The Talkies

...But that does not attest to the artistic merit of the film—one can be fascinated by the images in expensive coffee-table books, but their content rarely justifies either the expense or theeffort, and their fascination does not necessarily—and does not very often—imply that they have any artistic worth...

...Nevertheless, the visual splendor of Barry Lyndon does offer a clue to understanding the paradoxical and exaggerated reverence with which Kubrick has directed this adaptation of a novel so unworthy of such grandiosity...

...This pretentiousness is accentuated by the pompous off-screen, third-person narration—a significant change from the first-person narration in the novel—and by the sound track, which is made up of bits and pieces of eighteenth-and (anachronistically) nineteenth-century works...

...Since the movie so clearly lacks any sustained dramatic interest, this is like justifying dullness by appealing to its intrinsic fascination...

...Kubrick' s partisans have extolled this technique as the creation of tableaux, of dramatic contexts that permit concentration on the "externals" of the characters rather than their motivations...

...Or for the contemptuously indifferent casting...

...And the essential frivolity of the material seems matched by the indifference of Kubrick's casting: Ryan O'Neal as Barry, and fashion model/ Barry...

...But I doubt that Kubrick was so reflective about the nature of his endeavor...

...is a mid-nineteenth-century picaresque novel about the social climbing of a mid-eighteenth-century Irish upstart...

...The Talkies byRobertAsahina / Reverence and solemnity are usually regarded as characteristic of religion and not of cinema, the "liveliest art" : Gravity is thought to be inimical to the high spirits of movies, especially American movies...

...Kubrick reThe Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 13 peatedly begins a scene with a relatively close-range shot of the characters, only to pull back to reveal a typ;cally grand landscape...

...The film ending—in which Barry is defeated in a duel by his stepson, who thus avenges the mistreatment he previously suffered at Barry's hands and ultimately brings Barry to ruin—is not to be found in the novel...

...What other explanation is there for the little attention that Kubrick pays to the story...

...It is this obsession with technique—also apparent in his tableaux and in his lingering museum-piece interior shots—that explains the pretentiousness with which he has filmed such a minor literary work...

...Far from expanding the medium, with his obsession for the formal elements of filmmaking Kubrick has reduced movies to merely a panorama of static images...

...The most banal lines are quoted directly from the novel with a solemnity completely incongruous with the ironic spirit, however thin, in which they were originally written, and the result is unintentional humor directed at the film's pretentiousness...

...In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick aspired to the level of high art, but he succeeded only in attaining the level of High Camp...

...Admittedly, it is effective, and even powerful, filmmaking: for all its dullness, I was never really bored with Barry Lyndon—that is, I never found myself dozing, or looking at my watch...

...But Kubrick has used this lightweight material and these lightweight performers in a movie whose ponderousness belies the narrow limitations of both...

...The pretentiousness of the movie is further revealed in other departures from the novel...

...In any event, the effect in Barry Lyndon is enough to set one's teeth on edge (although I suspect that the soundtrack album of the movie will become a best-seller—like the sound track album of 2001, which was equally "serious...

...Much has been made of the advanced technology which enabled Ku-brick to film scenes by candlelight—the development of a super-fast lens from the cameras originally used for the moonshots...

...and one can only speculate that Kubrick fabricated it to give the film a moral dimension that the novel lacks...

...But after the first dozen or so "shots that linger on the vast interiors of grand castles, or on their ornate furnishings, or on powdered wigs and faces, it is clear that the film has become an example of what it purports to disdain...

...Lyndon jet-setter Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon...

...It seems odd that Kubrick chose to adapt for the screen not some literary classic of a scope commensurate with his cinematic ambition, but instead a pseudonymously authored minor novel that was William Thackeray's first published work...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 13 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976...

...As if in unintentional confirmation of this thesis, Stanley Kubrick has directed a new film, Barry Lyndon, which offers three and a half hours of failed seriousness...

...Kubrick might have been aware of this, and might even have intended his tableaux as ironic, pseudo-nineteenthcentury visual representations of eighteenth-century scenes—a cinematic parallel to the literary stance implicit in Thackeray's writing about a century previous to his time...

...And sure enough, whenever he can—even when there is no compelling dramatic reason—Kubrick sticks in a shot by candlelight, just so that we can see those marvelous golden tones, and just so that he can present another example of his virtuosity...

...As stunning as the landscapes were, since they were devoid of any internal dramatic interest, they might as well have been filmed for a documentary by the Irish national tourist board...

...As literature, it suffers from the ,same shortcoming, or dubious virtue, that George Orwell identified as typical of all of Thackeray's works, including Vanity Fair: the "flavor of burlesque, of a world where no one is good and nothing is serious...

...Camp highlights the contrast between "silly...

...For implicit in this aesthetic elephantiasis is a contempt for the dramatic material, a disdain of "content" in favor of "style...

...Moreover, all Kubrick has done with his tableaux is to "rediscover" a favorite trick of nineteenth-century landscape painters, who often placed tiny figures in their paintings to convey the supposedly grand scale of the scene...

...In fact, I was almost transfixed by the splendor of the photography, especially the landscapes...

...content and rich form...

...The Memoirs 'of Barry Lyndon, Esq...

...but I suspect that their awe stems from a combination of their ignorance of serious music and Kubrick's heavyhanded —and thus obvious, even to the tonedeaf—use of music to offer "weighty" aural accompaniment to visual experience...

...For the clue to his filmmaking lies precisely in his artless reverence for cinematic tech-nique...

...Partisans of Kubrick's films have often touted his ability to integrate music into the total cinematic experience...

...And it is this disdain that Susan Sontag -sees 4.s central to "camp": "Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content...

...This suspicion is underscored by Kubrick's cinematic techniques, which seem to be meant to emphasize the opulent decadence of the eighteenth century...