The labyrinth endures as one of cinema's most potent spatial metaphors, embodying what Penelope Reed Doob identifies as the maze's tripartite nature: artifact of admirable complexity, inextricable trap, and transformative journey from ignorance to enlightenment. This paper examines how Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and Gary Ross's The Hunger Games (2012) deploy divergent cinematographic strategies to construct physical and psychological labyrinths that simultaneously engulf their protagonists and implicate their viewers. Through close analysis of Kubrick's pioneering Steadicam work, his manipulation of perspective and POV ambiguity, and the visual patterning of the Overlook Hotel's interior design, this study reveals how the director transforms cinematic space into an inescapable mental prison—one that collapses the boundaries between the real and the supernatural, leaving spectators as disoriented as Jack Torrance himself. Conversely, Ross employs rapid montage, strategic depth-of-field manipulation, and calculated cutaways to the Games' control room, positioning viewers as omniscient spectators who witness Katniss Everdeen's navigation through an arena that functions as a perpetually mutable labyrinth. Where Kubrick's mise-en-scène enacts a slow, inexorable entrapment that offers no epistemological exit, Ross's editing rhythms generate urgent disorientation while simultaneously providing moments of spectatorial relief, ultimately framing the labyrinth as a crucible for heroic metamorphosis rather than eternal damnation. This comparative analysis contends that cinematic labyrinths function as more than narrative devices; they constitute formal strategies through which filmmakers orchestrate viewers' own cognitive navigation between confusion and clarity, thereby interrogating the very nature of cinematic spectatorship itself.

Authors:
Ines Glanznig, University of Vienna, Austria

About the Presenter(s)
Ines Glanznig is an English Language Instructor at YBM. Her research interests include censorship, race, and US education. She is currently writing her PhD on racism in literary censorship on sexual grounds.

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