The Autonomous Camera in

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

PAUL SUNDERLAND

This study into the aesthetics of camera movement in the cinema of Stanley
Kubrick is due to an interest in the relationship between technology and
cinema. Analysis of some of the major developments in moving camera
technology demonstrates the close connection between technological
development and moving camera aesthetics. As new technology becomes
available, filmmakers are afforded greater freedom in the ways in which a
moving image can be achieved. Kubrick’s position at the forefront of
technological developments in the cinema throughout his career, as well as
his stylistic preference for camera movement, make his body of work a
logical focal point for a discussion of this kind. 2001: A Space Odyssey was
ground-breaking in its use of special effects – an achievement that would
earn the director an Academy Award. Barry Lyndon featured radically new
lenses that allowed sequences to be filmed entirely by candlelight.1 By
focusing on Kubrick’s use of the Steadicam in The Shining this discussion
will focus on a less-widely acknowledged aspect of Kubrick’s use of
cinematic technology. In my discussion I suggest that Kubrick’s innovative
use of the Steadicam challenged the spectator’s perception of cinematic
space. I attempt to show that Kubrick introduced a radically new form of
camera movement that fundamentally altered the use of movement as a
narrative and stylistic device. In departing from conventional moving
camera aesthetics, Kubrick’s camera becomes a self-conscious narrative
device, entailing a rejection of the illusion of realism with which narrative
cinema is conventionally concerned. This self-consciousness accounts in
part for the authorial presence, or directorial ‘signature’, apparent
throughout The Shining, and traceable across the director’s cinema.

1
For a detailed discussion of this see Ed DiGuilio, ‘Two Special Lenses for Barry
Lyndon,’ American Cinematographer 57, no. 3 (1976): 276-7.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Kubrick and the aesthetics of camera movement in The Shining

The climax to The Shining depicts Danny being pursued through a

large, snow-covered hedge-maze by his axe-wielding father, Jack. Danny
deftly weaves through the narrow hedges of the maze as the camera
pursues him relentlessly from behind. The imposing walls of the maze
accelerate past the edges of the frame, emphasizing the speed and
desperation with which Danny runs. Bright lights at the ends of the tunnels
seem to beckon to him through the falling snow as he frantically flees his
father. The sequence is permeated by an excessive amount of movement,
but immediately noticeable is the ease with which the camera moves to
pursue Danny through the tight spaces of the maze. At one point Danny
falls; the camera slows down, and then accelerates to pursue him as he rises
and begins running again. A moment later Danny abruptly doubles back in
the direction from which he has come, but the camera accommodates his
change in direction with ease – it stops, pulls back, and turns to follow him
in one fluid movement. It appears that this camera is floating through
space, not questioning the dense materiality of the earth but hovering
blithely above it. It pursues Danny relentlessly, free from the restrictions of
gravity and materiality, embodying a kind of freedom and autonomy rarely
displayed in narrative cinema prior to The Shining.2

This sequence represents a fundamentally new form of cinematic

movement made possible by developments in the early 1970s in the
stabilization of hand-held cinematography. These developments were
perfected in 1975 in the Steadicam, a device that combines the mobility of
a hand-held camera with the stability of a dolly, producing a graceful and
fluid image in motion, while simultaneously allowing the free movement of
the apparatus through space. After seeing a reel of test footage shot by an
early prototype in 1974, Kubrick wrote to Garret Brown, the Steadicam’s
inventor, to tell him that the footage shot by the ‘hand-held mystery
stabilizer was spectacular’ and that it ‘should revolutionize the way films
are shot.’3 The Shining was Kubrick’s first film subsequent to the invention
of the Steadicam, and it is unsurprising that a director so enthusiastic about

2
In a discussion of several technological developments in the 1970s allowing
greater freedom in camera movement, Salt includes among the Steadicam’s unique
effects the tendency ‘to feel as though it has a life of its own,’ and ‘a slight look of
‘balloon-like’ motion’. See Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and
Analysis, (London: Starworld, 1992), p.278.
3
Quoted in Serena Ferrara, Steadicam: Techniques and Aesthetics (Oxford: Focal
Press, 2001), p.30.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

both camera movement and technological development in cinema should

utilise the aesthetic possibilities afforded by the new technology. In
assessing Kubrick’s use of the Steadicam, Brown found that Kubrick used
the device ‘as it was intended to be used, as a tool which can help get the
lens where it’s wanted in space and time without the classical limitation of
the dolly and crane.’4 Pipolo similarly argues that The Shining represents
‘one of the most spectacular applications of technological invention to the
illusionist seductions of the medium.’5 While earlier films had used the
new technology for conventional camera movements,6 Kubrick’s film was
the first major production to use the device as a distinct narrative and
imagistic voice, one that is ‘independent, superior and capable of tying
together events, anticipating them and abandoning them exactly because it
knows the story and chooses how to tell it to us.’7

