The following article was written for Moving Image Source and is being cross-promoted on Reverse Shot.
Hang It on a Wall
Chris Wisniewski on Barry Lyndon
Since its initial release to mixed reviews in 1975, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon has been likened to a work that, in one way or another, belongs in a museum-a sentiment that has been intended as both praise and criticism. Pauline Kael, one of Kubrick's most vocal detractors, derided it as a "three hour slide show for art history majors" and complained that the voiceover narration by Michael Hordern was "like one of those museum tour guide machines." In A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker writes that the many suggestions that Barry Lyndon's images were suited more to a museum than a movie theater were "tantamount to saying the film was dead." Without explicitly saying so, it seems clear that Kolker clearly has in mind art museums that exhibit paintings, and the implication of his observation is that such museums are, like Barry Lyndon itself, austere, inert, deadening—that they invite detached appreciation and observation rather than the sort of engagement one might expect from audiences in a theater.
Barry Lyndon, an 18th-century picaresque adapted from a 19th-century novel by William Thackeray, certainly does have a painterly quality to it. It is static and studied, to the point that it often feels as though it were less made of moving images than a series of tableaux frozen in time. Throughout the film, Kubrick favors long shots, particularly landscape shots, over close-ups; in a frequently recurring visual motif, he zooms out on various actions from a medium-close shot to an extreme long shot—moving from the particular to the general, fixing his characters in the frame. Especially in the film's first act, Kubrick occasionally uses a telephoto lens to shoot his characters moving toward or away from the camera, flattening the image and thus making it seem as though his characters are walking or riding their horses in place. Rather famously, John Alcott, Kubrick's Oscar-winning cinematographer on the film, captured most of his images without artificial light sources (a number of interiors were lit exclusively by candle and shot with an extremely wide lens built for NASA), thus achieving a look more similar to paintings of the era than to other Hollywood period pictures. A number of shots even explicitly reference Hogarth, Watteau, Gainsborough, and other 18th-century artists (see, for example, this illustrative video). Kubrick's images have the look, feel, and composition of paintings one might expect to see at the National Gallery in London or the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in New York]. Does this mean, to follow Kolker, that they are dead?
Read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's article at Moving Image Source.
Barry Lyndon is playing December 30 and January 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the series See It Big, co-presented by Reverse Shot.