The Shining film

The Shining is a glaring example of a film that has led to countless interpretations, favoured by its complex and enigmatic nature, sometimes leading to interpretive deliriums – as confirmed by the documentary film Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012). It is our belief that, since the themes are intrinsic to the dramaturgy of the narrative film, the thematic interpretation is valid if it grounds itself in solid dramaturgical analysis, something that even many good studies of the film lack. In this article we offer a basic dramaturgical analysis of The Shining (in both its versions – 144’ and 119’) using a method which follows authors such as Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, and Dara Marks: we deal with both the narrative world, i.e., the characters, their relations, and the environment in which they act, and the narrative structure. This analysis aims at offering a new basis for reconsidering the thematic interpretations proposed until now, in order to test the validity of the implicit and symptomatic meanings which have been made about Kubrick’s film.

https://archive.org/details/ShiningPhilology

A peer-reviewed video essay, which is part of the following academic publication:
Sbravatti, Valerio (2018). "Home Video Philology: Methodological Reflections". Cinergie. Il Cinema e le altre Arti (13): 47-52. DOI:https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2280-9481/7878.
Contains 5.1 audio. Fair use of copyrighted material for research purpose.

References

“1980 TV spot for The Shining (rare, higher quality).” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esaGu1w1K1g> (last accessed 21-05-18).

“Kubrick Questions Finally Answered: An In Depth Talk with Leon Vitali.” <https://www.dvdtalk.com/leonvitaliinterview.html> (last accessed 21-05-18).

“Shining Music Charts.” <http://www.drummerman.net/shining/charts.html> (last accessed 21-05-18).

“The Shining blue end credits.” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-FEFGcsSTs> (last accessed 21-05-18).

Castle, Alison (Ed.) (2005). The Stanley Kubrick Archives. Köln: Taschen.

Instagram pictures: , <https://www.instagram.com/p/BGiMXZjCkGn>, <https://www.instagram.com/p/BGjcTSOCkGL>, <https://www.instagram.com/p/BGj5fQEikMY>, <https://www.instagram.com/p/BGm3FjxCkF6> (last accessed 21-05-18).

The Shining (1980). ABC airing, 02-06-1985. Personal collection.

The Shining (1980). DVD. USA: Warner Home Video, 1999, cat. no. 17369, ISBN 0-7907-4274-8.

The Shining (1980). DVD. USA: Warner Home Video, 2001, cat. no. 21156, ISBN 0-7907-6005-3.

The Shining (1980). Blu-ray Disc. USA: Warner Home Video, 2007, cat. no. 115710, ISBN 1-4198-5299-X.

Stainforth, Gordon (2015). The Shining Music – Introductory Note. <http://www.gordonstainforth.co.uk/shining-music-intro> (last accessed 21-05-18).

Other pictures through Google Images.

The aim of this study is to analyze and compare The Shining, the 1977 novel written by Stephen King and the 1980 film adaptation produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The main issue considered is the subjective perception observable in the work of each of these artists. While Kubrick deliberately changed a myriad of elements to fit his own narrative, King was concomitantly quite upset with Kubrick's interpretation of the novel and the artistic liberty he took with writing the screenplay. An investigation into the theory of adaptation studies and the underlying issues concerning the adaptation process will be conducted and applied to the analysis of the novel and film. The viewpoints and criticism, from both the novelist and filmmaker will be taken into consideration to further explore the general issue of film adaptations. This study should point out the fundamental issues such as "faithfulness" to the novel, the filmmaker's conveyance of the story, and the artistic differences in both works of art.

O kultowym filmie „Lśnienie” bardzo wiele zostało już napisane i powiedziane. Ciężko zatem wymyślić coś nowego nie narażając się jednocześnie na powtarzalność. Jak wiemy, z każdym następnym seansem – i dotyczy to właściwie każdego filmu – dostrzegamy inne szczegóły, na coś innego zwracamy uwagę. W przypadku „Lśnienia” sprawa jest bardziej złożona.

