The experimental French movie that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’
Filmmakers don’t come much more singular than Stanley Kubrick, who famously had a well-known term in the cinematic lexicon named after his distinctive approach to cinema. Of course, he never entered the profession with designs on ‘Kubrickian’ being a byword for his style, but neither was he above adopting the influence of others, with The Shining standing out in that regard.
As true as it is that there’s never been anyone to make films quite like Kubrick, not even the greats debut as fully-formed auteurs with designs on reinventing the medium. Everyone takes at least one small cue, if not significantly more, from filmmakers of the past, and anyone who says they don’t is almost certainly lying.
For The Shining in particular, though, the fingerprints of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad are there for all to see. There’s no shame in that when it was a pivotal moment for the French New Wave that stoked the creative fires of countless other all-time greats, and never is it more apparent than in the labyrinthine corridors of the cavernous Outlook Hotel.
Last Year at Marienbad revels in its experimental, nonlinear, and dreamlike approach to narrative, with the crux of the story focusing on unnamed aristocrats being drawn into a web of love, lust, and loss along the way. Named by Akira Kurosawa as one of his favourite movies, that was only a small inkling of how far it would reach to cast a spell over the titans of cinema.
As meticulously crafted as The Shining is throughout every frame, the tracking shots aren’t just similar to those used in Last Year at Marienbad, but they each take place in the winding hallways of an ornate hotel that carries a lingering air of something never being quite right. It was hardly blatant homage, but the similarities are too stark and pronounced to ignore, especially when the film itself was held in such high regard.
Thanks to its staunch refusal to offer suitable answers to the many questions posed throughout, Last Year in Marienbad generated a decidedly polarising response at the time of its release in 1961. Upending the fundamentals of cinema would become a regular practice throughout the rest of the decade as a slew of seminal greats toyed with the established parameters of the medium, but being so steadfastly experimental was a stick used to beat Resnais’ masterpiece over the head in certain quarters.
Kubrick evidently wasn’t one of them, looking at how closely The Shining mirrored Last Year at Marienbad, but the feeling wasn’t entirely mutual. As revealed by The Harvard Crimson, Resnais wasn’t quite as keen on Kubrick’s body of work. “I can’t understand why I don’t enjoy Clockwork Orange more at the end. I was not fulfilled,” he said. “I think he could use more speed. I would like sometime to edit him.” Based on that assessment, it would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the director’s inimitable horror.
