The Conspiracy Farm: Why Stanley Kubrick? Vol 3

Well howdy folks and welcome back to the farm. Today we're going to jump right into volume

three of why Stanley Kubrick so far in volumes 1 and 2. We covered Dr. Strangelove or how

I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Then we covered of course 2001 a space odyssey.

In our last volume we started talking about a clockwork orange and we completely lost

track of time because I'm both fascinated and horrified by that movie. I find it to be a brilliant

artistic achievement but also an awful harrowing experience to actually watch.

And I find that contradiction very strange and interesting. I mean okay yeah it was a low budget

Kubrick only spent two million dollars to make it but I mean that was a very interesting use of

two million dollars you know plastic eyeballs used as cufflinks giant female mannequins that

dispense milk laced with psychoactive drugs through their presumably plastic breasts.

Yeah it's that kind of movie. Now I know so far it seems like I've been very spoiler heavy

but I have left a lot of details unspoken and these are the details that I think make the movie

interesting and I'm talking about how Alex interacts with his droogs with his friends

and how goofy his parents are and how they're clueless about his his doings and goings on

and where he is at night. Then the bizarre mannerisms of the prison and government staff

of the interesting twists of fate and some unlikely circumstances that come together to move Alex's

story forward. He's almost like a pinball bouncing around inside a machine in the third

reel of this movie because now that he's had his agency taken away from him by the ludovico

treatment he's just sort of a a victim that things happen to and so in the last volume I did

sort of skip over the details of the ludovico treatment. I must interrupt here since you neglected

to mention it. Ludovico is the Italian version of the German name Ludwig this is interesting

because Ludwig van Beethoven inadvertently figures prominently in this treatment.

As I said in the last volume the quote-unquote doctors in their white lab coats take Alex to a movie

theater and strap him to a chair his body and his head so that he can't look away from the screen

they use stainless steel metal clamps to clamp his eyes open and they begin to play films for him

and someone sits next to him in the very next theater seat and their task is to use an eye dropper

to drop artificial tears into Alex's eyes so they don't dry out while he's being forced to watch

these scenes of sexual assault and torture and murder and beatings and stabbings all day

every day while he is injected with this substance that rewires his responses to these images

and begins to neurologically associate a feeling of extreme dread a feeling that you're about to die

combined with a kind of nausea and helplessness

now here's where a little problem comes up it's never made clear in the movie at least

whether or not the doctors knew that Alex was a big fan of classical music and in particular

Beethoven but for some reason one of these films had a soundtrack and behind all of the death

and the mutilation we start to hear Beethoven's ninth symphony classical music being played over

these awful visuals which is in a strange way kind of a an intense distillation or echo of the

film at large because that's what this movie is kind of disturbing visuals mixed with beautiful

classical music and so when Alex hears Beethoven in his terrible state and he realizes that

Beethoven is going to be associated with this this feeling of dread and horrible fear and helplessness

once he realizes that this is going to damage his ability to appreciate music that's when the

real horror sinks in and for the first time he freaks out and starts yelling and he wants the doctors

to turn off the music and he begs them to turn off the music and appeals to their their basic role

as members of our civilization and it's a sin to do this to another human well it's very convenient

that Alex has just discovered that there are some things you shouldn't do to other people

a little late now and the doctors agreed and they did not turn off the music and one of the

climaxes of the film probably in a psychological sense before Alex's release the prison

organizes a demonstration of Alex's new condition for the edification and education of the government

and the public they invited journalists and government officials to come witness what they've

done to Alex and during this quote unquote press conference Alex is brought out on a stage

in front of the crowd and he's dressed in a nice suit and he looks like a very decent young man now

then they bring people out on stage to interact with Alex and things don't go so well at least not

for Alex but the officials of the prison and the government officials are thrilled with the results

so first they have a guy come out just an ordinary looking guy in another suit

he just starts calling Alex names and abusing him in a way that keeps escalating and we see that

Alex can't fight back and at one point Alex in his attempt to defend himself gets this sudden surge

of weakness and nausea and he just collapses into a fetal position on the stage but his tormentor

and stage partner is not nearly done with him yet and so he stomps on his chest to get him to

roll over flat and during this stomping is when the actor who plays Alex Malcolm McDowell had a rib

broken by the stomping motion during that scene after stomping Alex with that shoe he holds the

shoe over Alex's face and he orders Alex to lick the soul of his shoe and Alex is completely helpless

and in a desperate attempt to get the guy to stop abusing him the camera fixes on a close-up of