This article focuses on the representation of the fictional characters’ thoughts in the novel by Stephen King, The Shining. The linguistic choices made by the author create the impression of an interior voice and, as a consequence, of an interior monologue but sometimes this voice, when looked into more closely, seems to be the by-product of a particular use of linguistic signs to represent mental elements that are not verbal. The formal presentation of these elements (linguistic techniques and punctuation, both in a certain context) is crucial to understand how language can be used and fashioned in certain ways in order to represent different mental phenomena.

Stephen King famously dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his celebrated horror novel, The Shining. He called the film “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it” and has criticised every element, from casting to Kubrick’s execution.
“Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie,” King has said, because “Jack Nicholson seems crazy from the beginning.” Even worse, “Shelley Duvall’s Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film,” very different from the sympathetic wife he had created. But the real problem according to King is that “Kubrick sent out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre.” “Nothing in the movie is really scary,” he concluded. 
King has explained his antipathy by saying that Kubrick had made a “cold” film out of a “hot” novel. More profoundly, King has acknowledged “a fundamental difference of opinion” about the origin of evil: external for King, and internal for Kubrick.
Analysing four decades’ worth of interviews with Stephen King, this article goes deep inside his mind and explores his keen personal attachment to the novel’s characters, especially that of Jack Torrance, which, by King’s own admission, is his most autobiographical.
The survey, while illuminating two radically irreconcilable philosophies, also exposes a number of stories that Stephen King has embellished to aggrandise his involvement in the film’s making – many of which are still widely repeated. The relationship between Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is therefore revealed to be more complex than a mere rejection.

This paper utilises hauntology and cryptonomy, alongside abjection, as lenses for textual narrative analysis of David Lynch's 1977 cult body horror film Eraserhead, his first feature as a writer-director. This investigation will uncover how Lynch formulates a filmic narrative articulating a critique of patriarchy, with an understanding that the concept can be considered a hauntology in itself. I will then proceed to explore how this engagement with hauntology has influenced further works by Lynch himself, and by other cinematic auteurs such as Stanley Kubrick.

Formidable barriers of time and place, language and culture separate Aeschylus’ Agamemnon from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980). Yet the two works are so uncannily linked by shared elements and themes that a detailed comparison is mutually illuminating.  Each piece is a visually sumptuous work of horror, built around a haunted house. Each focuses on acts of savagery among kin, including the sacrificial murder of children. And each features a clairvoyant attuned to phantoms arising from an eerie commingling of past, present, and future. Moreover, both Aeschylus and Kubrick ground their violence in the corrupting effects of wealth,  which ripple across temporal and social divides. This transcendent nature of evil leads the directors to personify their potent locales:  the palace of the Atreidae and the Overlook Hotel ultimately possess the individuals who inhabit and maintain them.

Edmund Burke (1757) propone una distinzione tra Bello e Sublime: l'esperienza del Bello nasce dal piacere e dalla sua attesa. Al contrario, l'esperienza del Sublime nasce dalla paura dell'annientamento. Il Sublime si sperimenta di fronte a fenomeni che suscitano in noi un senso di stupore e smarrimento, un misto di ammirazione e paura, dinnanzi all'immensità o alla potenza di fenomeni o entità che potrebbe facilmente annientarci. La Natura, in particolare, è dove il Sublime si esperisce con particolare evidenza.

