Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 353: Sat Dec 19

Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975): ICA Cinema, 3pm


Richard Ayoade, Jan Harlan and Maria Pramaggiore are at the ICA Cinema for a panel discussion after the screening, presented by The Badlands Collective.

Here is the Badlands Collective introduction to today's special screening:
Winner of four Oscars for 1975, including Best Cinematography, Stanley Kubrick’s painterly, darkly comic masterpiece is celebrated in this rare screening from a 35mm archive print.

Based on William Thackeray’s novel about the rise and fall of an 18th Century Irish rogue (Ryan O’Neal), Barry Lyndon features breathtaking, technically revolutionary candlelit visuals that recall the paintings of Hogarth and Gainsborough, vividly realising an epic world of beauty, deceit and poetic justice. This event is presented by the curation group The Badlands Collective, and we also welcome Kubrick collaborator Jan Harlan, cinema scholar Maria Pramaggiore and filmmaker Richard Ayoade for a discussion after the film.

Chicago Reader review:
All of Stanley Kubrick's features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours) adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott, with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O'Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey. With Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, and Leonard Rossiter; narrated by Michael Hordern.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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