#45 Barry Lyndon (Kubrick) at Alamo Drafthouse DTLA

If you go into this three-hour, 18th-century period drama expecting a gripping plot, you’ll be disappointed. This isn’t a film you watch to see what happens next; you watch it to look at it --- the compositions, the light, and, if I’m being honest, Ryan O’Neal, who does less acting than posing, but that turns out to be enough.

I didn’t fully appreciate Barry Lyndon (1975) until I learned about the lengths Stanley Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott went to make it appear entirely naturally lit. Kubrick looked to artists like Hogarth, Gainsborough, and the Dutch Masters to inform the masterful lighting design. 

The candlelit scenes, like the card playing and gambling sequences, are the most famous example. Kubrick used Zeiss Plantar f/0.7 --- ultra-fast --- lenses originally developed for NASA to photograph the moon, and even then production had to create thousands of special candles with multiple wicks just to generate enough light. The effect is extraordinary. It’s perfectionist auteurism in its purest form.

Barry Lyndon isn’t about what happens. It’s about how impossibly beautiful it looks while it does.

Barry Lyndon on Letterboxd