Da questo punto di vista, The Shining è un film più di paura che di orrore, applicando la definizione di Nöel Carroll (The Philosophy of Horror, 1990): più che i fantasmi, sono l'isolamento dal consorzio umano e il confronto con la Natura circostante a trascinare Jack Torrance nell'abisso della follia. La finitezza umana di Jack è assediata dall'immensità della Natura. La sua mente soccombe dinnanzi al Sublime. Questa lettura è sostenuta già nei titoli di testa, sequenza su cui si concentrerà l'articolo. La musica di Wendy Carlos – con il suo cupo Dies Irae – ci indica come la maestosità della Natura che vediamo in quelle immagini debba essere interpretata in termini di Sublime, non di Bello. Se infatti, in un “commutation trick” (Philip Tagg, “Music, Moving Image, Semiotics and the Democratic Right to Know”, 1999), la stessa sequenza venisse accoppiata al più rassicurante e “bello” “Main Theme” da Jurassic Park, la Natura in quelle stesse immagini perderebbe quei connotati minacciosi. Ma il Sublime è presentato anche visivamente: le tortuose curve cinte da montagne che l'automobile della famiglia Torrance percorre sulla strada per l'Overlook Hotel ci parlano della finitezza umana al cospetto della Natura e del rischio concreto di perdervisi, anticipando così anche il motivo del labirinto, luogo dello smarrimento fisico, che sarà in tutto il film metafora dello smarrimento mentale.

“The sacred in architecture reveals itself beside a roadside stall, while you watch your batch of hot jalebis being made. The jalebi is a fabrication of the ubiquitous spiral, hence when you sink your teeth into one, with the juice exploding in your mouth; you know what spirals taste like…”

A month before my daughter Zahra was born, I was commissioned to write on the sacred in the architecture of all religions. I had turned down the commission arguing my expertise did not extend beyond Muslim Civilizations.

When Zahra was born, my father suggested we have jalebis to celebrate! (Jalebi is a dessert made by deep frying circular shapes of maida flour batter in a cauldron of boiling oil, and then soaked in sugar syrup). While biting into a hot jalebi, with its juice bursting in my mouth, in a flash my mind connected the movement of the chef’s hand while making jalebis with rituals of movement in the practice of several religions.

“Jalebi & The Knot of Sacred Architecture” was born at that instant; one of my quickest essays, it was written in a single draft (apologies for any unintended lapses and inadvertent faux pas).

In retrospect, growing up in multicultural India, the crossroad of world religions had sufficiently exposed me to multiple religious practices..

Published as "Contorurs of the Sacred" International Gallerie Vol.11 No.1 2008 pg.44-46
Final iteration forthcoming that restores its original title "Jalebi & The Knot of Sacred Architecture."

Cross Reference. See also:
"The Kaaba: Guarding The Centre, Generating The Circumference" in Articles Section
"Three Shores Of The Cube"  in Articles Section
"Medina Highway" in Poetry Section

Stephen King is married to Tabitha King and she committed a few novels a long time ago. But that union has produced so far two boys who are writers too. Owen King who kept his father’s name as a writer and Joe Hill who did not. The former dores not seem to work with his father and the latter is associated to his father in many recent books or works, and he is prolific on his own any way.

Such literary dynasties are rare and we could of course quote the case of Anne Rice and her son Christopher Rice. But there are not many more, though some writers are surrounded by younger people who work with them and around them and they become the core of a literary school, but that is not exactly the same. I do not think there is a literary gene in man – or woman as for that – but to be raised in a literary family haunted and animated day after day and even night after night by a story teller or even two definitely should produce some imaginative story tellers, or neurotic if not psychotic people running away from unreal phantasm called stories.

The future will tell us who survives time and who disappears with time, but here is what I have written on this literary militia over the last six or seven years with first the links to older writings on them you can find on academia.edu

This essay deals with two connected questions: "is the horror genre really the most productive framework to understand "The Shining?" and "how does the use of
psychoanalysis figure in this work?"

My discussion deals with psychoanalysis as a meta narrative, as it is adapted for artistic expression and making sense of the irrational side of human behavior. The analysis here is NOT the proper structuralist, text-bound psychoanalytic reading of a film text. Coming from Cultural Studies: I'm interested in how psychoanalysis has become a form of popular knowledge and how it is being used, appropriated, imagined and polemicized. In my research of Kubrick, it is evident that he has psychoanalytic ideas in mind in working out the entire project of The Shining.

