers him the possibility of adventurous sex. When Jack investigates the bathroom of Room 237 he discovers a voluptuous nude young woman in the tub, who rises seductively to embrace and begin kissing him. At this point, the camera does a zip pan away from Jack and the woman to reveal a startling shot-reflected in the bathroom mirror-as Jack discovers he is actually embracing the decomposing corpse of a woman who then begins to cackle in gratuitously effective horror film fashion and to chase Jack, her arms extended in ghoulish invitation, as he backs out of the room.

This scene is important primarily because of its Freudian overtones, but I also believe this scene can be viewed as the hotel’s way of both luring and frightening Jack over to its ideological side. Essentially, the management has seen that he will jump off the wagon, then accept their misogynistic perspective (Lloyd sympathetically assures Jack: “Women. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em,” who replies eagerly, “Words of wisdom, Lloyd. Words . . . of . . . wisdom.”), then commit adultery, and finally adopt their racist perspective as well. But like all shrewd employers, those in charge of the Overlook do not dole out all their incentives at once, and in order for Jack to receive this particularly alluring bonus in its robust and youthful form, he will have to do some “work” first. If he refuses, as implied by the sudden and horrifying degeneration of the attractive young woman, the hotel can indeed make things get ugly fast.

The “work” required of Jack, of course, is the murder of his wife and son. After all, in order to be a truly engaging, swinging single, 1920s white male, the hotel management implies, Jack must not have the cement shoes of a family holding him down. During the bathroom conversation with Jack, Grady characterizes Jack’s “job” in culturally acceptable-even motivational-terms: like Grady in the past, Jack must “do his duty” and “correct” his family.

Although the butler superficially defers to Jack during this conversation, it becomes quickly apparent that he is actually in charge of the exchange, and it shouldn’t be hard for Jack to read the message from the 1921 front office between the lines: “Okay, Jack, you’ve demonstrated your allegiance to us so far. Now let’s see some tangible results. And if not, no more goodies for you.” But if he delivers? Then the eternal party, both in the ballroom and-in more pleasurable terms than previously, one assumes-in Room 237.

Somewhat perversely, Kubrick laces “The Shining” with a solid streak of satire that is nerve janglingly effective when played off against the standard “horror film” content of the film’s surface plot and this more subtle (and hence more deeply frightening) subtext.

A great deal of this satire is reserved for Jack’s dialogue and general actions (both of which are interpreted to the manic hilt by Nicholson), as he rants and raves and mugs around the hotel. Supposedly a writer, Jack produces at his typewriter an enormous pile of paper bearing only the sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over, but in different patterns so that the sentence mimics various conventional writing forms. Like this same sentence, manifest repeatedly in different forms, Jack projects himself into various roles which he then plays out in the most over-the-top fashion: the suffering writer, the overworked husband and father, the sexist drunk, the “worldly” party-goer, and finally the raving lunatic.

Stanley Kubrick was a master film maker because he really understood the medium he was working with. Instead of choosing what was right for a scene, he instead chose what was more interesting. In fact the principal of interest is one of the key foundational elements in human memory. No one remembers the mundane activities that happen in our day to day life, we as human being are hardwired since our birth to catalogue only the most interesting and intense experiences of our lives. Kubrick was well aware of this and used it to his advantage for his portrayal of Jack.

The implication here, simultaneously humorous and disturbing, is that Jack may not really have gone insane. In what is arguably the film’s most viscerally frightening scene, we watch as Jack, grinning and capering gleefully, systematically hacks his way through first the locked door of the caretaker’s apartment and then the locked bathroom door within, all en route to his wife and son, who are barricaded in the john. “Wendy, I’m home,” he calls amiably upon chopping through the first door, with that one phrase recalling the banal entry cue of countless American white male sitcom fathers from the 1950s. “Heeeere’s Johnny!” he announces dementedly when he manages to whack a sizeable hole in the bathroom door, now aligning himself with the comedic king of American late-night television who, it should not go unnoted, is well known for being unable to cultivate a successful marriage. Lastly, Jack also casts himself as the Big Bad Wolf before even going to work on the bathroom door (“Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. Not by the hair on your chinny-chin-chin? Then I’ll huff . . . and I’ll puff . . . and I’ll blow your house in . . .”), recalling another fictional “wolf’ who has been subtly present throughout the film, the Coyote character in the Roadrunner cartoons Danny is repeatedly seen watching.

Suddenly this whole scenario-one in which a man is going after his family with a rather large and nasty axe, you will remember-becomes a twisted, surreal, cartoon-like event which is very possibly Kubrick’s wry comment on the way Americans like to have their violence depicted in movies. Most American cinematic depictions of violence are aesthetically cartoonish (lots of flashy cuts, explosions, gunfire, numerous anonymous casualties) while attempting to maintain a serious overall tone; but here Kubrick reverses this, making the violence slow, deliberate, and consequently tough to watch (we see or hear nearly every vivid heft, descent, and blow of the ax), while maintaining a perversely humorous tone. As an audience, we don’t know whether to laugh at this or scream at it, and our ambiguous reaction is all the more disquieting because of it.