Camera movement is Kubrick’s most consistently self-conscious

stylistic characteristic and numerous examples from any film in his body of
work testify to its importance to his directorial style. The ubiquity of
camera movement in Kubrick’s cinema points to a restlessness with
conventional spatial aesthetics. Overt tracking movements forward or
backward in Paths of Glory and A Clockwork Orange suggest an attempt to
breach the frame separating the diegesis and its observer. The zoom in
Barry Lyndon alters the relationship between the spectator and the object of
the gaze. The viewer’s spatial orientation is overwhelmed by the tracking
shots of Dr. Poole as he circuits the control room in 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Kubrick’s predisposition towards camera movement suggests he
recognised and was attracted to the Steadicam’s ability to reconfigure the
relationship between the spectator and the diegesis and to more closely
approximate the full immersion of the spectator in the cinematic space – a
goal the director’s relentless tracking-in-depth tries to achieve. But there is

4
Quoted in Ferrara, Steadicam, p. 30.
5
Tony Pipolo, ‘The Modernist and the Misanthrope: The Cinema of Stanley
Kubrick,’ Cineaste 27, no. 2 (2002): 12.
6
The first Steadicam shot in a feature film is a 2-minute tracking shot in Bound For
Glory (1976). Beginning from a raised platform, the camera descends to the ground
and then follows David Carradine as he moves through a crowd. The device was
also used in Marathon Man (1976) to add dynamism to the shots of Dustin
Hoffman running through Central Park and the streets of New York. Rocky (1976)
features the celebrated sequence in which the Steadicam follows Rocky as he
climbs the stairs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In none of these films
however, does the device demonstrate the autonomy and self-consciousness it
attains in The Shining.
7
Ferrara, Steadicam, p. 81.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

another distinct difference between the earlier camera movements

characteristic of Kubrick’s cinematic style, and what I will refer to as the
panoptic8 gaze in The Shining. The apparatus that pursues Danny through
the maze demonstrates the ability to move anywhere in space. Not only can
it maintain the subject of its observation in a perfectly-framed shot, it can
anticipate the movement of characters. This spatial ‘awareness’ marks a
significant development on previous camera movements, which are
conventionally used to support the story through a character’s point-of-
view. The track, for instance, is an explicit register of movement within the
frame usually tied to character. Antoine’s run to the beach at the end of The
400 Blows (1959) demonstrates tracking’s conventional characterological
function – the movement in this case conveys the sense of freedom for
which Antoine yearns. 9 Likewise, Jules et Jim (1962), to use another
example from Truffaut, demonstrates the use of hand-held cinematography
in the mediation of character. In the famous scene of Oskar Werner, Henri
Serre and Jeanne Moreau racing each other on the Parisian bridge, ‘the
freedom of the camera and the freedom of the characters are one.’10
Camera movement in cinema has thus been aesthetically normalised as a
function of point-of-view. The unique development brought to the cinema
by the Steadicam is the materialisation of a presence dislocated from
conventional point-of-view itineraries.

Kubrick: ‘A parody puppeteer in the shadows’

Kubrick’s films have typically been met with a combination of

confusion and disappointment upon release, and The Shining was no
exception. Gregg Smith sums up the response: ‘some critics complained
that the film was too complicated and didn’t make sense, others that it was

8
Foucault uses Bentham’s Panopticon – a circular prison arranged so the cells at
the periphery are constantly visible from a single central point – as a metaphor for
the functioning of power in society. He writes: ‘The Panopticon is a machine for
dissociating the see/being seen dyad; in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen,
without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being
seen.’ See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), pp. 201-202.
9
For a detailed account of this sequence see Lucia Nagib, World Cinema and the
Ethics of Realism, (New York, NY: Continuum, 2011).
10
John Calhoun, ‘Putting the ‘Move’ in Movie,’ American Cinematographer 84,
no. 10 (2003): 81.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

too slow, still others that it was not scary enough.’11 Variety wrote that
Kubrick destroys ‘all that was so terrifying about Stephen King’s
bestseller,’12 and Dave Kehr found that the ‘imagery – with its compulsive
symmetry and brightness – is too banal to sustain interest.’13 Given the film
is a long, ponderous story about unremarkable and unlikeable characters, it
is hardly surprising that some of the response was negative. Its release also
coincided with a surge in popularity in ‘slasher’ films, and as a ‘thinking
person’s horror film,’14 The Shining was unlikely to appeal to audiences
accustomed to films like The Amityville Horror, Halloween, and Friday the
13th, all of which were released in the three years prior to The Shining to
significant commercial success.15

Smith adds that it was not just popular critics that disliked the film,
but that academic critics were disinterested because they saw it as ‘a horror
film and as such not worth paying attention to.’16 Smith’s point here is that
the contemporary critical dismissal of The Shining as a genre film was a
simplistic reduction of its thematic and stylistic complexity. As with
previous ‘genre’ films in his career, the horror genre to Kubrick was hardly
a strict system of rules and conventions to which a film must conform, but
rather a framework on which to construct a unique conceptual vision.
Richard Jameson argues that categorising The Shining as a horror film is as
helpful as describing Dr Strangelove as an ‘anti-war film’, or 2001: A
Space Odyssey as an ‘outer-space pic’, or Barry Lyndon as a ‘costume
picture.’17 He argues that ‘The Shining is a horror movie only in the sense
that all Kubrick’s mature work has been horror movies – films that

