This is the “movie that was shot by candlelight”. “Barry Lyndon” is anchored in the collective memory of most people who have perhaps never seen it in its entirety or who have avoided it for a variety of reasons. Even when it was released in 1975, it had a reputation for being slow-paced and largely boring. The pun “Borey Lyndon” made the rounds.
After Stanley Kubrick had released three masterpieces in a row with “Dr. Strange or How I Learned to Love the Bomb” (1964), “2001 – A Space Odyssey” (1968) and “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), all of which wrote film history in their own way, the verdict on the overly long, introspective and also melancholy historical film was initially cautious. Even today it is still valued primarily for its impressive aesthetic display values.
Past that is past
Not only are John Alcott’s sophisticated camera work, Ken Adam’s meticulous set design and Milena Canonero’s breathtakingly authentic costumes – all of which won an Oscar – of lasting value, but above all Kubrick’s spectacular attempt to make a film in which the past is reconstructed as the past (and only as that and nothing else) with cool directorial precision.
After a year of preparation, the director banned himself from any antics that had been common since the beginning of the genre costume picture belongs to it and instead told with a strict analytical eye and taking into account all the sociological knowledge available to him about the anti-hero Redmond Barry, who, with a little skill and also some luck, manages to advance into higher aristocratic circles – but who, at the very moment when he has reached the highest point of social advancement, fails due to the strict moral codes of a class into which he was not born.
After “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess, Kubrick once again based his historical panorama on a literary model – the novel “The Memoirs of Junker Barry Lyndon” (“The Memoirs of Junker Barry Lyndon” (“the first novel without a real hero”) by William Makepeace Thackeray from 1844, which is rather unknown in German circles.
The director also wanted to put the literary nature of his story at the center of the action. Because “Barry Lyndon” has a narrator who is unreliable from the start, who mentions several times that not everything he says is correct and deliberately ignores certain findings from historical research in order to replace them in favor of reports that were supposedly brought to him.
The most expensive experimental film of all time
Most likely, the lethargic narrator, who more than once anticipates crucial details of the plot and thus nips any tension in the bud, is also a reason why “Barry Lyndon” was accused of being boring. However, this judgment is unfair because Kubrick was not for the first time overriding the narrative logic of Hollywood cinema, but rather was applying the essential achievements of the experimental cinema of the 60s and 70s in a genre that had simply not attempted such experiments before. Equipment cinema is expensive – and so the pressure on filmmakers is high to deliver according to strict guidelines for audience taste.
For this reason, it would only be fair to recall “Barry Lyndon,” which was not a huge success at the box office, as the most expensive and perhaps bravest experimental film of all time. In 300 days of filming, the perfectionist Kubrick managed to stage historical furnishing details with hyper-realistic accuracy and art historical details in an enchanting way tableaux vivants and to use the subtle soundtrack between Handel’s “Sarabande” and Irish traditionals to both narratively advance and ironically comment on his story.
The sprawling work thrives on the great presence of its main actors, especially “Love Story” mime Ryan O’ Neal, who, with great sobriety and only a few gestures, can convey his undoing pride, his narcissism, but also his quiet, inner joy at social advancement. Equally impressive is Marisa Berenson, who brought a quiet, introverted beauty to her role as Lady Lyndon.
In the few scenes that suggest something like closeness between the two main actors, the viewer still feels the infinite distance that exists between the characters due to their social differences. Just think of the scene in the carriage when Barry, now elevated to the nobility, smugly blows the smoke from his pipe into his newly wedded wife’s face and she endures it stoically. Or the sequence in which Barry asks Lady Lyndon for forgiveness for his orgiastic excesses and ruefully hugs her as she sits naked in the bathtub.
Of course it is true that most of the characters in “Barry Lyndon” aseptically haunt a setting that is downright eerie because it is unrealistically beautiful in every respect. But they are not expressionless puppets; rather, they represent Kubrick’s bittersweet vision of a world whose history cannot be changed by even the greatest application of external and internal forces. This deep skepticism about the effectiveness of human individuality runs through almost all of the American director’s films, in which the characters like AlexDelarge in “A Clockwork Orange” act as “Clockwork Oranges”, as human robots without idealism, without a goal.
Variations on the same thing
It is not for nothing that “Barry Lyndon” ends in 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution (the epochal change to a modern world) and also with the pithy sentence: “The people shown here lived and fought at the time of King George III: good or bad, beautiful or ugly, poor or rich – now they are all equal.” These people, as the film wants to convey, are dead and have sunk into a past that has been irretrievably lost.
With its fascinating camera zooms (which aesthetically reinforce the still life character of the narrative panorama of small people on a very large stage), its candlelight scenes shot with a special NASA lens and also the ethereal nature shots in which you can watch the clouds breathlessly as they move through the picture, “Barry Lyndon” is probably the most literally beautiful work in film history.
And even if the film did not reach a large audience again after the three great achievements that Kubrick had preceded it, it is still much more consistent than all of his other works in its philosophical representation of a view of the world that the great picture arranger wanted to brutally impose on the cinema for all time.
Of course, this artistic tendency to banish every possibility of interpretation with cinematic precision and analytical coldness also has a dark side. The American film critic Roger Ebert then remarked in his renewed observation of “Barry Lyndon” that Kubrick allowed no other way to look at Barry than he did himself.
The focus is on the view of the world
In this respect, Susan Sontag’s thesis that Kubrick’s films are essentially fascist cinema (the essayist based her criticism primarily on “2001 – A Space Odyssey”) is not necessarily wrong. But that would deny the director any form of ideological criticism, which has very visibly shaped his work since “The Killing” (1956) at the latest.
Kubrick’s extraordinary and lasting artistic influence can be better explained by his uncompromising reliance on the power of subversive images that only cinema was capable of producing.
“Barry Lyndon” is without a doubt one of Kubrick’s great works because, like “2001 – A Space Odyssey” (1968) for the science fiction genre, “Paths to Glory” (1957) for the war film and “Shining” (1980) for the horror film, it reflects the conditions of its genre – the historical film – in an exemplary manner and reveals the essentially secret laws of its production logic and The narrative stance opens up the possibility of criticizing it. So nothing is boring here.
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