Saturday, 29 April 2017

Barry Lyndon - Man and Universe


In ‘Barry Lyndon’, Stanley Kubrick has employed a number of unique techniques and motifs to express the epic story in a visual way, rather than through a ‘humanistic’ and sentimental narrative. These strategies can facilitate the audience to understand the messages Kubrick has intended to convey behind the story.

Because Kubrick has not placed emphasis on a clear or straight-forward storyline in ‘Barry Lyndon’, some viewers could not easily understand the story and would swiftly jump to the conclusion that the film was boring and cold. I think a fairer description is to say the audience members are alienated by the film, and it is not necessarily a bad thing as it may first seem. In an interview regarding his unrealized ‘Napoleon’, Kubrick has explained why he often made films either about the past or the future. He felt that when the audience was experiencing an era unfamiliar to them, they would be alienated and therefore would have to take a more detached perspective when engaging with the story. This was exactly what Kubrick requested from the audience. True, it is okay to be sentimental and tells others, ‘I understand your situation.’, but do we really understand? If we are to understand and look for deeper reasons, can we trust our subjective mind and jump to conclusions easily? Kubrick wanted the audience to take a clinical detachment and to served as observers when watching his films. Only when the audience could detach and take an external and objective view, they could start to appreciate how the characters in the film interacted with their environments and how or why the environments would influence them in a particular way. If we are to look for identifications from the characters, we will just be as entrapped as them, and will never be able to look through the surface to reach a deeper understanding. This was especially true for ‘Barry Lyndon’ – as Kubrick wanted to express his view on big questions regarding human nature.


  
The naturalistic style

The techniques Kubrick employed have contributed to a naturalistic style in ‘Barry Lyndon’. The approach he has employed was also unconventional and represented a technological breakthrough for film-making, which ironically it was employed to make a film about the past. Kubrick and his cinematographer John Alcott have clearly stated the motivations behind this – they wanted to film 'in the way we see things'. What they were driving at was to achieve a realistic and naturalistic feel to the film, and they have been experimenting since they were attempting to make ‘Napoleon’. Concretely, that meant they wanted to make the film using natural and available lighting, without the use of any additional lighting to achieve the effect. What was even more daunting was their intentions to shoot some interior scenes with either available lighting from the outside (sunlight or moonlight depending on the scene), or the illumination of candlelight alone – without any additional electrical light sources. Through their tests, Kubrick and Alcott have concluded that the movie cameras available at their times were not sufficient to capture these scenes satisfactorily. Later, Kubrick heard that there were a number of rare Zeiss camera lenses, which were used by NASA to film the dark side of the moon in the space mission. Gratifyingly, Kubrick got hold of one of these lenses and modified it to fit onto the movie camera. It was the only lenses at the time that could shoot candlelight in an interior scene without the extra help of electrical additional lighting. Now, while Kubrick has achieved his aim, the lens was not without problem. Because of its very short focal length, it displayed zero depth of field in the scenes. In other to maintain focus, Kubrick had to stage and position the scenes very carefully to achieve the desired effects, and in some cases had to deliberate the movement. A further advantage from this was that it gave a very static impression to the scenes, which was what Kubrick has intended when he made the film.

With the technology allowing him to realize his style, Kubrick has committed to portray his 18th century as realistic possible, in an objective and detached manner. Yet, we need to understand that he was not trying to make the audience identifying with the characters, like many sentimental movies out there. A simple example – when someone is sad, you may say ‘oh, I understand you, I share the sadness with you.’ But do you really understand, and do you really share it? It is a sentimental answer to try to show that person that you care about him. Except that you can hack into the person’s mind and share that particular sadness, I feel it is a misuse of the word ‘understand’. You can be compassionate with someone, but you can only objectively appreciate or understand the situation. What Kubrick was driving at was something similar. The characters in ‘Barry Lyndon’ behaved like they were the people in the 18th century, and Kubrick did not frame this characters to be similar to the modern audience, so that the viewers could identify with them. Kubrick was portraying in an authentic manner how a person, in a given setting in the 18th century, would have behaved.  Certain audience, wishing to look for character identifications when they watched ‘Barry Lyndon’, could not find anything common between themselves and the characters starred by the movie stars like Ryan O’Neal and others, were alienated and therefore hated the film. For Kubrick, the only thing common was the psychology, or the timeless nature that drove these characters and the audience alike. That was why Kubrick desperately dispatched some many unique techniques to invite a clinical detachment from his audience. What he wanted from the audience was for them to engage with the ideas rather than seeking some sentimental feelings from the characters or the story. From this, Kubrick has committed a rigorous realism to ‘Barry Lyndon’, just like when he was working on other films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

How could Kubrick achieve such a sense of realism? Well, the production team has researched on the materials regarding that particular era, and in particular, Kubrick has inspected a number of paintings from the 18th century, in order to portray in a pictorial manner the interactions in that age. The end result was that the whole film looked like a moving painting, for which Kubrick’s 18th century was portrayed in a meticulous and authentic manner. Because the way the 18th century worked was extremely different from the modern age the audience was in, it has led to an alienating effect and the viewers had to take an observer’s stance, and to literally viewed the story from a distance. I suppose it was the attitude for Kubrick when one viewed history – one could only approach history in an objective and intellectual manner, rather than through a subjective, ‘I know how you feel’-type attitude. Only through such an appreciation can we find some meanings or inspirations when we are engaging with the past.



