The Shinning
The scene is avable on You Tube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmn6FRgYwBQ&NR=1
Background
The Shining was a horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980. The story is about a family spending the winter in an entirely isolated hotel in the snow mountain. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the father likes the hotel because nobody comes in the hotel and it is very quite t write his book. After few days, Jack Torrance goes mad and starts to try to kill his family who are staying in the same hotel.
The one of the interesting characteristic of editing skill in this movie is the cutting skill. The beginning of the scene stats from the boy ridding on a bike. The oddly quiet and smooth sound comes out along with the tire scrapes the carpet floor. The camera angle is a long shot that give a scene of third perspective. Above these elements, the eerie music makes the scene entirely giving a scene of anxiety to the viewers. This shooting style and editing style makes the next scene unpredictable. Even thought the viewers could predict the story line, the effective cutting style that stir their mind makes the viewer unable to predict the amount of fear they are about to feel.
The repetition of the hall way and the oddly well positioned twin girls gives anxiety to the viewers because even though everything is well positioned, the viewer will automatically predict the disorder of the oddly well-proportioned situation. The fact that the situation is so well proportioned, there is an enormous capacity of dynamic change in the next cut. This consciousness causes a huge amount of sense of anxiety. And the word here ‘anxiety’ is an extremely similar lexicon with the word fear. In other words, this film cause huge anxiety by letting the viewer to acknowledge the capacity of dynamic change in the next scene.
The music does a good job to support this idea. In a lot of films, the music’s rhythm indicates the viewer to fallow and predict the next event. However the music is very unstable and random. This causes more anxiety to the viewer because the music does not allow the viewer to predict the next event.