Alex's face with the soul of that guy's shoe like one inch over it almost touching his nose

and Alex horrified by what he's doing sixes tongue out and gives the soul of the guy's shoe a long lick

now surprisingly Kubrick allowed the actor to switch shoes between shots so that the shoe that's

right over Alex's face had never actually been worn before and the souls were determined to be very

clean I'm surprised by that I would think that Kubrick's obsession with getting details right

would require that the soul be filthy visibly dirty when Alex licks it and then there's a close-up of

you know the gravel and the dust on Alex's tongue I would have expected that but I guess Kubrick

was in a good mood and he had already broken the guy's rib and so I guess he felt bad about

making him lick a dirty shoe on top of that on the same day now if they were two different

scenes then maybe Kubrick would make him do that but you know not on the same day not in the same

scene you know Kubrick had his limits he wasn't a monster well after Alex licks the shoe he's not

done yet it's time for the real test after his tormentor leaves the stage Alex is able to gather

himself enough to get up off the floor but then a half naked woman walks out on stage and begins

walking very seductively toward Alex trying to arouse him and we can tell that he was aroused by

the woman because he once again collapses into nausea and dread and helplessness in a fetal

position this is now his new reaction to being aroused so they've taken away Alex's ability to

commit violence they've taken away his ability to be sexual at all and so now that he's been proven

to be a sort of semi deactivated person the government officials the prison officials and the press

are all elated and they cheer because they've found a solution to the crime finally so Alex has

graduated and in the third part of the movie we see Alex run into a lot of people from his past

that he had wronged and who were seeking revenge understandably so given what a disgusting

monster he was in the first third of the movie and so the first thing Alex thinks to do is to go

home and see his parents and see if he could stay there at least for a while well his parents

didn't adjust too well to finding out that their son was a serial rapist and murderer

so they didn't visit him apparently and they allowed another young man to rent out Alex's room

as a border for extra money so when Alex shows up with his little bag that contains everything he

owns in the world he finds his parents having dinner with the border this guy that the parents have

clearly sort of taken on as their new son during the years when Alex was away and they basically

tell Alex that this other young man has signed a contract and Alex isn't really all that welcome

there anymore anyway and here's where I need to mention that most people at some point

discover that Alex's father is being played by the same actor who played Delbert Grady

the caretaker of the overlook hotel in the shining the ghost that Jack Nicholson's character

meets in the strange orange and white bathroom this is the ghost of the man who

act as family to pieces with an axe according to the story in the shining anyway it's weird seeing

Delbert Grady play a kind of helpless doofus dad he probably should have taken the axe to Alex

when he was young he would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain so Alex has treated very poorly

in the third reel of the film as I mentioned I have to mention here that during this portion of

the film the actor Malcolm McDowell almost drowned during one scene it's a scene where someone

is holding his head underwater while they're beating him and there's no CGI involved no stealth

cuts Malcolm McDowell just holds his breath for a super long time while he's being hit with

rubber trunches the turning point kind of comes when Alex runs into one person in particular

who has a deep hatred of him and this person happens to find out not only that this strange young

man is the same teenager who had done a horrible thing to him in the past so he knows who Alex is

he knows something even worse for Alex

this man knows that Alex has the same reaction to Beethoven that he does to being aroused by a

woman or angered or if he's attacked with violence and he wants to retaliate

and so this leads to one of the most bizarre scenes I've ever seen

I wonder if this is what put Kubrick over the edge as far as oh I've got to make this movie because I

want to film this scene so Alex is locked in a room with a good sound system

and someone blasts Beethoven at the top of the volume for Alex's listening pleasure

and Alex is so neurologically affected by Beethoven that he's dry heaving and crawling on the floor

and eventually he has to jump out the window and attempt suicide because he can't listen to Beethoven

anymore well I'll go ahead and say Alex survives the fall and the ludovico treatment becomes a hot

potato and a major subject in the media and the government is forced to change its policies

and so I won't give the details of the ending but when we talk about the ending we have to mention

that there were two endings to the novel Anthony Burgess originally wrote a version that had a more

disturbing less happy ending and ending where Alex was actually restored to his previous self

and then in compensation for what had been done to him he was given a government job

so Alex ends the story as a man who dreams of sexual assault and murder but now has a nice job

and his whole life is is waiting ahead of him which is a disturbing thought and so later