My focus on Kubrick's use and articulation of psychoanalytic knowledge also reopens the question of intentionality in film studies. As I understand it, the culturalist turn often subjects authorship to broader cultural reading and interprets the work of individual agency to be functions of institutional
constraints. Perhaps because I'm also an artist myself, I am drawn to analytical approaches that allow personal desires and private intentions to be brought back for scrutiny.

By now it goes without saying that cinema is and has always been a synesthetic experience. But what exactly do we mean when we say that? This paper develops a  phenomenology of “cinematic synesthesia” that draws upon three recent developments:  first, the neuroscientific “neonatal synesthesia hypothesis”; second, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on child psychology and translator Talia Welsh’s contextualization of that work within recent developmental psychology; and third, Dylan Trigg’s concept of a  'darkened phenomenology” that accounts for the radically “unhuman.” These conceptual lenses are trained on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), whose legendary impact stems from its perplexing tangle of the sensory with the cognitive, the unconscious with the conscious, the individual with the collective, and the past with the present.

Barker, Jennifer M. “Haunted Phenomenology and Synesthetic Cinema.” Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 364-400. Special issue: “Film and Phenomenology,” edited by Julian Hanich and Christian Ferencz-Flatz.

The audiovisual object is like a product of visuals and sound, not a summation. Film analysis should track back to the separate factors and show how they multiply each other when combined. Music, in particular, can be an elusive element, especially for non specialists. But music can crucially perform a variety of functions in films, and its agency should therefore be taken in proper consideration during film analysis. After a preliminary discussion of some recent theory of how visuals and sound fuse into an audiovisual whole, the article presents the manipulations made possible by the videographic approach as a helpful analytical tool to draw attention to the music. As an example, I provide my own videographic manipulations: an annotated audiovisual clip of the opening sequence of The Shining , and the same clip with the original music replaced with John Williams’s ‘Main Theme’ from Jurassic Park .

A partire dalle dichiarazioni di Stanley Kubrick contenute nelle oltre 200 interviste da lui rilasciate alla stampa, il corso intende analizzare il suo peculiare modo di fare cinema: dalla scelta della storia all'adattamento, dalla direzione degli attori alla fotografia, dal montaggio alla promozione presso il pubblico. Lasciando parlare il regista sarà possibile vedere i suoi film depurati dalle interpretazioni di critici e dagli stereotipi perpetuati dalla stampa: uno sguardo nuovo, filologico, per scoprire il vero metodo kubrickiano ed evidenziare la mano sicura del regista in un corpus d'opere coerente e compatto. Il corso si avvarrà di materiali d'archivio inediti e raramente visti in Italia. Programma Kubrick su Kubrick ha una durata minima di 10 ore e fa largo uso di clip tratte da tutti i film del regista, per studiarne la grammatica cinematografica e analizzarne i meccanismi di produzione del senso. Le dichiarazioni di Kubrick accompagnano tutto il corso come un lungo e articolato running commentary, un contenuto extra di un immaginario making-of onnicomprensivo. Per documentare le scelte di messinscena, direzione degli attori, fotografia, montaggio e musica vengono presentati anche estratti video da documentari inediti in Italia (in inglese sottotitolati in italiano).
1. Bio-filmografia: dal 1928 al 1999, la carriera del regista corredata da informazioni produttive, accoglienza critica dell'epoca e risultati al botteghino.
2. Il processo creativo: come Kubrick pensava, scriveva, produceva e girava i suoi film; un'analisi approfondita delle fasi necessarie alla realizzazione di un'opera cinematografica secondo il metodo-Kubrick.
3. La promozione: case history del marketing sbagliato di "2001: Odissea nello Spazio" e dell'innovativa strategia comunicativa per "Arancia Meccanica".
4. I progetti incompiuti: gli studi per “Napoleon”, “Aryan Papers” e “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”.
Il corso si rivolge sia a coloro che già conoscono i film di Kubrick, dei quali scopriranno aneddoti sulla realizzazione e i perché dietro le scelte artistiche, sia a chi non ha mai visto i suoi film e vuole capire cosa abbia mai di così importante questo Stanley Kubrick e perché non si è ancora smesso di parlarne.

