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Watch: Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ Meets Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad’

In many ways, Alain Resnais’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad‘ (1961) and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining‘ (1980) are quite similar. Both films take place in sprawling resorts that are sparsely populated. Both films pose narrative mysteries that have deliberately ambiguous solutions. In the former, did the woman (Delphine Seyrig) meet the man (Giorgio Albertazzi) last year at Marienbad or not? Or perhaps they did meet, but not at Marienbad. If they did meet, did the woman forget because she was traumatized after being raped by the man? Are the characters even "real" or ghosts or fragments of someone’s imagination? Resnais’s French New Wave classic has fascinated, baffled, and frustrated viewers for half a century quite simply because it is a puzzle without a key to guide the viewer. You have may an interpretation after watching it, but it is tentative (I change my mind almost every time I watch the film) and far from being definitive. Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ offers up ambiguity in a slightly lower dose. Quite simply, is Jack (Jack Nicholson) motivated by cabin fever or ghosts? If we accept the former, how does Jack escape the freezer after he’s locked up by Wendy (Shelley Duvall)? If we accept the latter and the ghosts can take physical action (who rolls the ball towards Danny?), why do they stop short of killing the Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Wendy? Moreover, how can Jack exist both in the early 1980s and in a 1921 photograph? These are ambiguities that have encouraged numerous interpretations, ranging from the ridiculous theories of ‘Room 237’ (2012) to my own video essay "Free Will in Kubrick’s The Shining".

Yet, the connections between these two films go even deeper in how they attempt to use spatiotemporal ambiguity to further disorient the spectator. The hallways and spaces of Kubrick’s Overlook do not make any spatial sense. There are windows that look outdoors in rooms that face inwards. The flow of time, as aforementioned, is also mysterious. The film’s title cards marking off days and hours represent a linear march of time, yet Jack’s encounter in room 237 and the photograph at the end would suggest that time is a circular or that alternate timelines exist simultaneously. Similarly, the times and spaces of Resnais’s film blend together. Costumes provide only a temporary reference point, because jump cuts, voice over, and the similar interiors of separate resorts make the differences between past, present, and future indistinguishable. Yet, viewers of both films can probably agree on one aspect. Violence haunts these corridors.

Dr. Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay and all of its forms (co-presented by MediaCommons and Cinema Journal). [in]Transition recently won an award of distinction in the annual SCMS Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship competition. His publications have appeared in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, The Black Maria, Flow, In Media Res, Mediascape, Press Play, RogerEbert.com, Senses of Cinema, Studies in Comics, and a range of academic anthologies. He is currently completing a manuscript on the overlap between American blockbuster cinema and comic book style.

Watch: Steven Spielberg’s Bloodiest Scene from ‘Saving Private Ryan’: A Breakdown

I remember very clearly the day I saw the Omaha Beach scene from Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ A dear friend had taken me to a screening, and after the 20th burst of vomit or blood, I asked myself quietly, "This is a Tom Hanks movie, correct?" I can think of few war films with quite as visceral an opening as this one, and so I’m thrilled that Cinefix (who seems to be on a roll recently) has put together this reel of background about the scene. We get a lot of nice tidbits here, such as the fact that shutter modifications on the cameras used gave the scene its jumpy, alarming immediacy, or that squibs of blood were programmed to explode in sync with flare bursts from soldiers’ guns. We get voice-over quotes from Spielberg, Hanks, and sound designer Gary Rydstrom. And we get the pleasure (painful, but meaningful) of revisiting one of Spielberg’s most remarkable isolated achievements.

Watch: What Are the 100 Best Movie Lines of All Time?

If I had to choose my top 10 favorite movie lines of all time, out of this masterful 6-minute video from Cinefix which gives the ****100**** best movie lines of all time, well, I’d say–well, what would I say? Let’s see:

Rosebud.
You can’t handle the truth!
Why so serious?
Honey, I’m home!
Well, nobody’s perfect!
I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.
Go ahead, make my day.
You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?
Luke, I am your father.
You talkin’ to me?

Viewed this way, these choices could read like the results of a psychological test, of some sort. And what would they say about me? Hmmm…. In any event, this short feature takes us through 100 of the greatest individual lines in movie history, from ‘Top Gun‘ to ‘Blade Runner‘ to ‘Jaws‘ to ‘Some Like It Hot‘ to ‘The Empire Strikes Back‘ to ‘Scarface‘ to…

See how many movies you can identify from this video–and, lest I forget, what are your top ten best lines?

Watch: How Does Nicolas Winding Refn’s Colorblindness Shape His Films?

Did I know Nicolas Winding Refn was colorblind? No, I did not. But having been thus educated, this little bit of information explains quite a lot about his work’s appeal. Looking at YouTube user Blue Leaf’s piece through this scrim, and given Refn’s own testimony that his colorblindness is what causes him to make all of his films with high color contrast, I begin to understand why films like ‘Bronson‘ or ‘Only God Forgives‘ have the visual appearance they do–and I also begin to understand something about their attitudes: the interest in extremes of morality, the clash of affection and intense violence, the silence versus the noise. Perhaps it’s an obvious point to make about a filmmaker who’s gotten more than his fair share of attention, criticism and fan-dom over the years, but re-investigating the point can’t hurt–and this piece is, at the very least, a thrilling watch.

