In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese in February 2015.
I still remember the shock I felt when I heard the news of Stanley Kubrick's death. On one level, it was shocking because it happened so suddenly. On another level, Kubrick seemed like he was somehow beyond death, an Olympian figure, an immortal. After he died, I was interviewed for a documentary on his life, and I was asked why I thought he'd made so few films, just three shorts and 13 features over half a century. My answer was simple: he may not have made so many pictures, but the ones he did manage to make were enough. Each one contains multitudes, worlds, vast mysteries.
And with the exception of Dr. Strangelove (and, to a certain extent, A Clockwork Orange), each one was greeted with bafflement and down-right hostility at the time of its first release. Kubrick's pictures were too powerful to be watched and absorbed and understood on contact. You had to live with them. People are still catching up with his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, and, I believe, with Barry Lyndon, which really stopped us in our tracks when it was released in 1975. We had all come to expect the unexpected from Kubrick, but this adaptation of a little-known Thackeray novel from 1844--a lavish, eye-filling, minutely detailed recreation of life in 18th century Europe--was something else again.
Like 2001, which had by then become a classic, Barry Lyndon was mesmerizingly slow, and it looked and felt like no other film made before or since. Kubrick procured a 50mm still camera lens that had been manufactured by the Zeiss Corporation for NASA, and he asked the Cinema Products Corporation to figure out a way to fit the lens on an old Mitchell BNC movie camera so that he could photograph his interiors by candlelight. The people at CPC wondered why he wanted to go to so much trouble (there were, at the time, ultra-fast lenses available that he could have used if he had supplemented the candles with a little bit of artificial fill light). But when you see the picture, you understand why he went to such lengths. It was more than a matter of mere authenticity. Every scene in Barry Lyndon, inside and outside, is astonishing to look at. And every element--every cut, every turn in the story, every gesture, every word--is crucial to the orchestration of the entire picture, the sense of a world of manicured landscapes and lavish estates and carefully observed codes of conduct in which full-blown human passions and acts of brutal savagery play out.
You could say that Barry Lyndon is a gangster story in an aristocratic setting, but you could also say that Scarface and The Public Enemy are stories of aristocratic power plays in modern settings. When Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal) is challenged by his stepson Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali, who became Kubrick's assistant) to a duel - one of the most suspenseful scenes I've ever seen - you could be watching Orestes coming to avenge Agamemnon, Lord Arlen beheading his wife after catching her with Matty Groves, or Michael Corleone ordering the execution of his brother. Kubrick reminded us that we may live in palaces and maintain impeccable manners, but we can never outrun our own fallacies. He was a towering artist and Barry Lyndon is one of his greatest pictures.
