The Dance of Death

The Shining is a cinematic dance of death. The vitalistic and naturally beautiful associations of the sunny title are already thwarted in the opening credits by a sense of looming catastrophe. Accompanied by the alien, electronic sounds of the famous Dies Irae motif, the camera swoops in a helicopter shot over an alpine lake. The surrounding mountains are reflected in the crystal clear water with almost perfect axial symmetry. Initially, the camera moves towards the geometrical vanishing point of the landscape, until it tilts slightly to the right and turns in the same direction. Thus, the first shot already contains all the aesthetic parameters that structure the film: a spatial slipstream movement, motifs of mirroring and doubling, the dominance of symmetry and central perspective and anamorphic distortions. These are all condensed in an image of nature denuded of any human presence, which, despite (or because of) its immense beauty, congeals into a monument of inhuman creation. It is for this reason that the first shot of The Shining is not so much an establishing shot as it is an emblematic image that sets the film’s allegorical process in motion.