Anthony Burgess I believe at the request of publishers wrote a sort of coda or epilogue where Alex

uses his restored free will to do good he actually reforms like people should through his own

self-awareness and self-discipline it was a satisfying happy wholesome ending that reinforced our

assumptions about our society and the future and so Stanley Kubrick was having none of that

he hated this ending and so he was determined that the movie would keep the original disturbing ending

and so now we have this beautiful and horrific masterpiece called a clockwork orange

so how was this movie received by the public what did people think about it when it came out

well it was promptly banned in the UK for 25 years

it's very ironic that a movie that was filmed in Great Britain could not be seen by the people

that lived in Great Britain now the British government was motivated to ban a clockwork orange due

to public outcry from some copycat murders and attacks that had happened because the movie makes

Alex a very memorable and engaging character and so it's it's difficult to see the movie and not

feel some sort of empathy with Alex especially in the second and third parts of the movie

and because of that Kubrick was accused of being I guess pro violence pro sexual assault

and sort of seeing the world vicariously through Alex Delarge especially Alex's attitudes toward women

now Kubrick's feelings about women and how they're portrayed in his movies is kind of an issue

there's a couple of things I find interesting about sort of what Kubrick is saying about sexuality maybe

and Alex is obviously portrayed as a dangerous sexual predator

but we also see Alex picking up teenage girls for a consensual and enthusiastic three-way sexual

encounter at his apartment where he lives with his parents who are presumably at work and this

teenager threesome occurs in broad daylight during the day when all three of them should be in

school but not in this future we don't care about education or the discipline of the youth in

this world this is some sort of bizarre nominally socialist but de facto totalitarian nightmare where

there are no real families just children running around trying to gratify themselves with no sort of

overarching belief system and so Kubrick was actually criticizing the counterculture

in a way I think Steven Spielberg referred to a clockwork orange as the first punk rock movie

but I think that Kubrick was actually criticizing that attitude and that movement

because with a clockwork orange he seems to show us the final result of all this

I think he sees Alex's world as the world you get when too many people embrace the counterculture

when too many people want to live out the social and political ideals of easy writer

one flew over the kukus nest apocalypse now the godfather or a fistful of dollars these are movies

about loners drifters people who don't fit in people who take what they want using their own initiative

and cleverness it's not about learning to live harmoniously within an established social order

the movies of the time were about kicking over the social order because it was rotten

so in a way Kubrick was trying to out easy writer the anti-hero sentiments in those films

I think that Kubrick wanted us to bear in mind or or remember some of the messages about sexuality

in the movie and that's because of how visually or temporally prominent these moments are

and one in particular is the threesome which luckily is portrayed all by adults even though

they're supposed to be in high school Kubrick filmed the entire experience the entire sexual

experience between the three nude people on Alex's bed but it was filmed so that when you played

it back it was in fast motion it was sped up so that the whole thing only took a couple of minutes

but the people were like jumping around like acrobats in the nude to perform what they wanted to

perform and then the whole thing was set to the inspiring sounds of the William Tell overture

so needless to say probably one of the strangest sex scenes in cinema history

and I think it's it's a stroke of genius because he's able to literally show this sort of unusual

sexual encounter but it's this cold dry boring uninteresting mechanical thing and I think

that's brilliant he uses he uses his competence in the art of cinema to reduce sex to something

that we can see graphically but it's just sort of blah and mechanical that's a beautiful way to

put us in Alex's position clearly sex is not anything particularly special or interesting to

Alex it's just sort of a bodily function that he performs regularly he actually calls it the old

in and out no time for the old in and out today love I just came to read the meter

the other image I think of is during the demonstration that the government puts on of what they've

done to Alex and when the half nude woman walks out on stage her arrival is marked as a significant

moment not only by the music but also by the lighting and the overall slow pace of the scene

the pace slows way down when she arrives and we see Alex's reaction as he collapses feeling violently

ill and Kubrick kind of lingers on this powerful shot looking up at this statuesque woman standing over

a collapsed Alex and it's almost like like a revenge for what Alex has done to women in the past

and you're tempted to think that Kubrick himself found this image pretty disturbing if you interpret