11
Greg Smith, ‘‘Real Horrorshow’: The Juxtaposition of Subtext, Satire, and
Audience Implication in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,’ Literature/Film Quarterly
25, no. 4 (1997), 300.
12
‘Review: ‘The Shining’,’ Variety, accessed June 11, 2013,
http://variety.com/1979/film/reviews/the-shining-1200424592/.
13
‘The Shining,’ Dave Kehr, accessed June 13, 2013,
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-shining/Film?oid=2686751.
14
Amy Nolan, ‘Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanely
Kubrick’s The Shining,’ Cultural Critique 77 (2011), 184.
15
While partaking in the narrative and visual tropes of the horror genre, The
Shining clearly deviated from the conventions of both the slasher and supernatural
horror film. However, few contemporary analyses in criticism attempt to interrogate
the nature of this deviation, which I locate in the film’s stretched out suspense,
intrusive comedy, and the absence of sympathetic characters with which to identify.
16
Smith, ‘Real Horrorshow,’ 300.
17
Richard Jameson, ‘Kubrick’s Shining,’ Film Comment 16, no. 4 (1980), 29.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

constitute a Swiftian vision of inscrutable cosmic order.’18 Contemporary

audiences expecting a conventional horror film similar to the commercially
successful slasher films of the late 1970s were thus unlikely to be
impressed by a film that not only dispensed with the conventions of the
horror genre, but one that strategically deviated from the classical
Hollywood style to conform more closely to what Bordwell would describe
as an ‘art’ film.19

Smith and Jameson both suggest that audiences judging the film
according to aesthetic criteria based on classical convention were unlikely
to appreciate The Shining’s narrative irresolution, ambivalent point-of-
view, unlikeable characters and general ambiguity. Furthermore, the film’s
overt self-consciousness was likely to further alienate audiences
accustomed to a style that effaces all traces of the author – a ‘rule’ ignored
by Kubrick throughout his career. Jameson makes the point that it is more
helpful to categorize The Shining as ‘A Stanley Kubrick Film’ than as an
example of the horror genre.20 Mamber puts this another way: ‘Behind all
the hotel doors setting ghastly images in motion, dripping blood out of
elevators, providing the unexplained means of escape to frequently trapped
characters, lies the director himself, a parody puppeteer in the shadows.’21
Kubrick’s frequent inclusion in lists alongside the great auteurs of cinema –
Hitchcock, Welles, or Antonioni, for example – is in part due to this
authorial presence, or directorial ‘signature’. By rejecting the effacement of
the author typical of the classical style, Kubrick’s cinema demonstrates a
modernist22 sensibility that exposes the fictionality of the text,
foregrounding both the narrational process, apparatical construction of the
image, and the presence of the author.

18
Jameson, ‘Kubrick’s Shining,’ 29.
19
David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,’ In Film Theory
and Criticism: 6th Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), pp. 774-782.
20
Jameson, ‘Kubrick’s Shining,’ 29.
21
Stephen Mamber, ‘Parody, Intertextuality, Signature: Kubrick, DePalma, and
Scorsese,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12 (1990): 34.
22
I use the term in accordance with Bordwell’s conception of a modernist cinema:
‘that set of formal properties and viewing protocols that presents, above all, the
radical split of narrative structure from cinematic style, so that the film constantly
strains between the coherence of the fiction and the perceptual disjunctions of
cinematic representation.’ See Bordwell, ‘Art Cinema’, pp. 780-781.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

The incongruity of a ‘difficult’ modernist sensibility with a

conventionally marketed genre film goes some way toward explaining the
film’s early mixed reception, but as with other Kubrick films The Shining
has risen in both popular and critical esteem in the decades subsequent to
its release. It has become the subject of numerous critical studies and works
of scholarship, with most critics focusing on the film's narrative elements –
plot, story, and characterisation – in discussing the film’s thematic
concerns. These analyses have shown that the film is a complex exploration
of American history,23 patriarchal repression,24 and the American nuclear
family,25 which connect to broader ideas that recur throughout Kubrick’s
cinema, such as humanity’s preoccupation with war, the maintenance of
male-dominated systems of power, and the incompatibility of social
institutions with human nature.

Though these thematic aspects have been widely discussed, the film’s
stylistic and formal qualities, particularly the use of the apparatus, have
generally been under-acknowledged in critical discussion. I argue that an
analysis of stylistic and formal qualities, in addition to narrative and
thematic concerns, is essential to forming a comprehensive interpretation of
the film. My analysis attempts to demonstrate how the authorial presence
inherent in much of Kubrick’s cinema is manifested in medium-specific
tropes. Deviations from classical convention foreground the presence of the
author and make manifest the narrational process intrinsic to Kubrick’s
unconventional style. My discussion focuses on the implications of
Kubrick’s use of the Steadicam as a self-conscious narrative device in
contravention of classical convention. In order to understand the ways in
which the Steadicam is utilised specifically and self-consciously in The
Shining as a fundamentally new form of camera movement, it is necessary
first to examine the development of camera movement in the context of the
development of the classical narrative style.

