THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
LIGHT COMEDY THE SCREEN To the end of the credits for Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick appends an expression of gratitude to Carl Zeiss, the German optical manufacturer, for "providing the f 0.9...
...When his beautiful cousin preferred the suit of an English captain to his own, Barry (Ryan O'Neal) had, he thought, killed the rival in a duel...
...And in Part II of Kubrick's film, undone he is...
...He has understood that the subject of all photography is light...
...From a bumpkin, he has become a gentleman...
...Because Kubrick recognizes this, light is always a form of imagery in his films...
...This extremely fast lens-f 1.2, f 1.4 or even f 2. are standard-was in fact developed for the Apollo Space Program...
...It does not shine on some other imagery of things or compositions: it is an imagery itself...
...When he at last seduces Lady Lyndon on the veranda, it is not in bright sunlight, but in the cold, dim light of the moon...
...From poverty, he has come into' money...
...Once Barry has arrived in those candlelit rooms, though he may think only that his fortune is made at last, Kubrick thinks he is undone...
...Because of this thank-you note to Zeiss, however, Kubrick has come in for much grief from the popular reviewers, who have all made clear their impatience with what they see as a fondness for pretty pictures and meretricious techniques...
...Increasingly the film has come to dwell in its candlelit interiors, and the exteriors have become ever more overcast...
...The reason Kubrick wants only candlelight in certain scenes is to create the most suggestive possible contrast to sunlight, which is the kind of illumination he uses elsewhere in the film...
...But the first time we enter a candlelit interior, this society is transformed into something altogether different...
...Louis Quinze is a decor that has appeared often before in Kubrick's films-most notably at the end of the time warp in 2001-and it always seems a setting for the idea that man's high civilization reveals only his frailty and corruptibility...
...The first scene after the intermission is Barry's wedding to Lady Lyndon, at which the two worlds that before remained so separate are finally united...
...Throughout the rest of Part I of Kubrick's film, up until the intermission, Barry's life is divided between sunlight and candlelight, day and night, outdoors and indoors, the undissembling but violent ways of his youth and the subtle but civil ways of the world...
...LIGHT COMEDY THE SCREEN To the end of the credits for Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick appends an expression of gratitude to Carl Zeiss, the German optical manufacturer, for "providing the f 0.9 lenses used in the candlelight sequences...
...When a dance is held, it occurs not in a salon or ballroom, but a meadow...
...It reflects the thoroughness with which, even in their most technical aspects, he masters every detail of his productions...
...One thing that attracted Kubrick to Thackeray's novel, no doubt, was the opportunity it provided to make this cynical equation...
...What the camera takes a picture of-what literally, physically, gets onto the film-is not landscapes, people, or events, but light rays...
...Before making movies Kubrick was a professional still photographer, and in his career as a movie director he has understood something often apparent only to still photographers...
...When he takes up a career as a gambler, Barry graciously cheats at cards by candlelight each night, then duels with the losers by day to collect the debts...
...and the sunlight comes neither from in front nor behind, but from the side as it did at Barry's wedding...
...Perhaps then the first thing to be said of Barry Lyndon is that its candlelighting is not a gratuitous gesture...
...Though in an interior, where we are used to finding candlelight, the ceremony is brilliantly sunlit from clerestory windows off to the side...
...One minute a Prussian officer politely betrays Barry to a press gang at a candlelit inn...
...On the photographic negative the laws of gravity are therefore turned upside down, light and shadow weighing far more in our perceptions than mass and substance do...
...In a manner common to episodic narratives, Barry Lyndon now recoils on itself...
...Thus, softened, gentle images emerge from and waver before the harsh light much as society itself here seems to emerge from Ireland's shelterless wilds...
...But now, as he blinks into the dim and murky glow of the candles, he learns that the captain's wound was faked so he, Barry, would have to flee to the army and the Continent, leaving the field open to the captain again...
...The next minute Barry is being decorated at a noonday ceremony for saving that officer's life, but instead of a citation Barry is rudely read the riot act as the award is made...
...The shadows are deep and prominent because the light is focused rather than diffused...
...Most of these outdoor scenes are not only sunlit, but backlit...
...It is typical that the disintegration of the central character should be accompanied by a dazzling unification of the central imagery...
...To publicize his appreciation in so arcane a matter typifies Kubrick...
...And the world, Barry learns at that moment, is a place full of perfidy and deceit...
...For the most part the two modes remain separate too...
...With similar pathos the death in battle of Barry's first benefactor is recalled by the death in bed of his first son...
...The progress of all civilization is here being characterized as a Rake's Progress...
...The scenes in Part I that marked his ascendancy recur as milestones along his road to perdition...
...The interiors to which he has gained access are those decorated in Louis Quinze or its English contemporary, the Adam style...
...Instead of the open field, the setting this time is a tithe barn, a shelter where exterior and interior worlds meet...
...In the very earliest scenes, for example, he uses sunlight exclusively and thereby creates a kind of cinematic idyll...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...Barry's rise in the world becomes, literally, the o'erdarkening of his days...
...All the key scenes henceforth occur like this, indoors with outdoor lighting, and it is typical of Kubrick's sense of irony that he should mark his hero's decline and fall with such a glorious blaze of light...
...And from outside, he has come in...
...The first of two parts) of two parts...
...Even when the ceremony of life moves inside at one point, the setting is so rustic, with a bubbling fountain and furniture decorated in encrusted pebbles, we don't feel we have left the outdoors at all...
...This last episode does suggest, however, how far Barry has come in the world...
...In the former scene, the rough life of soldiers in the field was refined a bit by the imposition of prize-fighting rules, but in the latter, those rules have an opposite effect on the drawing room...
...When a traveler stops at a pub, he remains astride his horse and is served in the road...
...His vision is of rural eighteenth-century Ireland as a place at once both cultured and primitive, civilized and barbaric...
...Even in his pursuit of Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), he only makes eyes at her at the gaming table, waiting until he gets her out on the veranda to make bold with her...
...Consequently, in order to make the faces and figures turned toward us read properly, the photography is slightly overexposed so the light will diffuse shadow-lessly around the characters...
...Catastrophe mounts upon triumph and dispels it as sunlight does shadow in a gloomy room, until at last Barry finds himself challenged to a duel just as that captain was by him at the beginning...
...Now the light source is in front of the human figure instead of behind it...
...Where a fistfight earlier made Barry's reputation in his regiment, a similar assault at a musicale now ruins his name at court...
...In this apt setting, a duel dispatches Barry from grand society as unwittingly as one earlier propelled him into it...
...In this film it is no different...
...It is a world that wants for nothing in the way of social amenities, and yet a world in which all the ritual and refinement of social life are played out out of doors, as if society itself were still tentative and nomadic like the life of Druids...
...In scene after scene the light pours through the windows as if it were besieging the elegant world inside, and indeed the guileless values and temperament of Barry's youth do burst in disastrously on his new life...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 7
