Funny Picture

One of the things directors have to watch is the topography of a set. Often you don't have the budget to build an entire set; but you have to film it so that the viewer has a clear sense of what's where.

This article makes the case that Stanley Kubrick did the opposite in THE SHINING: he changed the set, presumably to subtly disorient the viewer.

It's an interesting technique. It leverages the way our brains tend to elide the editing. Even a scene of two people talking is actually multiple conversations shot from different angles and edited together. We generally remember the conversation but not the cuts. We assume that the hotel wouldn't change because we assume what we're seeing is really a hotel and not a series of hotel sets that may or may not join up. So how can we reconcile things when bits of the hotel change? We can't, and that's sort of subliminally alarming.

We've all seen this done explicitly, when the hero comes back to the place he saw the crime and there's no house there, or the house is abandoned and not the new house he was in, etc. This is the first time I've seen a convincing case of someone doing it without drawing attention to it.

How can you apply this technique to writing? You'd probably have to make clear to the reader what you're doing; otherwise the film crew would assume you were just sloppy.

UPDATE: John August says this is "the genius fallacy." It may be. But even Kubrick didn't do it intentionally, you can.