Kubrick's work as the musings of someone who occasionally dabbled in misogyny then you can see how

Kubrick thought this this image of the woman overpowering the man and he's powerless to do anything to her

he's just a a child basically a helpless infant around her and since we know that Kubrick is trying

to paint a nightmare for us Kubrick is trying to create this oppressive world where all the rules

are thrown out the window what if he's telling us hey one of these rules is the power of men over

women and if we keep up this counter culture stuff you're going to have women having power over men

and that's just as terrible as having these milk crazed teenagers beating up old people in the

streets I don't really think that I think Kubrick just thought the image was emotionally powerful

and very cool and it fit what he was trying to say in that scene I think he was trying to highlight

the helplessness and humiliation of Alex at that point I'm not sure he was trying to make a

commentary about men in general and women in general but let me go ahead and say what I really think

I think Stanley Kubrick is a misogynist but that's okay and it's not sexist because he's also a

misandrist Stanley Kubrick is a misanthrope meaning he has a low opinion of all humans or at least

most including men and women so I say if you hate the genders equally if you hate all the races

equally then you're fine you're not a misogynist or a racist you're you're playing fair

Stanley Kubrick cast a very wide net of disdain and disapproval and all kinds of people got tangled

up in it not just women we're going to talk much more about this in the next volume on Stanley Kubrick

when we talk about the shining because the way Stanley Kubrick wrote the lead female character

and his treatment of that actress is the stuff of legend ugly Hollywood legends

but enough about a clockwork orange for now I'm sure at some point I'll refer back to it

but now it's time to move on to Barry Lyndon

the cool thing about Barry Lyndon is how completely different it is from all other Stanley Kubrick

movies and it proves that Kubrick was very versatile and not just a one trick pony

he wasn't just good at weird science fiction movies or black comedies

Kubrick had just completed two movies about a disturbing near future and then he jumps directly

into the past into a movie set in the 1780s in a very very quaint and traditional past

this movie is very long it's about three hours long and it has a very slow pace

it has kind of an epic scale it covers most of this one person's adult life a young poor Irish

farm boy named Redmond Barry he changes his name to Barry Lyndon later but the thing about this

movie is you have to really look at it it has much less dialogue than your typical period piece

in fact one reviewer called it almost a silent movie where it's just music and then this

voice over narration that kind of explains what the characters are thinking or planning at the time

it really is a kind of picture book on the screen because every frame of the film looks like a painting

and so during an interview Kubrick was told about this critic who had said that Barry Lyndon was a

silent movie and Kubrick's response was oh good he gets it it was a silent movie

Kubrick explained that the silent movies got a lot of things right in terms of visual storytelling

that the talky movies started to deviate from

I like to look in the background and at the costumes which we're going to talk a lot more about

and the amazing sets and the extras who are always polishing silverware or scrubbing floors

he really shows the busyness of the world back then at the same time there was a lot of leisure

it's cool you see people on walks or just sitting and watching the sunset while drinking ale

especially after watching a clockwork orange it's such a peaceful world and that's a weird word

to use peaceful because the movie is full of duels and redmond fights in wars in europe

in two different armies so we do see a lot of shooting and a pretty cool but brief sword fight

so I get a lot out of the movie mainly because I'm looking at the photography and let me say

something about that one thing to know about Barry Lyndon is that Kubrick was committed to shoot

the whole movie without any artificial light he wanted the film exposure to be accomplished only

through sunlight or candlelight usually giant chandeliers of lots of candles because you have to

remember even the best film stock and the quote unquote fastest lenses available could not handle

low light settings like modern film stocks could by the 90s or especially digital digital can

work with very low light but you couldn't do that in 1974 and so later on we'll talk about

some of the tricks Kubrick had to use and he did actually have to use an artificial light

to mimic moonlight there was a scene on a balcony at some aristocrats party it's supposed to be a

full moon and it just wasn't technically possible to get a good exposure even from a bright full

moon in Britain at the time and so we have very complex beautiful cinematography going on

and even though Barry Lyndon wasn't commercially successful it totally cleaned up at the Oscars

and this is back when the Oscars meant a lot more when it was less political and more about the

skill of the craftsman and so Barry Lyndon dominated the technical Oscars that year

it received the award for best cinematography best costumes and best production design

and let's talk about these costumes because the costumes in Barry Lyndon are pretty amazing

they are clearly partly the result of Kubrick's research into his Napoleon epic that he wanted

to make but he never did but the costumes would have been from roughly the same time period as