The zoom

The anthropological distance was significantly enhanced by Kubrick’s bold use of the reverse zoom, and Barry Lyndon could be considered as the ultimate film of this technique, because Kubrick has done this so many times in the film, almost as if it was a personal ritual. The reverse zoom in the various thematic scenes seemed to take a common approach. It often started from the close up of a human figure, or a depiction of human action (such as a pair of hands working on something), and then the reverse zoom started to pull back until an almost panoramic view was seen, with the human figure now being very small in the surrounding environment. While Kubrick employed this because he wanted to invite objectivity and clinical detachment from the viewers, I believe he had a more philosophical reason to do this, and the ideas were very similar to what he was trying to say in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

What Kubrick was presenting here is a realistic position of human’s position in the universe. When we look at things in life with a human-centered perspective, we tend to see ourselves as the protagonists of the various narratives, and the various often aspects are secondary or subservient to us. Kubrick, like some other philosophers, believed that the universe is indifferent to our passions, and therefore in ‘Barry Lyndon’, he was presenting an impersonal view on human nature, custom, and various mechanisms that governed the characters in their world. Of course, the impersonal and dispassionate could be cold for some sentimental viewers, yet Kubrick’s intention was always to inspire awe rather than sentiment or short-term sensations in those entertaining films. Indeed, this perspective could facilitate the audience to a calmer and more contemplative mood, and to observe and think about how nature, and more important to the film, man-made systems and rituals could affect the lives of these characters.

Kubrick’s characters were often entrapped by their surroundings. They found themselves powerful to the nature and universe, or in many cases, the systems they have created to control themselves and make themselves ‘civilized’. The image of a small human figure in a vast environment is a motif often used to illustrate this point, as in the films of Welles, Herzog, Antonioni, Inarritu and many others. Kubrick’s reverse zoom has enhanced this to an almost cosmic perspective. Humans are imprisoned in their surroundings, and as I will discuss in the next article, the tragic fact they can not understand or have the imagination to counteract or escape from the surroundings will likely lead them to submit to the stronghold of these systems and lead to dehumanization.



The narration

Kubrick’s films often have some forms of narrations, and it is also the case for ‘Barry Lyndon’. It is important to point out that the narrative approach in the film and the novel it is based on are very different, and these have led to impacts on the audience’s perception of the film or novel. In Thackeray’s original work, it employed a first-person narrative, where Barry was an unreliable narrator. He was boasting, telling lies, and deliberately giving out inaccurate information to impress the audience that he was a great guy. This reflected that the novel was based on a more humanistic perspective, where Barry could be quite immoral or ruthless when he tried to get what he wanted. And, he was also attempted to take control on things around him. In the film, however, the narrative style became a third-person narrative, and the story was given by an omniscient narrator. Yet, as pointed out by many others, the narrator was not a 100%-impartial observer. While he tended to take a detached tone in his observations, he often passed satirical or cynical comments, and there were things that he did not know or failed to comprehend, suggested he was not hardcore omniscient. What were even more curious was that the narrator’s comments often provided dissonance to the images portrayed on the screen, quite similar to Orson Welles’ ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ in some cases. Of course, certain audience could jump to the conclusion that he was an unreliable narrator if they believed wholeheartedly in photographic reality.   

What I suppose Kubrick was trying to do was to provide a satirical challenge on the notion of representation. If the narrator was really omniscient and provided accurate and objective information regarding the story, then these information merely filled up the holes in the plot, complementing the images which did not provide on the screens. In this case, it would be like Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’, where the narrator provided the information for the audience to make sense of complex and non-linear storyline in the film. In ‘Barry Lyndon’, the narrator’s observations often posed challenges to the audience when they attempted to interpret the narratives in the film. If the audience, or more relevant, the characters in the film, could have access to these information, they would have a drastically different interpretation or understanding of their situation, and there would take a very different course of action. The tragedy of the characters was that they were merely components in the story, and they could not easily detach from their worlds and lead to a greater appreciation of the issues they were facing. If we, the members of the audience, are being sentimental when we watch ‘Barry Lyndon’, there we are no different from the characters which were confused and disillusioned by the world they were situated in.


In some case, the narrator also challenged the notion of objective representation of history, and the humanist view championed by many warm and feel-good films. While these comments were witty and facetious in some cases, they could be disturbing because that only suggested how insignificant and unimportant an individual was in the face of history. In the skirmish which Barry had to fight against the French troops in the Seven Years War, the narrator informed us that this incident was not even recorded in any history books, even if thousands of soldiers died in the most absurd way in this insignificant battle. When Lord Charles Lyndon, being a powerful and rich aristocrat, was confronting death in the most hideously painful way, the narrator told us that all he has got was a small obituary in a book, and no one else would remember him. Kubrick went as far to mute the voice of the narrator when he was reading out the obituary, suggesting how uninteresting this character was. Just like the Japanese film ‘Harakiri’ and ‘Samurai Assassins’, the so-called objective history could be distorted or might be false – because they were written by the winners and the powerful, and the other more personal stories were seen as unimportant and were left out. Yet what Kubrick was trying to reiterate here was that the indifferent universe is very fair – no matter what sort of social status or abilities you have, a mortal will eventually die and it is of no importance to the universe. With the human-centered ego and hubris, this is a pretty sad comment, yet only when we can detach from our subjectivity and the surroundings, we can understand and find out the meanings of the things that take place around us, leading to the possibilities of real changes.  

(To be continued.)



by Ed Law
29/4/2017

Film Analysis