Barry Lyndon
4 October, 2008
This is Kubrick at his most incredibly overindulgent. Lighting indoor scenes with candles, moving at a pace so deliberate and so very achingly tense as to make each scene almost an exercise in eroticized vision, borrowing lenses from NASA- the entire production is over the top. And the end product is so delicate, so easily disrupted, that a single scene in which the lighting is not exactly perfect is so distracting it takes several scenes to recover from it.
I love this film, absolutely and completely, because it is so overwhelmingly beautiful. That kind of beauty is precisely what is necessary when the brain reaches a certain point of tension.
you’re so poetic in your reviews it adds so much more. i often forget to discuss with myself how the film affected me visually without anything else. i thought about that a lot after seeing the act of seeing with one’s own eyes and its added a new dimension to my film viewing. it may seem like something so obvious but i guess i haven’t been paying attention enough. i’ve never written any sort of review and this is my assignment for this grotesque class. its difficult when we aren’t supposed to analyze. i chose el topo. it was terrifying and wonderful.
i also loved santa sangre and i can’t wait to see holy mountain.