Camera movement and the illusion of realism

23
See for example Nolan, ‘Labyrinths,’ 180-204.
24
See for example Robert Kilker, ‘All Roads Lead to the Abject: The Monstrous
Feminine and Gender Boundaries in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,’
Literature/Film Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2006): 54-63.
25
See for example Frank Manchel, ‘What About Jack? Another Perspective on
Family Relationships in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,’ Literature/Film Quarterly
23, no. 1 (1995): 68-78.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

In an article on the aesthetic implications of camera movement, John

Calhoun argues that of all the visual arts, only cinema has the ability to
‘reframe a continuous image.’26 This alters the relationship between the
spectator and the frame, and allows a filmmaker to link a series of
geographically disparate objects or spaces in an uninterrupted sequence. As
early as the late 1890s, filmmakers experimented with camera movement,
suggesting the technique has been integral to the medium since its
inception. A short sequence depicting movement in Panorama du Grand
Canal pris d'un Bateau from 1896, ‘likely … the first travelling shot in the
history of cinema,’27 was achieved by attaching the camera to a gondola
and capturing a series of buildings as the camera floated along the canals of
Venice. The shot is typical of early examples of camera movement that,
due to an absence of panning heads and other specialised equipment, used
available means of transport as the method of moving the camera.
Attaching the camera to a train became one of the most popular methods of
achieving movement, and Nielsen points out that by the early 20th century
there had already developed two-subcategories of train mobility:
‘panoramas’ – shots filmed from the side of a moving train, which could
articulate a spatial layout – and ‘phantom rides’ – shots filmed from the
front of a moving train, which offer the thrill of ‘spectacular viewing
positions.’28

Short films featuring panning shots began appearing in the early

1900s, and in 1903, Hooligan in Jail featured one of the earliest examples
of a dolly shot. The sequence begins with a long shot of a prisoner seated at
a table. A guard enters to place some food on the table. The camera then
dollies in to capture the prisoner’s facial expression. The movement in this
early example is notable, as Nielsen points out, as it ‘varies from its
conventionalized use in classical narrative cinema.’ He argues that the shot
‘does not really invite the viewer inside the [hooligan’s] mind.’ Rather, the
hooligan is a ‘stock character whose grimacing is a comic performance,
and it is this presentational comic performance which the push-in
ultimately facilitates’ (italics original). The movement is accompanied by
the ‘direct audience address of the hooligan’, further relinquishing any
attempt ‘to sustain the illusion that he inhabits an autonomous fictional
world.’ 29 One of the earliest examples of camera movement was thus

26
Calhoun, ‘Movie,’ 73.
27
Jakob Nielsen, ‘Camera Movement in Narrative Cinema: Towards a Taxonomy
of Functions’ (PhD diss., University of Aarhus, 2007), p. 89.
28
Ibid, 89.
29
Nielsen, ‘Camera Movement,’ 93.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

indifferent to the realistic illusion of the cinema that would predominate

with the rise of a classical style.

Tom Gunning points out that though this early cinema was not
‘dominated by the narrative impulse that later asserted its sway over the
medium,’ by 1906 these early examples of what he calls a ‘cinema of
attractions’ would be overtaken by a different set of ‘spectator relations.’30
This different set of spectator relations developed into the classical
Hollywood cinema, in which style would become increasingly subordinate
to narrative. The classical cinema is predicated on a diegetic world that pre-
exists its representation by the cinematic apparatus, and the role of the
apparatus is to communicate the diegesis as seamlessly as possible,
effacing all traces of the author and the means by which the author
communicates. By effacing all traces of authorial activity, classical cinema
aims to achieve an ‘invisibility of style’, with the audience focusing ‘on
constructing the fabula31, not on asking why the narration is representing
the fabula in this particular way.’32 Classical camera movement can thus be
seen as any movement of the apparatus that attempts to communicate the
narrative as unobtrusively as possible. Ferrara writes that classical
movement aids ‘in the construction of the story and … in obtaining the best
possible portrayal of what is happening.’33 This includes ‘following an
actor’s movements’, and ‘illustrating and depicting the setting.’ Camera
movement from the early 1900s would increasingly be constrained by this
imperative.

An example from D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance demonstrates

the conjunction of experimental camera movement and narrative from the
early 20th century (figures 1-3). David D. Samuelson writes in A Brief
History of Camera Mobility that the simultaneous track in and down on the
Gates of Babylon set means the camera shows the ‘whole Babylonian
scene from a high angle … before being lowered and pushed forward
toward a two-head close-up.’34 The sequence (figures 1-3) is said to contain

30
Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction,’ Wide Angle 3, no. 4 (1986), 64.
31
Bordwell defines ‘fabula’ as ‘the narrative events in causal chronological
sequence’
32
David Bordwell, ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and
Procedures,’ in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A film Theory Reader, ed. Philip
Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 25.
33
Ferrara, Steadicam, p. 9.
34
David Samuelson, ‘A Brief History of Camera Mobility,’ American
Cinematographer 84, no. 10 (2003), 90.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

the ‘first shot where the camera changed height and tracked forward and
backward.’35

Fig 1

Fig 2

35
Ibid, 90.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 3

Samuelson points out that the details of how this cinematic milestone was
achieved have been lost to history, but it is believed a large tower was built
across two railway wagons, and the camera then lowered from the tower as
the wagons were pushed forward by hand. John Calhoun notes that the
‘obvious reason for the shot was to first establish the scale of the set, and
then to move closer to verify that actual human activity was taking place in
it.’36 This early example of an experimental shot – anticipating the
invention of the crane by a decade in its combination of vertical movement
and movement in depth – thus had the narrative function of orientating the
audience to the scale and grandeur of the scene.