And here, finally, as it has continually threatened to, the focus of the film has perhaps shifted uncomfortably onto us as an audience. Throughout the film, Kubrick has teased us with our role as participants: leading us along through the maze-like Overlook as he follows Danny’s Big Wheel with his trademark Steadicam point-of-view tracking shots; casting us briefly in the role of Lloyd the bartender when Jack first enters the ballroom (“Hi, Lloyd,” Jack remarks nonchalantly, gazing straight into the camera); showing us the entry into Room 237 primarily through Jack’s eyes (a sly way of attempting to arouse male viewers who, like Jack, are about to have this erotic encounter); hinting that we, along with the forest ranger whom Wendy contacts by radio at one point should become irritated with her; letting us read, along with Wendy, Jack’s comically unsettling prose.

The audience at this point gets a sense of The Overlook’s eerily symmetric entrance hall by virtue of the film’s slowest and most intense tracking shot; and taking us, ultimately, on the outdoor chase through the Overlook’s snow-choked hedge maze as Jack grips his fire axe and lurches, alternately enraged and giggling, after Danny.

Danny has led Jack into the hedge maze, not unlike what Kubrick has done with his audience by having led us through the outer trappings of a Gothic horror story into a cinematic maze which confronts us on four different levels: its surface manifestation as Gothic horror story, its subtextual level (where American race and gender stereotypes are perpetuated as a way of keeping the Overlook`s good old boys club intact), its satiric level (where commonly held images of the American nuclear family and of the white American male as father and husband are scathingly distorted), and its mirroring level, which veritably demands that we evaluate not only the film itself, but our reactions to it as well.

As adults our fall [like Jack's] accompanies self-consciousness, which in cinematic terms is our projection of ‘self’ onscreen, our willingness to assimilate ourselves to given characters and viewpoints and when the characters and their situations are as personally and politically loaded as those in “The Shining” potentially are to an audience, this can be a very uncomfortable fall indeed, one which lands us in the darkest aspects of ourselves and the society which has grown up around us.

Those glaring, artificial lights that bathe all Kubrick’s human habitations, from chateaus to War Rooms to Moon bases to prisons, and now even garden mazes, render human activity as starkly over apparent at the Overlook as anywhere, and with less chance than ever of escape back into “nature” (which itself seems forbiddingly incandescent). In that light-the light of movies-Jack cannot help encountering inner forces and spirits, nor we our lowest fears and desires. Jack’s fate attaches itself to the whole depraved audience, which in the end stays behind with him somewhere in the terrible, neon-lit space of its own consciousness.

The conclusion of “The Shining”, although it contains something of an optimistic resolution (Wendy and Danny escape, the boy symbolic of hope for the future, while Jack cannot find his way out of the hedge maze and freezes to death), is finally as unnerving as the film as a whole. Hallorann, who has come so far to break up a party whose racist exclusiveness is symbolic of his country’s history, is killed by Jack upon his arrival. In a rather pessimistic manner, Kubrick here almost forces the audience to overlook Hallorann’s contribution to Wendy and Danny’s escape, although it is the approaching sound of his Snowcat that draws Jack away from the bathroom where Wendy is cornered.

Jack quickly kills Hallorann and is once again free to stalk and murder his family, which he tries to do. Wendy and Danny must still escape on their own once Hallorann is no longer able to help, so our attention as an audience is directed from his murder to their still precarious safety. The disturbing implication for us as an audience is this: is Hallorann an acceptable sacrifice for saving Wendy? And how much of our racial or gender biases as a culture or as individuals informs whatever answer we give this question (even if our answer is to avoid it or claim that it’s unanswerable)?

The film’s final shot is a slow track through a hall of the Overlook to a black and white photograph of Jack and his fellow revelers at the 1921 July 4 ball, and it might be wondered here whether Jack’s appearance in this photograph indicates that he was admitted to the party even though he did not fulfill his work quota, or whether he was given a token spot in the photograph (where he remains frozen like in the hedge maze) as a reward for his efforts but does not actually exist in the supernatural “reality” of the party itself? One scene from early in the film which might help clarify this shows Wendy and Danny entering the hedge maze for a playful race while Wendy teases him that “the loser has to keep America clean!”

In the end, of course, it is Jack who is the loser because he can’t find his way out of the maze, the possible implication here being that in death Jack has been admitted in some capacity to the Overlook’s “sophisticated” white male entourage, a group that might very well use a polite euphemism such as “keep America clean” to represent their racist and sexist agenda. This would serve to underlie the disturbing ironies and paradoxes of this fascinating film, because contrary to the photograph’s aesthetic, nothing here is black and white except for the racist and sexist ideology of the Overlook’s vulgar fantasy world.

Kubrick, it seems, knows that this is indeed the case, and by ultimately throwing this ambiguity back onto the audience, by making it our responsibility to find our way out of the maze, he has created a film in “The Shining” that is not only a remarkable cinematic achievement, but a profoundly disturbing cultural mirror.

Both Kubrick and Kieslowski made remarkably complex and evocative capital out of the contingent facts of their chosen theme. The two movies are so vastly different in portraying the human psyche that the only thing that they have in common is the attention that was paid to them in making of these films.