Watch: ‘Jurassic Park’ and Its Prehistoric Symphony

Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park‘ wasn’t just about the dinosaurs. Nor was it just about the story, such as it was. A combination of elements made it successful, drawing people to the theaters in multitudes, even drawing movie snobs such as myself! Certainly, Dean Cundey’s cinematography brought the film’s monstrous and only-semi-herbivorous presences into viewers’ faces in a memorable way, but there was also another significant element: the sound. Had sound designer Gary Rydstrom decided to "go digital" with the sounds, the technology of the time might have yielded a product with only a fraction of the film’s staying power or box-office command. Instead, as Jacob T. Swinney (a Press Play regular) shows us in this video and in his explanatory notes, Rydstrom took a more adventurous route, using lion roars and dolphin chirps to recreate what poet Walt Whitman would have called the dinosaurs’ barbaric yawps. With ‘Jurassic World‘ on its way to theaters this Friday, looking at and listening to the original entry in the series may give your movie-going experience more heft.

Watch: The Movie References in ‘True Detective’ (Including Some Shockers)

One of the reasons the first season of HBO’s ‘True Detective‘ was so fascinating for so many viewers was that its ambition–shown by the development of the tormented relationship between detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), the spiraling exploration of a murder investigation, the multi-layered nature of the narrative–was of a type that, though we wouldn’t necessarily say it out loud, we would typically expect from a film rather than a television show, even in the Golden Age of Television. Decades of historic restraint of narratives on the small screen to fit into a one-hour format can still make television shows like ‘True Detective’ or its "prestige" brethren stand out. So it’s no surprise that the influences collected in this short piece by "Tea and a Movie" range from David Fincher to Jonathan Demme to (oddly enough) Andrei Tarkovsky. The piece highlights yet another part of the show’s allure, and filmic quality: its visuals (thanks to Adam Arkapaw’s cinematography), which might act on the viewer without the viewer’s awareness. Plenty have chatted about various filmmakers’ influence on the series, but seeing these similarities illustrated with such clarity could provoke further examination–where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Watch: What’s the Difference Between the WATCHMEN Comic and the WATCHMEN Movie?

Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ graphic novel, named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best novels of all time, is an absorbing and potentially transformative read: for its sagacity, for its balancing of numerous texts, for its storytelling. Zack Snyder’s ‘Watchmen‘ film was a slightly different animal, a valiant attempt to film a book that many might call unfilmable. With their usual wit and energy, the staff of Cinefix have constructed an elegant and rousing examination of the differences between book and film here, giving credit to both source and adaptation where due–and including some background about other filmmakers who took a running jump at filming the comic and failed. Take a look…

Watch: What If David Lynch Had Directed Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’?

If David Lynch had directed Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining"–let’s just stop there. In a sense, he did, just as much as Kubrick directed many of Lynch’s films. (In a sense.) It’s been said many times that there are only 4 or 5 good ideas, and they keep being passed around over and over, re-shaped, re-imagined. And the creative animus, the deranged, meticulous force of imagination that fueled Kubrick’s mind when he took a good thriller by Stephen King and made it into a horrific masterpiece could well have been flowing through Lynch’s mind when he made… anything. Except, perhaps, ‘The Straight Story.’ Or ‘Dune.’ This mash-up (though it’s a lot more) by Richard Vezina has a lot of beautiful little touches: a log truck rolling by outside the window as Jack Torrance is conducting his entrance interview at The Overlook; Dick Hallorann ending up in the tractor from ‘The Straight Story’ when he’s driving to the hotel to save the lives of Torrance’s family; Torrance watching ants gnawing and gnashing their teeth as he looks at a model of the hotel grounds… Far from just a random supposition, the question at the heart of the piece prods us to pay more close attention to the similarities between these two cinematic emissaries from the dark side of the mind.

Watch: A Jean-Luc Godard Homage in Blue, White and Red (NSFW, a little)

This homage to Jean-Luc Godard by Cinema Sem Lei focuses on his enduring use of blue, whites, and reds in the films ‘Contempt,’ ‘A Woman Is a Woman,’ ‘Pierrot le Fou,’ and ‘Made in U.S.A.’ Watching it, you might be tempted to say,Is that all there is to it? Just a collection of red, white and blue scenes? What’s the point? I could do that. Etcetera. In so doing, you might miss the point you’re looking for. Watching this little collection, one is reminded of a crucial element of Godard’s early (and to a certain extent later) style: that point where what we might consider a narrative element (the way a person dresses, for instance, as an indication of character–or a part of a setting) turns into something else entirely: a cog inside a large symbolic machine, not a shirt, not a neon letter, not a doorway, not a floodlight, but something else. You can use the word "sign," if you wish, or the term "visual vocabulary," or "visual language," but the three-way-rally exchange is the same: from the screen to the eye to the mind, lingering a little in each.

Watch: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’… Animated!

So, the most recent in the flood of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road‘ tributes is an animated piece by Vimeo user whoispablo. The work is deft, and smart, and driven here, and the earth tones used, rather than dampening the action, make it more gritty, with more of a newsreel feel. George Miller should feel proud that his series has touched such a cultural nerve–what that nerve is, specifically, remains to be seen.