Friday, December 15, 2017
349 - Barry Lyndon, United Kingdom/United States, 1975. Dir. Stanley Kubrick.
Every frame a Hogarth. Every frame a Gainsborough. Every frame a Constable.
Stanley Kubrick called the camera department and asked for BNC cameras, Hollywood camera-maker Mitchell's model of rear projection cameras. No problem. Nobody uses them anymore. We now use front projection cameras. He started buying them. They started sending them to him.
Then someone in the know found out. What! You are selling those cameras to Stanley Kubrick? They are the finest cameras ever invented. The parts inside are irreplaceable. The works are the best built camera works. You could not replicate them if you tried.
Apparently, Stanley Kubrick knew what he was doing.
Then he went to NASA and asked for their widest lenses, the ones used for the moon landing. He obtained a Zeiss with an f /0.7, a stop that most photographers have never seen before. Something that could never fit on a movie camera either.
He asked his inventor to invent a way to mount the large NASA lenses onto the outdated BNC rear projection cameras. The inventor said it was not possible. Kubrick asked him to do it anyway. He found a way to do it.
Kubrick could now film entire scenes indoors in candlelight.
Read that again.
Kubrick could now film entire scenes indoors in candlelight.
That is a stunning statement.
It is problem enough that the light is too dim for a film camera to record. But add to that that the candles keep changing in height as they burn. And that they produce so much smoke and debris. And that they suck the oxygen out of the room.
Kubrick filmed his exteriors in natural light, even allowing the light to change in the middle of the scene, as the clouds passed in front of and away from the sun.
Sometimes he zoomed where others would dolly.
When a DP wants the camera to move through space, he often places the camera on a camera dolly, sometimes on tires, sometimes on a track. The lens can maintain a set aperture, focal length, and f-stop, or the AC can adjust it proportionally as it moves. If you want to move towards the subject, you push in. If you want to move away from the subject, you pull out. This maintains a smooth and steady movement where the subject adjusts proportionally with the movement.
When you zoom, however, by moving forward and back in the lens rather than with the camera, it produces a type of distortion of the image. Filmmakers can use this to their advantage. Alfred Hitchcock developed a technique of zooming forward while dollying back that created a psychologically disturbing effect on the viewer.
Stanley Kubrick in this movie zooms plenty.
One could go on. The technical mastery on display in this film is a film school of its own. This three-hour, twenty-three minute historical drama, aside from making for a compelling story, is a textbook on the use and power of camera and lighting, both natural and artificial.
You may watch the film entirely for its evocative beauty. It is simply and absolutely gorgeous from beginning to end. You may marvel at how he found so many open landscapes without power lines or other signs of modern development. Kubrick has created a world, a world like a living novel, a living painting, a museum come to life.
Then there is the story. A one-man epic based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackery (07/18/1811-12/24/1863). Thackery is best known for writing the novel Vanity Fair (1848).
The story is told in two acts.
I. By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon
II. Containing an Account of the Misfortunes and Disaster Which Befell Barry Lyndon
Thackery's novel is told in the picaresque tradition, a style that originated in 17th-century Spain, which follows the life of a rogue or rascal from birth to death. Its most famous example is Cervantes' 1615 novel Don Quixote. The style flourished in the 18th-century, with novels often named after their protagonists: in France, Voltaire's Candide (1759), and in England, Daniel Dafoe's Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748).
By Thackery's time it was an established genre, with authors writing within and without the precedented parameters, from Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) to Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn (1868) to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
With the voice-over narrative and episodic titles, the film follows in the vein of the novel.
Redmond Barry knows exactly what he wants, and he wants it very badly.
He wants status. He wants money. He wants power. He wants Nora.
He has enough desire and enough will power to get all those things. Absolutely nothing will stand in his way. Nothing.
Except for the forces of fate and his own poor choices.
Barry rises propitiously despite incidents that work against him.
And then he falls.
One could do an analysis on the views of fate versus free will in this film.
Ryan O'Neal plays the role of Redmond Barry/Barry Lyndon, and his work is a revelation. The film actually came out after Love Story (1970), What's Up Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973), yet O'Neal as Barry seems like a kid just getting started--a testament to his acting in the film. He reminds you that he was a strong and dedicated actor.
There is a lot to say about Barry Lyndon. It is a film worth repeated viewings.
* * * * *
The following words are spoken by the Reverend Runt when Barry Lyndon encounters tragedy.
I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. - John 11:25
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another - Job 19:25-27
We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. - 1 Timothy 6:7
The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. - Job 1:21
O blessed Lord, the father of mercies and the God of all comforts, we beseech thee, look down in pity and compassion upon this, thy afflicted servant. . . .
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