Barry Lyndon (1977)

              Barry Lyndon (1977) wasn’t the first film to achieve what every filmmaker could hope for: cinematic perfection, but it is a spectacular achievement of it. A perfect film would be one that united all the points it starts by the end, La jetee (1962) was an earlier notch on the belt of cinema. Most films, certainly the ones of that era (1960-), ignored these objective standards.  Barry Lyndon, beyond being an unsung masterpiece, is an absolute unification and peak for mastery of the three points of view possible in Cinema, starting with the overlooked lens.

 For unification to happen all the strands of mediums must be tied together, only when they are, can Dramatic Narrative Cinema come alive. Kubrick sought to tie-up three ends: The Camera, the narrator’s eye held to the stillness and granted the slight leash of fluidity in the cinema. The Narrative, which for Kubrick was always an adaptation, would have had an established or desired narrative form from the start. The Narrator or the apologist for the thought-philosophy, it is often muddled in with the other two and lost (The Narrator was a prominent force that evolved violently through Kubrick’s career). From his early fastidious camera work on the voyeuristic noir camera of The Killing all the way to The Shining the narrator was never a concept that became muddled with Kubrick.       
            Stanley Kubrick was so aware of the camera, as an individual piece, it became an obsessive focus in developing all aspects of his work. As a result, Kubrick was driven to make his viewer as aware as himself of the Camera’s presence. The end result for Kubrick is an engagement with the viewer, rarely accessed.

           

           The emotional heights of Barry Lyndon do not rest on scenes of great dialogue, unexpected turns, or any other trick most cinema rests on, but in moments where all three points, come to moments of completion. 

           The death of Redmond Barry’s son comes at a point where the narrators telling of the story, which had been voyeuristically pleasure based, is suddenly woken up. Instead of playing up the story as another one of the causal reverberations of the brute’s feats, the Narrator, Narrative, and Camera all shift into another phase. It’s beyond a tonal shift, beyond that “the third act starts”, this is a point where the Camera leaves Redmond, the Narrator and Narrative both refocus on the items of larger importance in the life of Barry Lyndon.

           Redmond’s downfall is beyond known, it’s a dread that we slowly watch build in the character through his end and see beautifully executed by Ryan O’Neal. The Camera in Barry Lyndon is the showings, the paintings, of the voice, of our narrator. The performance from O’Neal in the third act is one of almost no dialogue on his part. This portion of the film is where Kubrick relied especially on techniques of silent film, though the whole film is a reflection of that era, and O’Neal comes to his peak as a silent star of the time. The “actors” in the film are all brilliant, I only put quotations around the term because it’s a film that so loosely and unapologetically uses the actors in a different way, more in the vain of models, set for Kubrick’s recreation. The misappropriation is rife with Kubrick’s body, and his attitudes of making a film have been misread and therefore can be dismissed as the eccentric workings of a genius. The work however required such attention, because film can’t be seen in a singular light. Themes, Music, Narrative, Acting, and Narrator peak at a moment like ­­Bryan Lyndon’s funeral. The Narrator became close to a man at this point in the film, and began to relate to the Drama and grow with it. In a film like Barry Lyndon Kubrick lays out these moments openly for an audience, just masked in a different light, which leaves it unappreciated as it sits among films of the 1970s. It should rather it alongside silent films of the era when filmmaking was closest to an art. The first gasps of sound in Cinema were in The Jazz Singer (1927), where the use of sound was relevant not only to the story but as an Action itself, once the song is over the film cuts back to silence. In Barry Lyndon the use of sound is not spare, it incessant, from long drafts of dialogue to specific selections of score. Every use is relevant and adds itself as a layer into the film.

               Large casts in large scenes their mood is the tone, at no point are we focused on Redmond Barry explicitly, even to moments with Barry as a drunkard, he’s always an object never an agent or action of the scene or moment we’re witness to. The background was even filled by people wearing antique clothing of the time, another one of Kubrick’s seen “quirks” and worshipped “perfectionism”. This shouldn’t discount select performances (which stand in line with the brilliance of the rest of Kubrick), nor lower the level at which a model can perform, in models you can create something deep out of nothing and Kubrick used this to an advantage. It’s with Redmond’s melancholy that Kubrick uses O’Neal most as an actor to illustrate, man in darkness.

