Barry Lyndon

“It needs to be seen on the big screen,” the advert for the Barry Lyndon re-release recites. This is the peculiar quality of the classics, the ones we grew up watching on small television screens, in awe in front of their universal value despite the years passing, despite the world changing.

This quality is what still amazes audiences in front of the big screen, the chance to look at a film differently as if watching it for the first time. It is the love for the cinema in its purest form, the need to return to the primordial desire for excitement and surprise as the curtain opens.

Stanley Kubrick’s genius was to take that love and turn each of his films into works of art with a strong identity reflecting on human nature in all its forms. The desire for success and wealth (Barry Lyndon), the human mind and its dark corners (The Shining), lust and immorality (Eyes Wide Shut), the fascination with the universe and the questions about our own existence (2001: A Space Odyssey), the trauma of war and personal crisis (Full Metal Jacket), violence and living by one’s own rules (A Clockwork Orange), just to name a few.

Barry Lyndon, adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), tells the story of the rise and fall of a young Irish man, Redmond Barry. Divided in two acts the film is a masterpiece of costume and production design, an excellence achieved through Kubrick’s infamous perfectionism.

Kubrick’s period drama is also notorious for its secretive production starring Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson and becoming an extraordinary combination of mise-en-scene and technique.

Always seeking a challenge to film form, in Barry Lyndon Kubrick experimented with light. Electric light was replaced with candlelight, which gives the film’s cinematography a painterly quality superior to any other. Even the characters seem to come to life in their painterly stillness.

Barry Lyndon is also one of those classics that was not particularly successful at the box office, but that was awarded four Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Musical Score proving its exceptional quality.

Thinking about what came before and after in the period drama genre shows that no picture ever quite showed entirely the feeling of a time, something palpable in the film’s scenes, a vibe of antique and yet modern. With Barry Lyndon Kubrick proved to what extent Film could and should risk as an art form.

Barry Lyndon must be seen on the big screen because we need to return to that emotion, that sparkle of novelty that makes us wonder and that inspires us all to look beyond the images, to desire for more.

Catch it in the UK’s selected cinemas from July 29th.