Taking a closer look at the "famous hedge maze" in The Shining.
http://www.jordanorlando.com/mazes
Salem's Lot 1979 and Salem's Lot 2024
Happy Halloween everybody! Julie's working late and the boy doesn't have school tomorrow so he's heading to one of those crazy f...
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(2007) * First of all let me say that as far as I could tell there are absolutely no dead teenagers in this entire film. Every year just ...
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Excellent! I just got an email about this and I was thinking "Jordan should post this on Horrorthon," and then it turns out he already did. My response:
1. You're a weirdo.
2. I think that opening on the right side of the map is meant to be the entrance gate, because it's meant to be on a short side and that also corresponds to the model in the hotel.
3. My personal assumption has always been that the crazy bird's-eye-view shot isn't intended as a representational depiction of the maze, but exaggerated for effect.
4. Man, what a great movie.
1) Takes one to know one.
2) I thought of that, but then wouldn't the map be turned ninety degrees? Also eight posts matches the model on the table. I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying that he's definitely fudging it on the outdoor set.
3) I think that everything in The Shining is a representational depiction. I think the distortions and surreal mismatches (and there are many) are at a shallower and a deeper level, if you will; the movie is speaking in metaphors as you're saying, but the metaphors are real; at the Overlook, the maze really is that big on the inside. (Kind of like another argument we once had about Charlie Brown's head, remember? Of course you remember.)
4) Agreed.
I made a mistake. YES, the Entrance gate is on the short, right side of the map and on the corresponding edge of the model, closest to Nicholson. I'm just not sure that the physical gate we see in my topmost photo (at the extreme right) is actually that same gate, because that would make the maze even smaller (if that's the short end, right there, facing us).
my question always was, if that aerial shot of the maze is fabricated (it has to be, in some way -- the aerial shot doesn't match up with the maze map or the model -- which do seem to match up with each other, at a glance) then where does the real maze stop and the fake maze begin?
pondering this question, i started to compare the map to the aerial from the outside in. and you know what? i think we're looking at an aerial of a completely different maze somewhere else -- even the very center of the maze has obvious differences from the map.
either that, or the maze, in actuality has differences from the map.
or we're looking at a complete superimposed fabrication, in which case, it's possible it's an aerial shot of another model with danny and wendy superimposed over it.
i dunno -- what did the eyewitness account say?
on a different note -- in the aerial shot there are two dead-ends on the immediate sides of the center of the maze.
i can totally imagine someone wandering around the maze looking for the center for hours and then turning up one of those dead-ends and just collapsing in a defeated heap, sobbing, "i give up!"
The aerial footage just shows the innermost, central chamber of the maze. I don't know how much of a set was built around the actors, but it's trimmed down very carefully for this composite shot, and literally all you're getting of that plate is the tiny rectangle in the center of the image. If you look closely, you can see the slight difference in color and brightness that gives it away.
The rest of the image is a miniature, with a rear-projection or front-projection optical insert integrated directly into the miniature or into a high-resolution photograph of the miniature (I can't remember which from the account I read). But Kubrick spent hours aligning the composition so that the z-axis perspective of the miniature matches the plate, so that all the shadows match, and even the color temperature and the luminosity is close enough that you have to be shown where the seam is.
I also don't know how high overhead the camera was for the "aerial" (or, overhead) portion of the composite shot. I really don't think it was as high over Shelly Duvall and Danny Lloyd as suggested by how high the camera was over the miniature of the rest of the maze. (In other words, if if were real, the camera would have to be something like thirty whole floors off the ground to get that kind of perspective with so little spherical distortion.)
Rodriguez faced similar problems in (for example) the opening sequence of Sin City. He photographed the actors with wide-angle lenses, and then those images (sometimes) had to fit into one portion of the screen with the perspective extended out in all directions, which meant a kind of radical degree of wide angle distortion that you can't really get with a real camera.
1. Yes, it does.
2. Yeah, I figured it out when I spotted the little gate by Nicholson.
3. I think I get you, and I sort of like your interpretation better than mine. I've seen two movies (which I won't name for spoiler's sake) in which there are killers who think they're someone else, and as such the movie actually show you the other people. It's a tricky thing to do right, and I found myself objecting big time while watching one of them. I mean, I get it, but I don't necessarily like it.
That maneuver is what I was suggesting the aerial hedge maze shot is doing, but yours is more interesting to me. The hotel grounds are mutable, not in a Dark City way, but in a you-look-again-and-things-are-different way.
ut in a you-look-again-and-things-are-different way
Which is the precise intersection of King and Kubrick. That's what's so great about the maze: it does that, too (like the hedge animals that move when you're not looking).
The monolith appears and disappears when you're not looking. Alternate David Bowman figures appear and disappear and become the protagonist when you're not looking.
Lloyd the bartender is just there, suddenly, after the cut ("Hi, Lloyd!") although there was nothing there a second ago (and no booze and napkins etc. either). King does it almost exactly the same way in the book, sliding into the hallucination or ghost visitation or whatever it is. Kubrick said, "This looks like a job for me, the director who frequently makes important items change, appear or disappear offscreen."
There's a great documentary made by Stanley Kubrick's daughter about the making of The Shining. Hope you have all seen it.
Julie, great minds think alike. See my new post (above this one)!
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