THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN In the last issue I was explaining why I find Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon a very beautiful film-not just a pretty film to look at, but one where meaning and order accrue from what we...
...But a couple of scenes later Kubrick has made Barry witness to another intimacy between two men where the relationship plainly is sexual...
...In writing the adaptation, Kubrick has imposed on the story the cyclical, two-part structure described in my previous column, and he has thereby enlarged the story's emotions...
...What interested Kubrick in the novel was not, I suspect, its characters per se, but rather the problem Thackeray set himself in writing about them...
...THE SCREEN In the last issue I was explaining why I find Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon a very beautiful film-not just a pretty film to look at, but one where meaning and order accrue from what we see...
...Yet those ideas also have about them an aura of cynicism that typifies Kubrick's work...
...That a nineteenth-century writer like Thackeray could only treat such habits of mind as a joke no doubt confirmed for Kubrick their uniquely eighteenth-century character...
...I say this because Thackeray's novel is a first-person narrative, and it occurs to me that Thackeray's imaginative leap back 100 years into the mind of Barry may have seemed to Kubrick not very different from his own leap back an equal span into Thackeray's mind...
...I think the answer to that returns us to the difficulties of time and timing in Kubrick's film...
...Here as elsewhere, we see in Barry Lyndon a completely deliberate film...
...This was perfect rationality delineating as sequence and consequence what had been instantaneous or simultaneous in events...
...Barry's own fortunes go into eclipse...
...As Grogan is Barry's last link with Ireland, it is his own youth Barry is kissing goodbye...
...Admittedly, the pace of Barry Lyndon is onewe are unaccustomed to in movies, and I wonder whether this hasn't cost the film the overwhelming popularity so expensive a production needs to make money...
...As I was saying in my last column as well, Barry Lyndon has come in for much abuse from reviewers...
...It telescopes time instead of expanding it...
...From that measured, periodic, highly rhetorical prose Kubrick has divined an age absorbed in minute self-examination-an age in which the mind's grasp of events was compound-complex no matter how elliptical the events themselves may have been...
...When Barry's own son dies Kubrick has put us in mind of Grogan's death once more, turning the mood grim again this time and intensifying this second loss to Barry by its associations with the first...
...This was the Enlightenment speaking, or at least a popularized version of it, taming even the most outrageous human folly with the genteel voice of reason...
...By gauging the distance between Thackeray and Barry, Kubrick could judge more nearly the distance between Barry and himself...
...This is all Kubrick's invention-in the novel Barry isn't even present when his friend dies-and it is in the film to signal an end of innocence of a sort that Thackeray never dreamed...
...Where the novel trots us along from laugh to laugh, the film would translate us from laughter to tears...
...Such camera gestures are not just affectations, however, any more than the film's lighting is...
...The slow time of Barry Lyndon which has made some of us restless is in fact its greatest stroke of originality...
...From sunlight it moves into candlelight, and then back into" the sun again...
...How elastic Kubrick's adaptation is can be seen from the way he has played upon the death of Barry's first mentor, Capt...
...The allegory of light with which Kubrick has surrounded these developments turns a Rake's Progress into a Pilgrim's Progress, of an ironic, secular kind...
...Kubrick's ideas literally dawn on the film...
...That purpose has ultimately been informed by the Thackeray novel on which Kubrick's film is based, but before trying to get at Kubrick's purpose, it would help to notice how extensive the changes are that the film makes in the novel...
...The invaluable thing that Thackeray offered Kubrick, then, was the nineteenth century's insight into the eighteenth...
...This is, I believe, what all those slow, slight zoom shots are about...
...Though the kiss is an intentionally startling image, there is nothing salacious about it...
...The insight Kubrick wanted was to be found not in any particular incident or character, but in the language which Thackeray put in Barry's mouth as the novel's storyteller...
...They have tended to get impatient with the film...
...While physical affection between two men provides a moment of tragedy in Grogan's death scene, it provides pure comedy now...
...The satire develops into something epic, and if we are at all open to the film, we find to our surprise that its foolishness eventually moves us...
...Not only is it merely pretty, some have complained, but it lingers over its own prettiness for more than three hours...
...It is, on the one hand, an act of deliberation, an unhurried pondering of life...
...While it reveals Barry's innocence with Grogan, it now reveals the fall from innocence of the world to which Grogan's death has abandoned Barry...
...Its implication is that Barry is still a boy, capable of kissing Grogan full upon the mouth without self-consciousness...
...The film becomes another of Kubrick's long, acerbic and dazzlingly eloquent essays on civilization...
...The structure Kubrick's direction has embedded in the very details of his film gives it a potential for cumulative effects that the novel doesn't have...
...But 2001, being a film about the future, lends itself to such elisions of time...
...No director has used editing more radically than Kubrick did in 2001 when he cut from a bone hurled by a prehistoric ape to a space station circling the earth 100,000 years later...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...
...The authenticity Kubrick hoped for, beyond costumes and scenery, could only be provided by another historian whose own historical position gave him a better feel for the times...
...Shot in battle, Grogan has Barry kiss him before he departs this world because, he says, "we'll ne'er meet in the next...
...The point, though, is not just that Kubrick has stretched Thackeray's material from the silly to the serious...
...Kubrick needed a camera gesture which would preserve the ritual of scrutiny that inheres in Thackeray's prose, and this is just what the incremented enlargement in a zoom lens is: a ritual of scrutiny...
...This protracted quality which events have in the film results largely from zoom shots with which many scenes begin or end-zoom shots that move so gradually and change our perspective so little, they are at times almost imperceptible...
...The significance of the film, or at least its signification, lies in its lighting...
...There is a curious parallel between Thackeray and Kubrick here, a parallel that was to Kubrick, perhaps, an instructive one...
...As the lighting-brightens again in Part II of the film, after Barry (Ryan ONeal) has wed Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson...
...I think we shall all come to admire it, too, even though it may take a while...
...Grogan (Godfrey Quigley...
...Like Barry, a movie must take up-ruinous obligations these days if it hopes to be grand and well-known...
...While the film may initially give the illusion of being just as episodic and aimless as the novel, it's only an illusion...
...It is that he has changed the novel so utterly, one wonders why he bothered with it at all...
...Barry Lyndon is a film about the past, and so, having leapt over whole millennia at a single cut in 2001, in Barry Lyndon Kubrick has lingered in zoom shots over infinitesimal moments...
...It is too long and too slow...
...Though we are used to thinking of classic novels as being diminished in movie adaptations -Kubrick's own Lolita encourages this notion-Barry Lyndon is expanded by its film version...
...Whereas prose like Barry's is a process of elaboration, the element of all cinematic statements is editing, which is a process of omission...
...But the dilations of time experienced by such a mentality are troublesome for movies to express, for it is the movies' nature to contract time rather than dilate it...
...and on the other hand, Kubrick has made it that way deliberately-with a purpose...
Vol. 103 • April 1976 • No. 8
