AN OVERLOOK

"The Shining"'s director Stanley Kubrick and editor Ray Lovejoy put together two shots which work, on a first level, as a transition from one scene to another: Jack contemplating a miniature of the hedge maze and Wendy and Danny touring the actual maze from the Overlook Hotel. Yet the quirky appearance of the bird’s eye view on the maze creates a brief sense of confusion, deliberately or not. Jack’s gaze in the shot that precedes it shows he doesn't just carelessly stop by the maze, but seems to be focused on thoughts that arise from it and which he projects onto it. 

The frame zooming in on the maze, while establishing and locating our characters from the next scene, also relays the feeling of delving deeper into the mind of our watcher, slowly descending into a maze of thoughts (it could even be said that its layout bears a resemblance with a brain), an experience reinforced by Béla Bartok’s music, with repetition on xylophone and intensifying, sustained strings. For a moment, you could think Jack is actually looking at them, as if a miniature world was contained in the object. It evokes the shining sense previously described by Dick Hallorann, “pictures in a book”, and is a way of expressing that the events that are to unfold are foreseen by a power of greater scope, in this case, Jack, or going further, the Overlook. It reminds of the idea of a surveillance camera and its reality loop, where the world being watched contains a room with another security camera, and on. 

While the two shots account to the passage of time, in a “meanwhile on the maze outside” way not necessarily at the exact same time, dissolving between them would have reinforced that intention, similar to the transition between Danny and Wendy entering the maze and Jack approaching the maze that precedes this moment. And while two almost consecutive dissolves would have resulted in a montage of time, the resulting effect of a hard cut in the second transition is one of correlation between two realities happening on different places.