Barry Lyndon so he had already done a lot of work in that area and so to give you a sense of

how accurate Kubrick wanted to be we have to mention that the first thing Kubrick did was

try to see how many original pieces he could get for the movie

looking at restored jackets coats trousers boots hats that were actually made in the 18th century

and believe it or not they managed to find quite a bit and so there are plenty of scenes in

Barry Lyndon where you see a really elaborately embroidered coat and some of them are literally

actually real pieces that were made in the 18th century they had to beg museums and collectors

and other sources of vintage garments and so after that Kubrick filled in the gaps with modern

reproductions but they had to be reproductions that were made of the same material using roughly

the same methods so that he could get the most authentic look possible and so all the scenes

that show the red coats of the British Army are a little dingy looking they're not the bright

blood red that you see in a lot of Hollywood movies it's kind of a deep orange it's definitely

red but it has a kind of dull rusty look and this shows once again Stanley Kubrick's insane

attention to detail and his desire for an immersive kind of realism

and this is once again why a lot of people who believe that the moon landings

or at least the first one was faked a lot of people who believe that claim that Stanley Kubrick

was approached by the deep state to fake the footage because they knew that Kubrick was the only

person that could defeat all the people who wanted to show that the footage was a hoax they knew

Stanley's insane attention to detail would save them and keep the secret going

now I do think we did actually go to the moon I don't think Stanley Kubrick faked footage for the

government I would like to think that Stanley Kubrick would not do that even though I'm about to

argue that Stanley Kubrick was very pro traditional civilization he was also very critical of it

he believed that he had to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak

there's a way to address racial prejudice or the ugly rough edges of capitalism without creating

cultural anarchy or sort of weak socialist governments so in Barry Lyndon we definitely get

this immersive world and it's even photographed with natural light so that it looks like paintings

from back then and Kubrick was careful about what makeup he allowed on his actors so the people

looked very natural and I cannot overstate how different Barry Lyndon is from a clockwork orange

where a clockwork orange is this cold disturbing movie Barry Lyndon is this sort of warm inviting movie

it's comforting there's something really comforting about the order of this life and how

everybody knows their place and the ornate home furnishings and you have these scenes where

people are talking but behind them you can see a servant on their hands and knees scrubbing the

floors and then you see people in these beautiful hats and wigs and we'll talk about this more later

and also the extreme politeness of the characters there's none of the the rude clipped speech or

profanity of the late 20th century and the politeness and the florid speech of the characters

even the lower class characters contributes to this this sense of order and comfort and not only

is Barry Lyndon by comparison serene and comfortable in terms of what you actually see on the screen

every image is pleasing in Barry Lyndon even the battle scenes are beautiful because of the movements

of the soldiers and their discipline and heroism and the uniforms looking so cool and showing how

the soldiers had to work together to survive it's very strange that Kubrick can portray violence

in two totally different ways and i think it's because he's showing that the violence that

Barry Lyndon was participating in as a red coat and later as a blue coat for the Prussian army

that violence was orderly and sanctioned by a state level government and is he sort of saying that

that's better than anarchy on the streets one skilled soldier being shot dead by another

skilled soldier to achieve some political purpose is perhaps preferable to a hapless citizen

dying on the streets from blunt head trauma because somebody wanted the 85 dollars that they had

in their purse i would agree i would say you want to eliminate those as much as you can

and so what is this movie about what's Barry Lyndon about well

Barry Lyndon was born Redmond Barry and Redmond Barry was a poor Irish kid who grew up on a small farm

and he wants to make something of himself he reaches for the top he kind of has nowhere to go but up

because his father died in a duel and his mother was barely keeping the farm going