The basic moving camera technologies were widely available by the

1930s and directors were free to explore the aesthetic implications of
movement.37 In his discussion of Renoir’s Grand Illusion, Bazin
demonstrates that cinematic realism is one of the aesthetic possibilities
provided by a mobile camera. His analysis focuses on how camera
movement eliminates the need for editing, which he believes separates
‘reality into successive shots which [are] just a series of either logical or
subjective points of view of an event.’38 Consider the sequence from Grand

36
Calhoun, ‘Movie,’ 73.
37
Salt, Film Style, p. 206.
38
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), p. 28.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Illusion in which the camera looks down from a high angle on Cartier in
the courtyard as he shouts off-screen to an unseen prisoner (figures 4-6).

Fig 4

Fig 5

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 6

As their brief dialogue comes to an end, the camera pulls back to reveal
first a window frame through which the camera has been filming, and then
the interior of a room where two prisoners are seated, one of whom was
shouting to Cartier moments earlier. The movement shifts the focus of the
scene from Cartier in the courtyard to the conversation between the two
prisoners in the room above, effectively linking two dramatically and
spatially distinct scenes. Bazin sees this kind of movement as fundamental
in preserving dramatic and phenomenological unity. ‘By moving the
camera to “reframe” the scene instead of cutting,’ he writes, ‘Renoir is able
to treat the sequence not as a series of fragments but as a dramatic
whole.’39 Realism is achieved by eliminating the need to introduce an
‘obviously abstract element into reality’40 through editing. ‘It is through
such techniques,’ Bazin argues, ‘that Renoir attempts to portray
realistically the relations between men and women and the world in which
they find themselves.’41

39
Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W. W. Halsey II and W. H. Simon (London:
W.H. Allen, 1974), p. 64.
40
Bazin, What is Cinema?, p. 28.
41
Bazin, Renoir, p. 64.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Significant developments in realism would also be achieved with the

advent of hand-held cinematography, the rise of which Calhoun attributes
to the coincidence of advances in mobile sound and camera technology,
and ‘the ascendancy of personal style in film.’42 A hand-held camera is free
from the restrictions imposed by a dolly or crane, allowing it to move
freely through space. The technique would become associated with the
directors of the French New Wave, who used it to disrupt the
conventionally stable frame of the classical style. Godard’s use of the
technique to follow Jean Seberg as she makes a circuit of the house
towards the end of Breathless, demonstrates the mobility the technology
provided as well as the realism it could add to the image. The extra
mobility meant that the camera could now follow characters through space,
and Geuens suggests that as ‘the camera stuck close to the protagonists and
followed them from room to room, from inside a building to the street, the
artificiality of the studio was left behind – the grime of the “real” world
paradoxically providing a breath of fresh air.’43 The camera that could
move freely could also affect the spectator viscerally. Geuens notes that in
following a character a hand-held camera achieves ‘the recreation of some
of the sensations experienced by a human being undertaking these
actions.’44 In endeavouring to provide a sensation of movement, these
experiments with mobility were increasingly a departure from classicism
and a narratively inscribed progression. They attempted to provide
movement as an affective quality of the cinematic medium. The extra
mobility of the hand-held camera had significant narrative and aesthetic
opportunities, but the lack of stability inherent to the practice was an issue
for filmmakers wanting to maintain a stable image within a constantly
reframing spatial environment. This stability was not technologically
possible with the hand-held apparatus seen in cinema prior to The Shining.

The Steadicam: ‘Pure visual presence’

The Steadicam was a development in moving camera technology as

significant as the dolly, the crane, or hand-held cinematography, and one
that, according to Geuens, ‘significantly altered the look of films.’45 It was
originally invented by Garret Brown to ‘improve the look of [his] hand-

42
Calhoun, ‘Movie’, 80.
43
Jean-Pierre Geuens, ‘Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam,’ Film
Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1993), 11.
44
Ibid, 11.
45
Ibid, 8.

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held shooting.’46 The device’s original patent describes it as a ‘portable

camera equipment system especially adapted for operation by a camera
operator in motion’47. It is ‘substantially free-floating in a manner to isolate
[it] … from unwanted lateral and vertical movement caused by the motion
of the camera operator.’48 Ferrara notes that the extra stability of the device
is achieved by the use of three basic principles: shifting the camera’s centre
of gravity, spreading the camera mass, and isolating the camera from the
movements of the operator.49 These three principles combine in a device
that ‘responds to the demands of one’s hands with the grace and fluidity of
a jazz dancer.’50 This stability and responsiveness produce the fluid and
graceful movement characteristic of Steadicam shots.

Camera operators frequently complain that the instant dynamism and

kinetic energy provided by a Steadicam shot has meant that the device is
often overused in contemporary cinema.51 Bordwell writes that ‘the shot
pursuing one or two characters down corridors, through room after room,
indoors and outdoors and back again, has become ubiquitous’ in
contemporary American cinema.52 He attributes this to the influence of
directors whose work is marked by virtuoso camera movements – among
whom he includes Kubrick – and to the increasing availability of ‘lighter
cameras and stabilizers like Steadicam.’53 Geuens argues that the excessive
visuality characterising much contemporary film calls for ‘no less than a
different type of scopic regime.’54 As an example he discusses a shot from
James Cameron’s Terminator 2, which he describes as ‘a flashy display of
Steadicam pyrotechnics.’55 The sequence begins with a close-up of a
computer screen. The camera tracks left and then pans to reveal a spacious
scientific laboratory where a number of scientists are busily working at
computers and desks. After establishing the layout and extent of the set, the
camera moves forward through the space, intermittently panning left or

46
Ibid, p. 11.
47
Ibid, p. 14.
48
Ibid, pp. 14-15.
49
Ibid, pp. 18-19.
50
Geuens, ‘Visuality,’ 12.
51
These views on contemporary Steadicam use can be found in Ferrara, Steadicam,
pp. 101-157.
52
David Bordwell, ‘Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American
Film,’ Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002), 20.
53
Ibid, 20.
54
Geuens, ‘Visuality,’ 15.
55
Ibid, 14.

