Great work requires innovating and copying. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (the 1975 three hour costume drama) demonstrates this well.

Barry Lyndon is a classic in the Mark Twain sense that everybody wants to have read watched it and nobody wants to read watch it. It is the sort of three hour movie that compels you to watch hours of youtube afterwards in order to begin processing the beautiful and slow thing you just witnessed.

Two things come up frequently in discussions of the movie:

• The movie has many candlelit scenes. In order to capture the candlelight Kubrick used a lens that was designed for NASA for low light, deep space photography. Kubrick machined and tinkered with them until they were able to fit on a film camera. This was “revolutionary”.
• A different approach was taken when it came to the costumes. All of the costumes in the movie are either copies based on 18th century paintings or actual clothing from museums. [Aside: Watch Ulla-Britt Soderlund win the 1976 Oscar for Costume Design in this sweet video. Different time!]

I love that these two facts sit together. Kubrick was a controlling director and did everything in his power to make movies that last. Sometimes that involved buying 3 of the 5 existing made-for-NASA low light camera lenses and grafting them onto a film camera. Other times that means dusting off clothing from a museum.

Great work requires innovating and copying. Genius is knowing when to do each!

Other notes:

• The Beauty Of Barry Lyndon [3 minute video]
• BARRY LYNDON: Unpacking Kubrick’s Most UNDERRRATED MASTERPIECE [1 hour video and source of Mark Tawin quote]
• How Kubrick Achieved the Beautiful Cinematography of Barry Lyndon [15 minute video]
• Interview with Mark Bridges (Phantom Thread Costumes; really nothing to do with Barry Lyndon but…) [30 minute video]
• Criterion video 1: Achieving Perfection – The Cinematography of Barry Lyndon [15 minute video]
• Criterion video 2: Making Barry Lyndon [30 minute video]
• Reminded me of the Vasa ship in Stockholm (images) in so much that it feels like time traveling into a period of history you don’t normally see
• Movie feels like paintings: Could hang up stills of the movie on a wall. This reminded me in a weird adjacent way of Jeanne Dielman (which Filmspotting voted tied with Barry Lyndon at #59)
• Silent films, fate, cards, randomness, twist and turns as inevitable, miserable rich people, class
• “the cinematography is what gets all of the attention, but the story is the thing”
• Kubrick’s made this movie after failing to get a Napoleon biopic produced. Just in time for the Ridley Scott movie!
• Here is a good review of the movie
• Here is Scott Sumner (The GOAT Movie Critic) calling it the best costume drama ever
• Oh ya, and the music! I’m sure there are better connections but for some reasons the Schubert piano motif reminded me of Johnny Greenwood’s overtones piece for The Master. Not that they sound the same, just the impact.

Criterion details:

With his absorbing historical drama Barry Lyndon (1975)—an adaptation of a William Makepeace Thackeray novel that archly chronicles the fortunes of a scheming social climber (Ryan O’Neal) in eighteenth-century Europe—the famously exacting Stanley Kubrick set out to vividly evoke a vanished past. To create the authentic look of the film, which went on to win multiple technical Oscars, the filmmaker drew inspiration from the landscape painting and portraiture of artists of the period such as Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth, and went to unprecedented lengths during production. In particular, the film’s interior scenes—which Kubrick insisted on shooting primarily by candlelight—posed myriad challenges for cinematographer John Alcott and his team, necessitating not only the retrofitting of super-wide-aperture lenses but also various practical work-arounds on-set. In the clip above, taken from a supplemental program on our new edition of Barry Lyndon, focus puller Douglas Milsome and gaffer Lou Bogue recall the breath-shortening amount of oxygen consumed by the candles during shooting, and the crew’s eventual use of reflectors to amplify the illumination without also producing more heat and smoke.