Room 237 (2012)
Directed by Rodney Ascher
A subjective documentary that explores various theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments.
5 connections found
View:
5 films that influenced Room 237
What critics say influenced Room 237
There was even a 2012 documentary, Room 237 , given over to several fan theories about just what the almighty fuck was going on, springing from the theory that as fussy and controlling a director as Kubrick must have peppered the film's structure and mise en scène with clues to the "solution".
"The Shining" has earned a feverish following over the years, the kind that has elicited so many theories and personal readings into Stanley Kubrick's underlying themes and subliminal messaging that it has spawned its own movie, a boundlessly fascinating 2012 documentary from director Rodney Ascher called "Room 237."
Some see The Shining as a damning critique of western US expansion and the subsequent extermination of Native Americans, while some regard it as a Holocaust allegory.
On the surface, Rodney Ascher 's documentary exhibits the theories a few obsessive fans have put forward to reveal what they think Stanley Kubrick 's " The Shining " is really about.
A third unseen theorist, filmmaker and conspiracy guru Jay Weidner, takes off in an opposite direction, arguing that various details in "The Shining" indicate, slyly, Kubrick's involvement in faking the alleged news footage of the Apollo moon landings.
It starts off with a visual trick: In a digitally modified clip from Kubrick's final film, " Eyes Wide Shut " (1999), Dr. Bill Harford ( Tom Cruise ) stands outside the Sonata Cafe in Greenwich Village, which is actually a set at Pinewood Studios near London (which is the source of a little in-joke: The location is identified as "EUROPE").
Ascher, who also edited the film, keeps it consistently lively and engaging, mixing extended clips from The Shining with the humorous deployment of imagery from other Kubrick films (particularly Eyes Wide Shut) to illustrate various points.
Stanley Kubrick didn’t like to explain his movies, which isn’t to say he didn’t leave plenty of room for interpretation in 2001, Eyes Wide Shut, and The Shining, that eternal terrorizer.
Generously illustrated with clips from The Shining and other Kubrick movies (including, most hilariously, Eyes Wide Shut), this is sure to amuse you if you get a bang out of the claims that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and Dark Side of the Moon was intended as a soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz.
Room 237 is, in the grand tradition of Histoire(s) du cinéma but with nothing resembling its intellectual rigor, a film made up almost in its entirety of clips from movies, and if The Shining is the most obviously justified of them, Ascher included footage from every single Kubrick film ( Eyes Wide Shut being far and away the most prominent), and from movies that have nothing to do with Kubrick whatsoever, and whose presence raises questions that Ascher either doesn't find interesting or doesn't realise he's asked (Murnau's 1926 Faust is a particularly glaring example of a movie included, seemingly, just because).
What’s considerably less successful, however, is Ascher’s use of other movie footage – from All the President’s Men to Faust to Demons 2 – to literalize whatever is being discussed, wherein talk of a boy’s education is paired with a visual of a father reading to his son from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and discussion of dream subconscious is illustrated with snippets from Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
My happy spin (there’s another) on Room 237 is that it’s a love story about movies and their meanings, a more mainstream, cinematic version of Geoff Dyer’s Zona, a book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, which is really about that movie’s place in his life.
On the other side of the ledger, while one could certainly devote much of one’s life to an archaeological dig below the surface of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” – an ambiguous science-fiction masterpiece that reached American viewers the same year as “The Shining” – the universe of people who have seen that film, or even heard of it, is microscopic by comparison.
Advertisement
But anybody who’s ever lost days trying to crack the nut of Mulholland Drive or Synecdoche, New York, or Tarkovsky’s Solaris knows that, in that blurred space between textual analysis and conspiracy theory, the questions themselves can be more rewarding than the answers.