This article is produced by the iris translation team, if you want to join the translation team, please send a letter to [email protected].
Author | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Translate | Fly up the circle
Proofreading | Suzuko
So Barry Linden failed. So what? Of the so-called "successful works" you've watched recently, how many of them are half as interesting or complete as they can be, so that you can spend even ten minutes after watching them? I myself roughly think that a smug little project like Clockwork Orange is worth about five minutes.
Barry Linden
I think of Jonas Mekas' comment on Zazi on the Subway a few years ago: "The failure of this film doesn't mean anything. Wouldn't God make a failure?"
In any case, when British-American commentators say it failed, it seems as if they were trying to express that they were confused and bored because of their confusion. In a way, I was also a little confused and confused.
So what? Who says we have to understand a movie thoroughly before we are entitled to like it? "This kind of thing, my dear Brutus, does not exist in nature. It exists in our hearts, and we are its men."
Critics in London saw Barry Lyndon at least a few weeks earlier than their American counterparts, so they wrote a slightly different comparison: the former would mostly blame Kubrick's beautiful images and praise Street Fighter or The Affected Woman; the latter was fair in pointing out that Barry Linden and Lady Lucky were failures, which led careless people to think that the two films were half a pound.
The Affected Woman
John Simon, with his love of artistic and literary value, criticized Lady Lucky more to help people avoid the false impression that he simply wanted us all to understand the point of failure: it was Lesha Minnelli's apparently poor performance, not Kubrick's incomprehensible IQ.
In other respects, the film's Anglo-American critics have one thing in common, namely that one person can drive many, like a juggling troupe that crosses the Atlantic.
John Coleman and Pauline Kael, for example, wrote, "The film looks like Kubrick falling under the spell of the most minimalist abstract pretentious, like Straub, and perhaps Dreyer, who made the wax-like film Gechu" and "Is he studying the recent works of Dreyer, Bresson, and Rossellini..."?
Of course, we don't have to look back at Getchu — which happens to be the best movie I've seen last year — to realize the desperate uselessness of these conclusions.
Despite knowing Kubrick's backward zoom photography and knowing that he can transition from close-up to panorama like a textbook, intermittently presenting a kind of regression with Rossellini, it is still difficult to understand two statements that have been repeated many times recently: slow = minimalist abstraction; slow/minimalist abstraction = Straub; and the recent Dreyer + Bresson + Rossellini = Barry Linden?!
Regardless of the relevant merits, a person who watches "Gechu" and wonders if Dreier has taken a pretentious night school, like Visconti or Lumet — or if Kazan is doing his gas plant-like movie "Tramway" will still be questioned in the same way. In any case, these directors use actors who can speak; perhaps this has a potential impact on the work.
Or take a look at the crazier teams, the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, where distinctive voices are common.
In the past, literary film critics were often looked down upon because they were more focused on lines than in pictures; today they often act like there are no lines at all in movies—only static, clear pictures that make them moo twice.
Thus, Michael Wood, explains the trick played by the narrator in Kesey's Flying Over the Madhouse, "It's a written game of hide-and-seek that requires text and readers, but doesn't work on screen images and theater audiences," and then goes on to mention that "Kubrick replaced the irony situation in which Thackeray lets the reader know Barry from another angle, rather than let him speak for himself—in a serious way."
John Carey of Thames Literature Supplement succinctly repeats this view, coming to the logically absurd conclusion: "Barry's exploits are superficially interpreted and displayed only on the screen in an objective form. Maybe Kubrick can't be blamed for this kind of thing, it's just the result of his mediocre ability. Cinema cannot arouse the audience's doubts about itself, as verbally explained. Without lying, let alone half-concealed, the film is completely used as an imaginative machine."
The above assumptions — movie = image = real = lack of satire = boring — mean that these critics need to wear earplugs to the cinema. But even if they do, do we have to assume from Wood's hint that Kubrick offered "to know Barry from another angle, rather than let him speak for himself", who lived his life with a built-in Zeiss lens? The primary problem with Kubrick's literary satire, it seems, is that it transcends the literary skills of film critics.
"Barry Linden" working photo
(1) From his interviews, Kubrick is an exploratory director who embarks on a project, which also reflects his desire to have control over an object before it is presented on camera.
