Event

Barry Lyndon in 35mm

Part of "Summer of Celluloid"

Stanley Kubrick / 1975, UK-USA
185min / 35mm

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan ONeal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiecea sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.