The audiovisual object is like a product of visuals and sound, not a summation. Film analysis should track back to the separate factors and show how they multiply each other when combined. Music, in particular, can be an elusive element, especially for non specialists. But music can crucially perform a variety of functions in films, and its agency should therefore be taken in proper consideration during film analysis. After a preliminary discussion of some recent theory of how visuals and sound fuse into an audiovisual whole, the article presents the manipulations made possible by the videographic approach as a helpful analytical tool to draw attention to the music. As an example, I provide my own videographic manipulations: an annotated audiovisual clip of the opening sequence of The Shining, and the same clip with the original music replaced with John Williams’s ‘Main Theme’ from Jurassic Park.

The role Leon Vitali played in Stanley Kubrick's filmmaking should make critics rethink our tendency to default to auteur theory in speaking of a film’s big ideas. Consider, for one, James Naremore’s reading of Kubrick’s oeuvre as hinging on a fascination with the “grotesque,” using art historian John Ruskin’s sense that it blends the ludicrous and the fearful. Naremore establishes this reading primarily through R. Lee Ermey’s famous scatological diatribes as Full Metal Jacket’s drill sergeant.  How does it affect that reading, then, to learn the scatological abuse the sergeant heaps on his cadets was created not by Kubrick, but by Vitali and Ermey in tandem?

Popular evaluative criteria for conventional narrative filmmaking assume fidelity to conventions of form. For example, in Film Art David Bordwell identifies "coherence, unity, intensity of effect, complexity, and originality" as hallmarks of quality filmmaking. In doing so, he ignores the reciprocity of "various conceptualisations of spectator response" described in the call for presentations. Bordwell and others in the business of framing the art of film as a set of time-tested conventions do allow for some degree of interactivity between film and spectator. However this interactivity is predicated on an understanding of classic convention as a largely seamless experience. In other words, the "best" films invite an unconscious or mechanical response from the spectator, and that response is motivated by an aesthetic or formal seamlessness that filmmakers (paradoxically) work very hard to manufacture.

Therefore it is worth considering an emerging strand of reception and criticism that foregrounds spectator response to peculiar uses of, or rebellions against, classical convention in films from a variety of genres and periods. This way of perceiving films and authors' intentions to some degree topples the conventional poles of goodness and badness favored by traditional critics. My paper explores Rodney Ascher's Room 237 (2012) as emblematic of the power of the spectator to re-write even a well-known film by ascribing meaning to formal inconsistencies and incoherencies. The obsessed commenters of Room 237 exercise their control over Kubrick's intentions, even as they stand in awe of him as a Creator.

I link this critical reappraisal of a classic film with the online reception of Mark Region's After Last Season (2009), a film ostensibly about sickness, ghosts, and murder. Region's film (his only film to date) is modeled after conventions of plot but made in defiance of conventional form. Spectator response reveals an "intensity of effect" that would not be possible to reach were it not for the breaches of form. After Last Season belongs in a separate category from celebrated cult films of Ed Wood and others. Regardless of the director's intentions, the camera of After Last Season seems haunted, distracted, and disoriented, largely due to the ignorance of form. This is an effect that the film could not have achieved through the lens of seamless classicism. Region is known as an amateur but regarded as an auteur because the spectators fill the gap, articulating and embracing the resonances between the film's content and construction.

“Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it’s completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it.”
Stanley Kubrick, 1977.