now what makes Barry originally have to leave his hometown and wander off into the wilder

wider world well it had to do with an incident that happened when he was very young

and i have to clarify something here unlike most Irish people

Redmond Barry is quite the hothead he's pretty good in a fight especially a fist fight

and he's quick to join one if he feels insulted or if he thinks he can gain something from it

now i know this doesn't fit any of the stereotypes associated with people of Irish descent

so it's kind of weird to see this 18th century young Irishman having such a

a temper and self-destructive pride but that's the kind of person he is now just like his father

pretty soon into adulthood he finds himself in a duel and after the duel

Redmond is forced to leave and try to find safety from law enforcement

so Barry Lyndon is given a bag full of gold coins by his mother and he packs up his best clothes

and the only horse they owned and he headed for Dublin to get away from the firestorm that he had

created but on his way to Dublin Barry is relieved of his gold coins by a pair of highwayman

robbers who ambush him when he's passing through some dark woods and i gotta say in line with Kubrick's

theme of the high civilization that we'd lost the culture of the past the comfort that we could

find in that culture and that order with even the robbery Kubrick underlines that theme

because Redmond is robbed by an older man and his son who point pistols at him and ask him to

get off his horse and they introduce themselves and they're downright cordial but then the old man

cocks his pistol and says well sir now it's time to move on to the more regrettable portion of

our brief acquaintance and the man's son searches Barry and finds the bag of coins and Barry

with his hands up in the air afraid to make a move because of all the guns pointing at him

for in fact Barry chooses to plead with the old man and Redmond says to the old man

that's all the money my mother has in the world mightn't I be able to keep it

I'm running from the law just like you I killed an English officer in a duel now I'm headed for

Dublin and the old man seemed to be a bit moved by Redmond's story and he says

well young sir that's one of the more intriguing stories I've heard in recent years

but a last a man in my line of work cannot afford to be sentimental or something to that effect

I don't remember the exact dialogue but I bet you I'm pretty close it's a much longer scene

though because their introductions and their banter is pretty funny and they're so nice to each other

the robbers do in the end feel bad for Redmond and since he had all that gold on him

they explained to him that they didn't know that he had so much gold on him and they were

planning to take his jacket his boots his hat and his horse they said that they had to take

his horse and the gold but that given his story and his circumstances they let him keep his boots

in his jacket and his hat and let him proceed to Dublin and Barry starts walking away into the woods

but Barry keeps his hands up and so the old man says oh you can put your hands down now Mr.

Barry and so Redmond puts his hands down and proceeds to Dublin now utterly penniless

and so given Redmond's extreme situation and his desperation he changes his name and enlists in

the English army as a red coat ironically the same army in which his victim the English officer

had served and now Barry trains and is sent over the channel into Europe because the

seven years war has broken out and he ends up fighting in some pitched battles there some pretty

cool scenes and what's interesting is that there is another English officer who admires Barry's

abilities and his strength and in a very honest and wholesome and genuine way he takes Barry

under his wing a little bit and Barry admires him and it's clear that the man became a bit of a

father figure to Barry now I don't want to go on more with the details of the plot just in case

you wanted to watch Barry linden but Barry does end up being pressed into the Prussian army

which was a very different experience and took him into other very strange circumstances

and him being a very able soldier and very ambitious and clever and brave and motivated

he's noticed by certain Prussian officers who think that he would make a good spy

and so Barry is relieved of his duties as an enlisted man he puts away his musket and his blue coat

and now he has to pose as a British officer and find himself in the good graces of a French aristocrat

but little do they know that secretly this French aristocrat is actually Irish

at least he was born in Ireland he had become quite culturally French of course

but Barry was sent there to spy on the man but of course the fact that they were both Irishman

overrode all their other allegiances and they started working together and conspiring together

to get money and trick everybody else and so their most profitable scheme was by holding parties

where they would have gambling and the idea was to get these clueless,

foppish aristocrats drunk and get them to gamble too much and fall into debt

of course these aristocrats would refuse to pay redmond now Barry would challenge these

debtors to duels where they either had to do the honorable thing and pay up or they had

to show up and fight him and apparently on the continent of Europe fighting with blades was preferred