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right to follow or leave the movement of various characters, eventually

coming to focus on Miles Dyson, the director of the laboratory, as he
converses with an assistant. The camera tracks 90 degrees around the two
men then follows them as they walk through the laboratory. The camera
moves through a doorway into a separate enclosure, stops to watch another
brief conversation before moving to follow Miles to the door of a heavily-
secured vault. The camera finally comes to a rest, and the sequence is
ended with a cut taking us to the other side of the vault.

Geuens writes that the sequence is permeated by ‘so much visual

distraction’ that it represents an ‘implicit indifference toward what was
once a basic tenet of the classical film language through which this kind of
text still officially operates.’56 The camera initially moves into the
laboratory independently, only subsequently focusing on the characters in
the room, and even then ‘it is no longer possible to say … that we are in the
best possible position from which to apprehend their conversations and
view their activities.’57 The movement of the camera far exceeds the
narrative demands of the scene and as such ‘cannot be explained through
the use of traditional narrative or aesthetic agencies.’58 It marks a
significant departure from the purely descriptive camera movements of a
classical style.

In The Shining, Kubrick introduced a highly specific and self-

conscious use of Steadicam movement that anticipates Geuens’ example
from Terminator 2 and that Bordwell has argued has become ubiquitous
since the early 90s. The first post-credit sequence of The Shining starts with
Jack entering the doors of the Overlook Hotel’s spacious and well-lit lobby
(figures 7-12). He enters the lobby left of frame and the camera tracks
laterally to follow him as he approaches a reception desk that soon enters
the frame from the right. He has a short conversation with a receptionist
who gestures to Ullman’s office off-screen and behind the camera. The
camera then follows Jack as he moves towards the office, first panning
anti-clockwise to give a panoramic view of the expansive set. The camera
then follows Jack through one doorway, pauses as he hesitates at a second,
and follows him into the office as he is invited in by Ullman. The camera
finally becomes stationary inside the office to observe a brief conversation
between the two characters.

56
Ibid, 14.
57
Ibid, 14.
58
Ibid, 15.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 7

Fig 8

Fig 9

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 10

Fig 11

Fig 12

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

A relatively simple classical arrangement would suffice in conveying

the sequence’s straightforward narrative material. A long shot would
establish Jack’s entrance to the lobby; a cut to a mid-shot would show his
brief conversation with the receptionist; a cut to the inside of Ullman’s
office would show Jack entering the room moments later. This causal
montage would effectively establish the spatial contours of the
environment and ‘direct’ the gaze of the spectator toward its key
significatory elements. Instead, Kubrick films the sequence as a continuous
shot, showing the entirety of Jack’s movement from the front doors of the
hotel lobby to his arrival in Ullman’s office nearly a minute later.
Kubrick’s decision to film the sequence without a cut recalls Bazin’s
analysis of camera movement in Grand Illusion described earlier. It could
be said that Kubrick films the entire sequence as a continuous take in an
attempt to portray ‘realistically the relations between men and women and
the world in which they find themselves.’ But this sequence has none of the
subtlety of Renoir’s movement. Kubrick instead revels in the exuberant
visuality provided by a fully mobile apparatus. In blocking Jack’s
movement, Kubrick ensures he walks around the camera on his way to
Ullman’s office, allowing the camera to perform a wide circle to follow
him, orientating us to the vastness of the set and establishing the camera’s
ability to go everywhere and see everything. Furthermore, the Steadicam’s
eerie floating sensation betrays a pensiveness unachievable with
conventional hand-held cinematography. Not only does visuality here
thoroughly exceed the demands of the scene, it ‘superimposes over the
conventional action a panoptic demonstration of pure visual presence.’59
The camera here is not describing a setting; it is announcing a vast and
precarious cinematic space of which it is unmistakably the centre.

Geuens notes that though the movement of the Steadicam through

space may parallel that of the dolly, the former device embodies a ‘clinical
distance’ and a ‘sterilized indifference’60 that lend an inherent artificiality
to the image. In discussing camera movement in Alain Resnais’ Night and
Fog he writes that the ‘slow, determinate, carefully executed dolly
movement’ alongside the latrines of an Auschwitz block ‘interrogate[s] the
palpability of the cracks in the concrete.’61 He argues that the intentionality
of the movement conveys the filmmaker’s determination to negotiate the
denseness of the world. This expresses the filmmaker’s ‘concern with the

59
Ibid, 15.
60
Ibid, 15.
61
Ibid, 15.

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very muteness of the photographic image and its failure to evoke but the
phantom of an event that was then and is now still truly unspeakable.’62 In
contrast to the dense materiality of the dolly, the levitation of the
Steadicam diminishes this connection between the material world and the
apparatus. The Steadicam is dematerialized – it is liberated from the
restrictions of gravity or physicality, and is consequently unable to
negotiate the material reality of the world. Attendent to this liberation is a
sterilization of the image. Following Geuens’s reasoning, the idea of
substituting the palpable materiality of Resnais’ dolly movement with the
‘clinical distance’ and ‘sterilized indifference’ of the Steadicam would be
repellent.