The myths and mysteries about Stanley Kubrick and his filmmaking methods persist to this day. He considered them to be a problem during his lifetime and they have continued to grow. The theories are at their most extreme concerning the creation of The Shining (1980). This research began with the aim of presenting a more reasoned account of Kubrick’s approach to filmmaking. It was an investigation into Kubrick’s working methods for a Masters dissertation. Available archive evidence from all of his feature films was thoroughly explored and interviews were carried out with people who had worked with him. The research demonstrated that throughout his career a definitive methodology developed and that his approach to every film was based on a similar set of distinctive processes.

In this chapter The Shining is presented as a case study. Assumptions and myths are addressed and then challenged with new evidence at each stage of the filmmaking process. Scripts, letters, memos and other documents from the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London provide vital clues to Kubrick’s methods. In addition new interviews were conducted with Diane Johnson (co-writer of the screenplay of The Shining), Katharina Kubrick (daughter and location researcher for The Shining), Jan Harlan (brother-in-law and producer of The Shining) and Brian Cook (assistant director of The Shining). By examining the evidence in context and looking beyond the myths a sharper picture of Kubrick and his distinctive approach to filmmaking emerges.

LTEN 149 (B00) - THEMES IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Fall 2012

Instructor: Sören Fröhlich
Meetings: Tu, Th 09:30-10:50 in WLH 2114
Contact: sfrohlic@ucsd.edu, Office: LIT 240, Office hours: Tu 12-2, Th 2-3 and by appointment.

If You Want Blood: Thematic Readings of U.S. Blood Discourses

Course Description: This is an upper-division undergraduate course designed to teach and train scholarly approaches to literature. It focuses on what I call “blood discourses,” meaning linguistic usages or interactive utterances attached to a social practice, to sketch out ways that blood was and is evaluated and how it structures and is structured in culture, especially literature, in medicine, and in history. We will read texts from a wide range of genres, periods, and media to follow the question: what is blood?

Humans may have always thought about blood, but this course will focus on how the understanding of blood changed over time, and how cultural representations of blood reflect and reinforce these changes. Blood is ever-present, from the latest splatter film to genetic engineering, from debates on blood quantum policies to the Eucharist. The Oxford English Dictionary has entire pages on entries related to blood. Blood donation is a major business, and so are hygiene products. Why are we so fascinated by blood? This course will examine the fluid that moves between fiction and fact, between body and psyche. We will learn to read fiction in connection to other fields, like medicine, anthropology, and religion.

We will focus on U.S. writing in several genres, as well as visual and performance art, and film, since the mid-nineteenth century that consider blood as a problem or a solution. We will locate some historical strands that still influence texts about blood, and supplement a focus text with readings from theology, sensational and gothic fiction, political and legal contexts, history of science, and media studies.

Course Requirements: Students must complete all of the required readings and see any required films before the class meeting for which they are assigned. Attendance is mandatory. Your active responses to the readings and screenings will provide the foundation for our class discussions. I expect each member of the class to take seriously our collective project of respectfully engaging and responding to the ideas of the participants.

Evaluation:
25% Attendance and participation
25% Weekly assignments and quizzes
50% Final Writing Assignment     
100%

Attendance and participation: I expect you to attend class regularly. Please contact me immediately for any special accommodation, medical problems, or the like. Two (2) unexcused absences are the maximum number to receive a passing grade in attendance.

Piazza page: I provided and will monitor a supplementary piazza.com course website under UCSD, LTEN 149 (https://piazza.com/ucsd/fall2012/lten149/home). Piazza.com is a third-party service in no way affiliated with UCSD. This is supposed to be your space outside the classroom. It is an optional venue for you to exchange ideas, contact each other, plan and discuss presentations, ask questions, discuss readings, look through the additional links I post, and to contact me. While I will closely monitor the content, I do not grade your questions or censor discussions, provided they do not violate UCSD’s Principles of Community (http://www.ucsd.edu/explore/about/principles.html).