The frenzy of time precision in Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's film Winstanley (which I briefly mentioned in the last London Travels [see Film Review]) seems to have a similar impetus to Barry Linden.
Winstanley
The strange similarities that appear in this gorgeous big-budget film and the small-budget black-and-white film cannot all be attributed to Mollo's brother John, who was Kubrick's historical adviser.
I think the hidden value that both films share and their respective elements of pathos can be traced back to this thrust — it appears in both Brownlow and Molo's films Nazi Atrocities and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but more appropriately in the plot of science fiction.
It is important that if someone sets out to study the fascinating contributions of these people—whether it is the future, another possibility of the past, the seventeenth or eighteenth century," he will not stop asking questions, which has also become part of the style of cinema; he will not end up with a "stand", but with a curious look of love and fear, a gaze full of curiosity.
In Barry Linden, this curiosity is complicated by an overlay, or "image" underpinned by material: it is not simply presenting eighteenth-century scenes for twenty-century people to see, but after nineteenth-century fiction records, it is again filmed for twentieth-century audiences. (This re-creation seems to bear some resemblance to Straub, although Kubrick seems to have been able to accomplish it only to his own terms.) ）
If we accept the same mysterious premises of the past as the future, then Winstanley and Barry Linden can be seen as equally speculative fiction that explores the unknown, that they cannot "explain" everything or be comfortable in a deterrent interrogation.
Consider what we don't see in either film: almost all the decisive scenes take place in public and we can only see it from a distance; in Winstanley we never get a real glimpse of the interior of the cabin, and in Barry Linden we can't intuitively understand the heart of the hero (the first-person narrative of Thackeray's novels can be expressed).
The expansive spaces of grey hills in Surrey, or the sumptuous eighteenth-century parlors, make it clear to the onlookers the hidden flaws that neither we nor they – the audience, the characters, the director – can fill them, even though the fundamental pain embodied in these three scenes is something that everyone has to face. In Barry Linden, the most essential part of the first and last shots is a sense of emptiness.
(2) Thackeray admits that his novel was an unsuccessful sketch, and that Kubrick's adaptation added a lot of changes in structure and purpose, which is not something to be wary of. What seems even more interesting to me is how some of these adaptations, including the increase from one person to three, finally presented something close to the Thackeray style.
I remember reading Vanity Fair in college and being annoyed by the narrator's first-person verbal interference, which was always telling me what to think; it felt like the interference of another reader who snatched the novel out of my hand and read it aloud, shook his head after a paragraph, muttered his own perceptions, and made an expectation (actually destroying them) of my every reaction.
Michael Hordern's narration, which introduces the subtitles of the various parts of the film—briefly, "How Redmond Barry Acquired Barry's Possessions and Titles" and "Telling the Causes of the Disaster and Misfortune That Brought Down Barry Linton"—and the concise closing remarks do something similar, but very different.
Many critics consider these things to be "objective" or "expressionless," while the content in Thackeray's novels is "subjective" and "ironic, and has a basis here; Hordern's remarks guide us in how to interpret the scenes in the film, and even how to examine them morally, just as the paragraph titles typed out guide us to what we look for in the film or (in the last paragraph) how to review what we have already seen.
The constant transmission of important information before and after certain scenes, with a curious intrusive nature, is a narrative that continues to change the nature of what we see or hear. Comparing the original idea to Kubrick's unique irony and twist, it forms a knife edge that cuts into the visual slope and provides strong support for fresh ideas.
However, because sound and picture have different attractions for us at the same time, the impact of this approach on the panorama, mainly in the nineteenth century, is neither to interrupt the story nor to give it a double meaning, for Thackeray it is more like transcending the boundaries of a single sound.
Expanding the possibilities of this story to complex dialogues between sight and sound, aspects (composition, camera and actor movement, or zoom photography, color, lighting, subject matter; narrative, dialogue, music, and other sounds) are independent but integrated, greatly increasing the audience's choice to synthesize them (so that a shallow viewer, such as Kael, can think of this narrative as "like one of the museum tour guide machines").
Needless to say, all films do this: with fierce eyes, good musical taste, become a skilled storyteller, and in this regard, Kubrick does a better job than most people. And unlike Thackeray, he doesn't snore in your ear.