Kubrick uses the sterilized image produced by the Steadicam’s

dematerialization to suggest an indifferent and detached cinematic space in
The Shining. The Steadicam’s indifference to the material reality of the
space is emphasised during one of Danny’s rides through the labyrinthine
corridors of the Overlook Hotel on his tricycle. The floor that Danny
covers on his route is primarily made up of hard floorboards, but at several
points during his ride he crosses a rug, the soft, muted sound of which
differs from the harshness of the wooden floorboards. The contrast between
the two sounds makes palpable the material reality of the hotel. The
Steadicam that follows close behind Danny is noticeably unaffected by the
change in material, instead gliding detachedly along. Girard writes of this
sequence that ‘the extremely low position of the camera and the amplified
sound of the bike's wheels awaken in the spectator a feeling of malaise and
of the unknown.’ 63 She attributes this effect to the shot’s coding as ‘a
subjective camera’ with ‘no imaginable subject.’ The camera's point of
view ‘thus becomes monstrous, dogging the little boy in an irrepresentable,
menacing fashion.’ The unsettling feeling produced in the spectator is a
result of the Steadicam’s ability to materialise a panoptic gaze that is
dislocated from a conventional point-of-view itinerary.

Spatial aesthetics and the configuration of a ‘presence’

Camera movement is a stylistic characteristic with which Kubrick is

often associated, and the ubiquity of the technique throughout the director’s

62
Ibid, 15.
63
Quoted in Elizabeth Mullen, ‘Do You Speak Kubrick? Orchestrating
Transgression and Mastering Malaise in The Shining,’ Image & Narrative 10, no. 2
(2009): 100.

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cinema suggests a dissatisfaction with conventional spatial aesthetics. In

looking at the way Kubrick attempts to reconfigure spatial aesthetics in The
Shining, it is helpful to consider an account of camera movement given by
Brown, who, in addition to inventing the device, was the Steadicam’s
operator on The Shining:

When the camera begins to move, we are suddenly given the

missing information as to shape and layout and size. The two-
dimensional image acquires the illusion of three-
dimensionality and we are carried across the divide of the
screen, deeper and deeper into a world that is not contiguous
to our own.64

Movement in depth is the attempt to reconfigure the conventional

relationship between the diegesis and its observer, which places the
diegesis on one side of the frame, and the spectator firmly on the other. By
moving forward or backward in space the spectator is invited to probe the
cinematic world presented in the diegesis. Kubrick’s constant attempt to
breach the threshold separating the diegesis and the spectator is evidenced
by a trope that recurs throughout his cinema: a character walks towards the
spectator through a symmetrical tunnel as the camera tracks backwards.
Kubrick often combines this movement with a wide-angle lens, distorting
the frame by emphasising objects in the foreground and pushing the
background into the distance. The combination of an exaggerated sense of
depth produced by the wide-angle lens and the tracking movement of the
camera gives the illusion that the sides of the tunnel are accelerating from
the edges of the frame towards a central vanishing point.

An early example of this is the sequence showing General Mireau

marching through the trenches inspecting his troops in Paths of Glory
(figure 13). The camera tracks backwards to anticipate the General’s
movement, pausing occasionally as he talks to the soldiers, whom he has
decided will soon be going over the top to meet German machine-gun fire.
As the General marches past, the wounded and demoralized soldiers lining
the sides of the trench accelerate from the edges of the frame towards the
vanishing point, reflecting the General’s indifference towards them.

64
Quoted in Calhoun, ‘Movie,’ 74.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 13

The same effect is achieved in A Clockwork Orange as Alex walks through

the record store to collect a record he has ordered (figure 14). Again, the
walls accelerate past the edges of the frame towards a distant central point.
Pop-cultural ephemera lining the walls accelerate into the distance as Alex
walks aloofly by. In this sequence the distinction between the diegesis and
the observer will be further breached in a metafictional disruption of
realism: at the conclusion of his walk through the store Alex will stop at a
counter where an LP for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is prominently
displayed.

Fig 14

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Kubrick’s innovation in The Shining is to reverse the direction of the

tracking. The frequent shots of Danny riding through the hotel position the
spectator behind him, inches above the ground (figure 15). As Danny rides
forward we follow him toward the distant vanishing point in the centre of
the frame. The vanishing point is what Jameson labels a ‘tear in the
membrane of reality’ in his description of one of the film’s visual motifs:

Virtually every shot … is built around a central hole, a

vacancy, a tear in the membrane of reality: a door that would
lead us down another hallway, a panel of bright color that
somehow seems more permeable than the surrounding dark
tones, an infinite white glow behind a central closeup face, a
mirror, a TV screen … a photograph.65

These tears ‘in the membrane of reality’ represent the threat of

subsumption posed by the hotel. Kubrick’s use of a wide-angle lens in the
lengthy forward-tracking shots produces the same distortion as in the
examples from Paths of Glory and A Clockwork Orange, but by tracking
forward the walls of the tunnel accelerate towards us. This produces in the
spectator the sensation of being pulled into the frame towards the distant
vanishing point. Paradoxically, the extra stability provided by the
Steadicam compounds this sensation by lacking the materiality that
permeates a dolly shot. It is the relentless forward-tracking movement
through a distorted tunnel coupled with the Steadicam’s dematerialization
that makes so tangible the hotel’s threat of subsumption.

