The Shining

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson in one of his iconic roles), along with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd), takes a job as winter caretaker at a deserted, isolated hotel in the mountains. Jack, who plans to write a novel, quickly develops a writer’s block and starts a slow descent into madness. The couple’s son, Danny, who spends his time racing down the hotel’s long corridors, suspects they are not alone in the building.

The Shining is one of the scariest films in the history of cinema, and one of Kubrick’s masterpieces, a superb example of his artistic strategy of choosing to work within familiar and popular genres in order to transcend their boundaries to tell a more universal story and attain the level of auteur cinema. The film is an adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, a master of contemporary literary horror. Jack Nicholson’s role of the writer-turned-caretaker of a huge hotel built on top of an Indian burial ground has gone down in cinema history. The Shining remains the most powerful cinematic statement on the colonisation of native Americans at the hands of white invaders coming in under the star-spangled banner. Although not directly mentioned in the dialogues, this is strongly accentuated in the visuals.
Tomasz Kolankiewicz

This screening will be presented together with The Fearless Vampire Killers by Roman Polański.

• Director — Stanley Kubrick
• Writers — Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson, Stephen King (novel)
• Genre — horror
• Production — USA, UK
• Year of production — 1980