Weekly assignments: The weekly sessions include written assignments designed to give you the basic tools needed for a successful literature course and to deepen these skills. You have one oral assignment at the end of class. Please contact me immediately if you think you need help giving an oral presentation in front of the class. The assignments are training in basic skills, but you should also use them to assess your strengths and weaknesses, find areas of interest to you, and also work strategically with the final assignment in mind. They should help you prepare texts, find sources, and rehearse techniques you can then apply quickly and easily in your final assignment. Contact me immediately if you need any special accommodations. (Formatting for all assignments: Letter-size paper, name, title, Times New Roman 12p, 1in. margins, double-spaced, no extra blank lines. I reserve the right to request an electronic copy.) Unless stated otherwise, all assignments are to be completed alone and due at the beginning of the first meeting each week. Quality gains higher grades than quantity and quantity more than blank sheets of paper. Attempts to cheat and trick receive very, very low grades. Any missing assignment receives a zero. There is zero tolerance of plagiarism. (For information on UCSD’s policy, see: http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/academic-integrity/policy.html) I reserve the right to pop quiz you at any time.

Final assignment: Write a five-page research paper (excluding notes and bibliography) or a four-page essay (double-spaced on one side of 8 1/2 by 11" paper, 1" margins, Times New Roman 12 point). The topic has to be related to one or more primary or secondary text assigned in class, a theoretical or conceptual problem, or a historical problem in relation to the texts. I expect you to use the tools acquired during the quarter to conceive, plan, and execute the paper. Contact me with alternative assignment ideas, ideas for collaboration, or if you wish to be examined in a different format no later than week 7. Contact me immediately if you need any special accommodations.
The final assignment has to be completed by Thursday, 12/13/2012, 11AM.

Required books (at UCSD Bookstore = B):
- Bill Hayes. Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood.
- Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.
 
Required short readings: I tried to reduce cost to the student and opted not to make a course reader. For the short readings, go to the UCSD Library course reserve (= O). Go to http://reserves.ucsd.edu and select our department or me or search by course name. Beginning this quarter, the Library will be password protecting Electronic Reserves. You need to enter this password to view the materials on Electronic Reserves: sf149 (not case sensitive). You can also contact library staff in person at Geisel Library, they will be happy to help you. Also, you may have to consult the audio-visual media, full-length texts, and additional texts I placed on the reserve shelf at the library (= R).

By now it goes without saying that cinema is and has always been a synesthetic experience. But what exactly do we mean when we say that? This paper develops a phenomenology of “cinematic synesthesia” that draws upon three recent developments: first, the neuroscientific “neonatal synesthesia hypothesis”; second, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on child psychology and translator Talia Welsh’s contextualization of that work within recent developmental psychology; and third, Dylan Trigg’s concept of a &amp;#39;darkened phenomenology” that accounts for the radically “unhuman.” These conceptual lenses are trained on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), whose legendary impact stems from its perplexing tangle of the sensory with the cognitive, the unconscious with the conscious, the individual with the collective, and the past with the present. Barker, Jennifer M. “Haunted Phenomenology and Synesthetic Cinema.” Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 364-400. Special issue: “Film and Phenomenology,” edited by Julian Hanich and Christian Ferencz-Flatz.

The article examines Stanley Kubrick's horror film "The Shining", showing how the director took Stephen King's storyline, then considerably developed the plot by introducing other material.  These include:
(1) reworking the storyline with reference to gothic tales by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, and Shirley Jackson, as well as taking signature horror themes from Gothic literature generally;
(2) deliberately employing Sigmund Freud's and Bruno Betelheim's theories of "the uncanny";
(3) using motifs suggested by the French film "Last Year at Marienbad" to construct the "The Shining" visually as a set of interlocking labyrinths. 
The article separates developments Kubrick made pre-production, when shaping the script with his co-author Diane Johnson, from a later set of creative decisions taken by the director alone during shooting, then editing the film. 
8pp.