65
Jameson, ‘Kubrick’s Shining,’ 30.

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Fig 15

Throughout The Shining, the apparatus consistently and overtly

demonstrates autonomy from the diegesis with which it is concerned. In a
discussion of Antonioni, Seymour Chatman calls this autonomy ‘the
wandering camera’, or the moments in a film where ‘the camera seems to
wander on its own, in an objective, not a subjective, manner.’66 He
describes a shot of the desert in The Passenger where the camera, instead
of focusing on the character within the diegesis, in this case Jack
Nicholson’s Locke, pans away and wanders on its own for a moment, as if
liberated of its conventional characterological function (figures 16-18).
‘Locke is often picked up accidently and contingently, as if diegesis (or at
least this diegesis) were not the camera’s real responsibility,’ he writes.
‘The effect is strangely tense, as if the camera itself did not know what to
expect.’67 Of the same film, Kenneth Johnson argues that ‘it is specifically
camera movement in an unmotivated situation that gives the wandering
camera a unique sense of “presence”.’68 ‘When the camera so wanders,’ he
writes, ‘we become aware, because our “classical” expectations have been
disrupted, of a foreign presence.’69

66
Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985), p. 196.
67
Chatman, Antonioni, p. 197.
68
Kenneth Johnson, ‘The Point of View of the Wandering Camera,’ Cinema
Journal, 32 no.2 (1993), 51.
69
Chatman, Antonioni, p. 56.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 16

Fig 17

Fig 18

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

The Shining opens with a series of ‘wandering camera’ movements

immediately establishing the camera’s autonomy. The first is a shot from a
helicopter as it flies over a lake in what starts as a conventional establishing
shot. The camera soon foregrounds its autonomy by veering to one side to
avoid trees on an island in the middle of the lake. The second and third
shots are also from a helicopter, this time establishing the presence of
Jack’s car as it drives through the mountains towards the Overlook Hotel.
In each shot the car is a tiny object far below and the camera tracks from
behind – a visual motif that will recur throughout the film. In the fourth
shot the camera pulls in close to the car but flies past as if it were
unconcerned, or as if, as in Chatman’s earlier example, this diegesis were
not its real responsibility.

The omniscience of Kubrick’s camera in The Shining distinguishes

it from Antonioni’s camera in The Passenger, which appears to ‘not know
what to expect’. An example of this is in one of the Steadicam shots that
haunt Danny through the corridors. Generally, the Steadicam tracks him at
a uniform distance, but at one point the distance between Danny and the
camera varies. As he rides through the corridor the camera slows down,
allowing Danny to speed ahead until he gets further and further away. Once
he is far from the camera in the distance at the end of the corridor he
abruptly turns a corner and disappears from the frame. Conventional
narrative cinema demands that the camera follow the character, telling the
story from their subjectivity, but this camera lingers for a moment in the
corridor after Danny has disappeared (figure 19). Ferrara writes that this is
‘evidence of the presence of a gaze from above, pointing to something
which, precisely because the spectator can not clearly identify it, creates
tension.’70 The pause occurs moments before Danny’s second encounter
with Grady’s two daughters, during which flashes of their slaughtered
bodies are intercut with shots of them asking Danny to come and play with
them ‘for ever and ever and ever.’ The camera lingers in the corridor after
Danny has left moments before this encounter occurs; in effect, it knows
what awaits him around the corner.

70
Ferrara, Steadicam, p. 9.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Fig 19

On one level, this use of an autonomous camera creates an

anthropomorphic setting, achieving the cinematic equivalent of the literary
personification that animates the hotel in King’s novel. But I suggest that
Kubrick’s use of an autonomous camera is also offering a meditation on a
metaphysical problem with which he is concerned. A camera liberated of
its conventional function in cinematic discourse problematizes the
distinction between fictional worlds and the apparatus that communicates
those fictional worlds. This forces us to question our most basic
assumptions of reality. As Johnson points out, ‘the wandering camera calls
attention to the relationship between the nature of narrative and the nature
of our existence.’71 By pulling away from a character and acting on its
own, the wandering camera suggests that ‘since characters are the product
of discourse, we, like fictional characters, might also owe our “being” to
our subject positions in language.’ Kubrick’s innovative use of the
Steadicam thus not only has important narrative and aesthetic implications,
but by calling attention to its function in cinematic discourse, it also raises
metaphysical speculation on the nature of reality and of our existence
within it.

71
Johnson, ‘Wandering Camera,’ 53.

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Sydney Studies The Autonomous Camera in ‘The Shining’

Paul Sunderland is a researcher with the Department of Art History and

Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He is currently working on
immersive aesthetics and contemporary Hollywood cinema.

85