and so there's a cool scene where Barry has a fight with a rapier with this guy

if you're into fencing it's it's cool to watch I did take one semester of fencing

but Barry and this fake aristocrat pocket a lot of money and during one of these parties

he meets lady linden and she is an attractive young aristocrat who is married to this kind of

gross cranky old man lord linden who owns a lot of property and has a title

and even his son lady linden's son with this old man even though he's still a boy he still has a title

lord boolingden and so to sum up the third reel of the movie lady linden and Barry become

romantically involved and pretty soon the old man is out of the way

Barry marries the widow linden and becomes Barry linden he takes on this aristocratic name

because redmond berry pretty obviously shows his low birth and he does not get along with his

stepson lord boolingden and Barry reaches the pinnacle of his life when lady linden bears a sun

and of course Barry doats on the little boy and spoils him and tells him stories about what he did

in the war and Barry had some genuinely good stories so before I sum up Barry linden and talk

about what I think it means let me talk about the tent scene

so I had mentioned that when Barry was in the british army he became friendly with a british

captain who served as a bit of a mentor for Barry and there was an important scene that occurred

at night inside an army tent where Barry and the captain have a conversation over this little table

and sitting on the little table is one little candle and that was the only available light in the

scene and so that presented a problem as I said earlier Kubrick was determined not to use any

artificial light to make the movie but I did mention that a single candle could not produce enough

to get a good exposure on the film stocks that they had at the time Kubrick wasn't a brilliant

chemist and so he couldn't come up with a more sensitive film stock for that scene

but he was an old school photographer who knew the mechanics of how cameras worked

and so he had a special camera built specifically for this one scene and it was a camera that had

a very fast lens and what that means is a lot of light gets through it and you can get a better

image with a lower light level and so you may have heard of this concept called f-stops in photography

and it's real simple an f-stop controls how much light goes into the camera how big is the

aperture that the light is passing through on its way to the film or in a digital camera the

CCD the sensor and the larger the number the smaller the hole and so f-22 it's about as high as

most cameras will go and that is a tiny tiny pinhole of light it needs to be broad daylight

noon in the Caribbean on a clear day in order to get an image with an aperture that small

now as I said the smaller the number the larger the aperture on a typical camera the largest

aperture you can get is 1.8 to 1.2 the camera I had would go down to 1.4 now that's going to let

in a massive amount of light but the problem is the larger that aperture is the less of the image

is going to be in focus so at f-22 everything is in focus if you were in the Caribbean on that

clear day taking a photo at f-22 every single vein of every palm frond is going to be perfectly

in focus every grain of sand can be seen if you zoom in and so the problem with a low f-stop

number i.e. a larger aperture the problem with that is very little of the images in focus so at f-22

something that's two feet away from the camera is perfectly in focus something that's two

hundred feet from the camera is perfectly in focus at f-1.4 something that's two feet in front

of the camera is completely blurry something that is two hundred feet from the camera is completely

blurry and pretty much only what you're focused on is in focus so if someone standing ten feet from

the camera you focus on one of their eyes which is usually the best thing to do their whole face

and body is going to be nicely in focus then everything behind them is going to be sort of soft

and fuzzy and blown out and that looks nice they call that bokeh so here's the thing when you're

lighting a scene with just one candle inside a tent at night in 1974 1.4 is not big enough

Kubrick had a special camera built that had an aperture that went below one now what that means is

the aperture is the same size as the last lens that the light goes through and so you're getting a

really hazy blurry image but you can get that image with very low light now inside this tent with

this special camera there was a one inch wide plane an imaginary plane that was a very fixed

distance from the camera and the two actors had to act out their scene within this one inch plane

all of their movements had to be practiced so that whenever they would engage in their conversation

or move their hands they would stay as close to this this imaginary plane a fixed distance from

the camera lens as close to that as possible so it took a lot of takes and even in the final film

there's a couple of times where their their heads wobble during the conversation just a little

too far or a little too close to the camera and we're talking about fractions of an inch here

as soon as they deviate that little bit that part of their face goes completely out of focus

so that's weird that's also a little extreme but I think Kubrick was so determined to accomplish

this because the way he lit the movie the costumes the sets I think it all contributes to the theme

of Barry Lyndon I think it all backs up and underlines what Kubrick was trying to say

and so what does Barry Lyndon mean well let's start with that tent what was going on in that tent

it was an army tent late at night where two men two men who saw eye to eye about life

the older man who represented experience and civilization and he's mentoring this young man

and sort of taking the wildness out of him and showing him a world of self-discipline of culture

put this in the context of a of an unflinching seamless and fully realized world

a lost traditional world a world of beauty and high civilization and culture and discipline