The Shining’s Camera, whose position was set as the presence of ‘the Ghost’, is a good example of Kubrick’s using a “Hollywood technique” geared toward entertainment, while also adhering to his ever-present mental grip of The Camera: a sophisticated and cerebral visual technique on its own. The Camera could be seen as Kubrick’s only ever true narrator, despite him any varied techniques throughout his career. The camera, as a technical tool can only be an emotional surrogate for the creator of the work. The camera lacks the ability to convey emotion in fullness, being a machine. Kubrick always used his camera to show the audience a point of view, never trying to insert himself in as the Narrator, like Welles or Godard and tried to make it look human. The seemed distance between Emotion and the spectator in the work of Stanley Kubrick is due to Kubrick often telling the piece from the point of the narrator: in their own world, uninterested in our understanding of anything outside his own narrow view and interpretation of the immediate.

 Kubrick worked through the narrow plastic medium that restricted the conveyance of human drama. Kubrick saw through the manipulations of emotion that were easily attempted by most filmmakers and worked against it. Many saw Kubrick’s work at the time as robotic (even being called a “machine” by a devotee of the opposite, Eric Rohmer), but really this was a new kind of dramatic narrative he was forging; one to fit The Camera’s perspective, acknowledging it as its own distinct medium and means of stimulus. Stanley Kubrick lost the fight over the creation of drama on film and now as a result most films are left one third ‘empty’ ignoring his innovations. Their makers failed to address this crucial aspect of narrative telling, though a few makers and a certain handful of films are true in their making and have avoided this problem. The starting of the scouring censors in the 1930’s advanced into the full and staying cleanse of 1968 and the MPAA (Kubrick fled the United States permanently after 1962 and Lolita, not because of censors cutting his work, but his fear of his films being created under an enforced code).

A Clockwork Orange’s failings are the spectator’s belief in the Camera, Narrative, and Philosophy being intertwined into a single stream of some narrative truth, not rationalized, like it was, by psychopathy. The audience sat to watch the film expecting one that affirmed their belief, rather than one that challenged their delicacies. When the doors opened, the audience felt dizzied from their perceived flaws in a soulless narrative, one that they greatly misappropriated the ideas of. Kubrick’s eye could be defined by the concept: Kubrick is a different way of thinking.  A Clockwork Orange exists just as strongly as a Stanley Kubrick feature, possibly the strongest in its established morality. Clockwork was a creation, a document, in its attempt at showing some reality. Reality is subjective and Kubrick was recreating the realities set up by the novel.

For reality in Barry Lyndon Kubrick decided on recreating scenes to a painterly perfection. The casting of Actors as Models to create (or arguably recreate) images and scenes as paintings turned to celluloid, Kubrick cast in iron the images he wanted. In Barry Lyndon the pieces were so elaborate in construction, there’s no choice but for it to be looked at as pieces constructed.   The voice-over is an objective standard like God, who narrates and gives the audience the settling epilogue (“…good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now”). The voice through out is ominous, haunting, taunting, and solemn. He’s more knowing and removed from us, easily written off as the transmuted voice of the narrator. With the finish from the Camera, which acted as the narrator’s voyeuristic interest in the area spread, was focused only by the narration. Most contemporary cinema is just plain unsuccessful because it’s unhealthily obsessed with a misunderstood idea of realism that leaves us with dead drama and a half hung camera in the end. Of course objective beauty is not a standard that can be measured but there’s something special about the way Kubrick cut Barry Lyndon together, some majesty and grace I can’t explain fully, but all Kubrick shows this desire of completeness. In Barry Lyndon the camera moves gently, even through the chaos of war. The Narrative is classical in the finest sense, the story; a man and his doings as part of his yearnings during conquest. Barry Lyndon could be seen as a film that’s the watch of a gentle divinity, the writer of the novel, or some British actor in a sound booth but it’s the finished product that should be examined. As a finished piece, it’s accomplished, that’s not even questioned. But sitting as a whole, Barry Lyndon sits as the most able construction of Stanley Kubrick, from its understand of Drama on screen to its execution of scenic imagery.  

             

             Kubrick’s creation in this film: textile from the era to be worn, natural light and a camera lens so spectacular it was never before used on the planet, patiently waiting to create moments “as they would have happened”, was all for the purpose for cinematic perfection of re-creation at its finest. More than any other Barry Lyndon could be compared to something like The Magic Flute. Lyndon shows more inventiveness and exploration in the medium and specifically for the medium of film. Barry Lyndon is a great film about a solitary being, it’s built around the aesthetic of solitude and it is Redmond’s undesired but unavoidable downfall. At great lengths I’ve thought why when I’ve seen Barry Lyndon screened, people laugh. I would have to say that this film might be the most tragic film I’ve seen. It’s the set up of a man who desired empire, and lived to watch the mud walls he built, be burned down, burying him.