(3) There is still much to be said about this narrative. Like I said, a mixture of Kubrick and Thackeray sounds, if Kubrick read it himself, rather than commissioned it to Hordern, it would most likely be recognized as a Wells work.
This is as important to Barry Linden as Wells's narrative is to Amberson: try to imagine that the film has no narration, the structure collapses, and most of the meaning and feeling disappear.
If the most beautiful moment of American sound movies is when a gust of wind blows in through the front door of the Amberson Building, and several pieces of clothing flutter in the wind, leading people to a grand ball, the beauty of this magic carpet tour is only due in part to the visual effects.
Wells's narrative is also related to this—defining, expanding, limiting its scope, by bringing us back from the present to a hidden world of the past, which is beyond our control, and our connection to Tarkington becomes less than that of Proust and Faulkner: "He sent invitations and threw a ball in his name, and this sharecropper's extravaganza was the last grand ball that everyone would talk about..."
There is no moment in Barry Linden that can be compared, but the narrator plays a comparable role, giving us post-mortem analysis and predictions in some scenes, encouraging us to wait—and when it actually comes, regretting—the ending of the hero.
The role of the narrator, both annotative and moral, is to clarify the environment for sound and the picture it accompanies. "You'll see right away..." and "Therefore, it will happen..." appear at the beginning of the interstitial, telling people in advance what to see next.
Before a skirmish in the Seven Years' War, we were told that "although all the history books do not record the battle, it is unforgettable for those involved in it," thus constructing a separate future for an event that has not yet happened.
In one scene, the pastoral life of the male protagonist and the German peasant woman is depicted as mutual seduction, their love is unashamed, the atmosphere is purely satisfied, and their farewell is accompanied by a satirical observation that the woman's heart is "like a nearby city; before Barry, it was swept and occupied many times."
When we are warned in a peaceful croquet game that Barry will end his life as "poor, lonely and childless", it is worth noting that the narrator uses his name (Barry Linden) at the moment, while in the first part, it is quite officially his last name (Redmond Barry).
If we recall the construction of moral positions based on first and last name in famous films (in any Gene Autry or Roy Rogers Western film, the decent person calls others by first name and the villain calls the protagonist by his last name), we can discern the subtle shift in the narrator's point of view from (Redmond) Barry to Barry (Lyndon). Then, in the closing scene, he's just Barry, a helpless, lonely name.
Why did Barry Linden "fail"? For me, the critics who attribute the reason to the lack of emotion are at best half right, because the film is full of emotions from beginning to end—not only the fears that have been raised, but also the real goals of loss and crushing.
More broadly, the film's "existential" structure is similar to that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which in the first part, the characters are largely victimized to a more powerful force than they are, completely passive and unaware.
2001: A Space Odyssey
In the second part, they try to fight this situation but fail: Imagine the poignant scene of Hal being dismembered. Thus, Barry's final fate and his initial circumstances are caused by the same injustice, and the pain arises only when he struggles to resist: after being caught by Mrs. Linton having an affair with the maid, he unusually goes to Mrs. Linton's room and says, "I was wrong."
More importantly, he did not make the decision to kill his stepson, Lord Brlington. It is in these and related scenes that Ryan O'Neill's efforts to perform are truly in line with Barry's own struggles. Looking more deeply, how many emotional climaxes in Barry Linden have to do with the actual experience are noteworthy.
For Nora Brady, Barry's charm; several dueling scenes; Captain Grogan's death, the shock that culminated in Barry's mouth-to-mouth kiss on him; Barry's few strokes of Lord Brington; the apparent fear of those who came after him, vomiting in the climactic duel and everything; Barry's injuries and the resulting amputation—these were all places that loaded with emotion and were directly conveyed.
The "failure" of this film is that the scene of barry's son Brian's death does not carry enough emotion. The same goes for Mrs. Lyndon's problems in all of her relationship plans.
The first misstep can be attributed to Kubrick's visual strategy. He keeps repeating the camera pulling back in some of the more spectacular scenes, paying homage to something radiating in Griffith's film—the location of an independent story, or the details of a historic moment.
