The Shining | :30s
Collapsed movie experiment
In the Summer of 1998, after my time at Kingston University, and before I moved to Holland to study at The Jan van Eyck Akademie, I made a single, large-format photographic piece which took stills from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining at thirty second intervals, and presented the entire movie on the wall, essentially as a single frame. I’d always loved Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Pyscho, and had been experimenting with video stills for most of my time at Kingston. I love the notion of being able to distill a movie into a single frame, essentially time-traveling the 2 hours the movie would otherwise take to watch, but seeing the thematic threads around each scene in clearer ways, intentionally removing all sense of suspense, drama and fear from the experience.
The original work was produced manually, taking the stills on 35mm film with a tripod in front of the television, getting them developed and printed out, and then assembling and mounting them all on the studio wall. 21 years later, the process of replicating the idea is an algorithmic one, with the whole process taking not more than an afternoon. I still really love the idea of this though, and wish I’d pursued it more during my time in Holland. Maybe one day I’ll make some more, but for now, I’m keeping it here, not to remember it later, but to remember it now. I made this in a hotel room in Maui. A long, long way from my bedsit in Kingston.
This will probably break your browser.
