Barry Lyndon (1975)
Country: GB
Technical: col 187m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
Synopsis:
A low-born Irishman's son rises to prominence in the military and marries into wealth but ends his life crippled and discredited.
Review:
Kubrick's exhaustive research and preparations, his meticulous attention to detail in execution, yielded a formal masterpiece whose design, cinematography and musical selections place it alongside 2001 in finesse and intelligence. Unfortunately it is almost as passionless as that film, though its tone, epitomised by Michael Hordern's narration, detached and ironic, so entirely befits an adaptation of a Joseph Andrews-style picaresque novel, one would hardly know it was written nearly a century later. Unlike Tony Richardson's approach, however, energetic and rambunctious, Kubrick's is stately, almost reverential. Each scene amounts to a tableau worthy of Rembrandt or Joshua Reynolds, often with zoom incorporated, and the characters appear caught as it were in amber. The narration and intertitles give away much of the plot before it happens and we are granted its surefooted illustration. This treatment left many critics cold, as it seemed to give priority to the settings, costumes, wigs, lighting and composition over humanity, and yet isn't that one way to capture the third person perspective of the literary genre in question?
Country: GB
Technical: col 187m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
Synopsis:
A low-born Irishman's son rises to prominence in the military and marries into wealth but ends his life crippled and discredited.
Review:
Kubrick's exhaustive research and preparations, his meticulous attention to detail in execution, yielded a formal masterpiece whose design, cinematography and musical selections place it alongside 2001 in finesse and intelligence. Unfortunately it is almost as passionless as that film, though its tone, epitomised by Michael Hordern's narration, detached and ironic, so entirely befits an adaptation of a Joseph Andrews-style picaresque novel, one would hardly know it was written nearly a century later. Unlike Tony Richardson's approach, however, energetic and rambunctious, Kubrick's is stately, almost reverential. Each scene amounts to a tableau worthy of Rembrandt or Joshua Reynolds, often with zoom incorporated, and the characters appear caught as it were in amber. The narration and intertitles give away much of the plot before it happens and we are granted its surefooted illustration. This treatment left many critics cold, as it seemed to give priority to the settings, costumes, wigs, lighting and composition over humanity, and yet isn't that one way to capture the third person perspective of the literary genre in question?
Country: GB
Technical: col 187m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
Synopsis:
A low-born Irishman's son rises to prominence in the military and marries into wealth but ends his life crippled and discredited.
Review:
Kubrick's exhaustive research and preparations, his meticulous attention to detail in execution, yielded a formal masterpiece whose design, cinematography and musical selections place it alongside 2001 in finesse and intelligence. Unfortunately it is almost as passionless as that film, though its tone, epitomised by Michael Hordern's narration, detached and ironic, so entirely befits an adaptation of a Joseph Andrews-style picaresque novel, one would hardly know it was written nearly a century later. Unlike Tony Richardson's approach, however, energetic and rambunctious, Kubrick's is stately, almost reverential. Each scene amounts to a tableau worthy of Rembrandt or Joshua Reynolds, often with zoom incorporated, and the characters appear caught as it were in amber. The narration and intertitles give away much of the plot before it happens and we are granted its surefooted illustration. This treatment left many critics cold, as it seemed to give priority to the settings, costumes, wigs, lighting and composition over humanity, and yet isn't that one way to capture the third person perspective of the literary genre in question?