He usually presents something comparable to Eisenstein when he transitions to a more up-close scene: a comic portrait of Captain Quinn, sir Charles Linton who might recall Hogarth, while others, like the broader British landscapes, but from a cinematic perspective they are reminiscent of STRIKE.
Instead, the scene of Brian's death, shot in close-up, appears to have been conceived by Griffiths and the entire traditional Victorian tear-jerking drama behind him — but Kubrick failed to make it convincing because he seemed to be dealing with the emotions in the scene in a rigid way, as if he were relying on data analysis to paint precisely.
The image of Mrs. Lyndon, which appears very unreal in the film, cannot be simply attributed to Marisa Berenson's performance or her passive role in the plot; it also shows that in the director's imagination, the scene is empty.
There is also a central emotional factor in the film that has not been mentioned before, which is the principle of attraction and exclusion. Theoretically, this should also be the basis of Clockwork Orange, and also played an important structural role in Anthony Burgess's original novel.
In the novel, Alex goes from being a cold man to being sympathetic and back to being cold, testing and challenging some readers' firm belief in freedom. But in reality, Alex in the movie is a charismatic character, and everyone else is annoying.
Personally, since I tend to think that all the characters are equally annoying and not as funny as caricatures, I don't quite empathize with these possible logics.
Many of the articles critical of Barry Lyndon have an obvious subtext that it's not quite like Clockwork Orange — if Kubrick had been more faithful to the original and let Barry tell his own story, it might have been.
Clockwork Orange
His decision not to do so made the narrator unusual: when the narrator mentioned that Barry had been harshly treated in the Prussian army, we saw something completely different, and the "layers" of separation became conspicuous, and the impact was ambiguous: we did not know which side to believe.
(Parson Runt, on the other hand, asks young Brlington after the wedding what he thinks of his stepfather, the narrator's explanation becomes awkward: because the two characters often appear together, no one would believe that the contradiction would take so long.) ）
Another unusual scene is also worth pointing out, and it is also a special mark of Kubrick's unique approach: the fight between Brian and Brlington during class.
Almost all other directors will express which side of the "mistake" of the fight is, in order to arouse the sympathy of the audience, did Brlington rob him of his pen as Brian said? Kubrick did not say, and he really had no interest in it; the audience had to choose their own emotional bias.
If Brington is the most interesting character in the film other than Barry, it's because of the role he plays in the second part of the film, which Barry plays in the first part — refusing to accept a marriage (Nora Brady/Captain Quin, Barry/Mrs. Lynton) and ending up in a duel over it.
Deprived of property, beaten and other humiliations endured, it is also worth pointing out that both characters are attached to their mothers, despite the huge gap in communication between them and their respective mothers.
This pair of parallel character constructs, combined with the contrast between Ryan O'Neal's smoothness and Leon Vitali's tension, fosters the atmosphere of extreme tension in the duel between Barry and Brlington – a cascade of events in which suspense is reminiscent of the final death sentence in The Glorious Road, but beyond it – even (or can we say it is because of it?). Kubrick failed to fully draw the audience's sympathy to either side of the conflict.
The Road to Glory
Admittedly, his camera is closer to Brlington,but this can also be explained, along with considerations of narrative integrity: We've seen Barry's movements in a previous duel—even if the crux of that duel suddenly shifted to the anxious Leonard Rossiter at the last minute—but his melancholy stepson has been an understood character in this confrontation.
Simply put, like Hitchcock, unbearable tension prevents people from asking moral questions about this principle of attraction and exclusion; in fact, we have to choose between two possible images of Barry Linton—the looted innocent or the extravagant squander.
Whichever we choose, we miss out on it—the two images are opposites, and whichever is chosen, it ends up being desolate—in one case, a family that falls apart or a broken identity; in another case, amputation, exile, and a terrible life. All that remains is history :
A payment slip signed on December 4, 1789, also the year of the French Revolution. And the huge eighteenth-century hall is no longer filled, and this cold space has been abandoned by the occupants—its screen has been stretched to an unbearable length before the announcement of Handel's funeral appears.
1. Cooperation contact email: [email protected]
2. Iris readers WeChat group: add WeChat personal service account hongmomgs as friends, invite to join the group
Highlights from previous issues