I think he wants this rough unmanufactured look a handmade quality to the film

because he's trying to evoke a time where you had these quiet nights and dinner parties where you

can hear the insects outside and there's no air conditioning everybody's face is painted white

with lead oxide because I think titanium dioxide was difficult to make until the 19th century

I mean when you watch this movie you can almost smell the perfume and the dusty wigs and the candle

smoke so what I'm trying to say is that a clockwork orange was not Kubrick's most subversive or

revolutionary movie I think it was Barry Lyndon I think that he wanted to show the audience

some sort of contrast to the world that he presented in 2001 and a clockwork orange

he showed us a future that threatened to end humanity either by actual extinction or by just

robbing us of what makes us human and here with Barry Lyndon he shows us this 100% human world where

people were people and there was nothing mechanical or anonymous about the world the way the way

things are now the way they were becoming in the late 20th century I think there was a kind of

cold mechanical inhumanity that Kubrick saw in 20th century America and the world in general

he seemed to have the a lot of the same dissatisfaction and critiques of our society that a lot of

people on the left had but I think that ultimately Kubrick thought that we were headed in the wrong

direction now if Barry Lyndon was a response to the counter culture which is what I'm saying

in terms of how the left tends to frame things you could say that it's a reactionary movie

because when the right reacts to positions on the left they consider that reactionary

so you could say that Barry Lyndon is a reactionary film it's sort of a a traditionalist mindset

asserting itself right in the middle of this counter culture revolution in the world of film

Kubrick hated postmodernism I think that shows in this very early modern film where the old traditions

and standards still had meaning a lot of people don't talk about how important the 1970s were

to the history of filmmaking I think all you have to do is watch a few of the typical movies from

say 1967 and then watch a few movies from 1984 and you'll realize that there's this vast

gulf between them not just in terms of subject matter or cultural norms or fashion

but definitely in terms of filmmaking style now in the information age we're all used to technological

changes coming along and we see how that can change media for example streaming or just digital

photography in general and we forget that there were technological advances before the 1990s

and part of what changed about filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s was technological

it was new kinds of cameras new film stocks new lighting options and you have to bear in mind that

Stanley Kubrick was the first director to use a steady cam harness in a film and that was for the

shining so Kubrick was always looking for the next technological development that could help him

realize a film and that's one of the main reasons why the films from the 1970s have that classic

photograph to look that's different from the painterly technicolor look that was prominent in

films in the 1960s there was more realism in the imagery and you can see that Kubrick enthusiastically

leveraged all this new technology to create this very tactile real world of the past in Barry Lyndon

I think that Barry Lyndon and Blitz Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are two films that have the

best cinematography of all time so yes Barry Lyndon and Blitz Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

are awesome movies that anybody interested in photography or cinematography should watch and study

okay well enough about Barry Lyndon for now and in the next volume on why Stanley Kubrick we're

going to be talking about two of the big ones his two final major films and no I don't consider

eyes wide shut his final film and we'll talk about why that is but it's interesting because

the shining has become I think Kubrick's most popular film or at least his most well-known film

but I will join with the other Kubrick fans who regard this as one of his lesser films it's still

awesome and it still holds up and it's very haunting but I don't know if it hangs together the way

the other ones do Kubrick made some very strange choices during the writing and the shooting of

the shining and we'll talk about that and then we'll move on to maybe one of my personal favorites

of Stanley Kubrick full metal jacket that is a doozy and it has a lot to say about all kinds of

things it also has the best soundtrack of any Kubrick film lots of classic rock and so in the next

volume we will re-enter the grim cold world of Stanley Kubrick and talk about I guess probably his

two most grim and cold movies they're not as bizarre and disturbing as a clockwork orange but

you know they hit hard you remember them and they say some ugly things about human nature

and they make us reflect on how we fit into the universe and so until then talk to you later