Monday, April 25, 2011

The Shining: Forwards and Backwards

On Wednesday, March 9th, 2011, The Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, screened Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining forwards and backwards simultaneously, superimposed. This experiment in projection was inspired by the analysis of The Shining by MSTRMND, and one line in particular:
The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards.
We took the MSTRMND gambit at face value. We put the US DVD version into Final Cut, cut all corporate logos and leaders at the beginning, and cut all credits at the end. The entire film image sequence was then copied, reversed and superimposed over the original forwards version. (For clarity’s sake we screened the forwards/backwards superimposition with the forwards audio only.) 


A selection of stills from the superimposition, with commentary, can be found here: http://kdk12.tumblr.com/