4. Barry Lyndon (1975) - Candle Light Via NASA - The Beautiful
The Film: People often cite that Barry Lyndon is nothing but an empty vessel of prettiness. One of the most beautiful films ever shot with a real lack of anything else going on at all. I for one totally disagree, instead finding its nigh on three hour running time some of Kubrick's most amusing, character driven and genuinely entertaining work. The film is split into acts as we follow fictional wanderer Lyndon as he bumbles into various exploits and odd situations in the 18th Century. Barry Lyndon can be levelled as a great double header for A Clockwork Orange both Lyndon and DeLarge are massively off-putting chaps, but somehow you still root for them. Most see Lyndon as Kubrick's most underrated film, and it is a real gem for any fan of his work. Usually left until last on the 'must see' scale, most - including myself - find this to be some of his most satisfying and interesting work. Martin Scorsese has often been quoted as saying Lyndon is by far his favourite Kubrick film, largely inspiring him whilst making 'The Age of Innocence' (in which an exact replica love scene on a moonlit balcony can be seen, replacing Ryan O'Neal with Daniel Day-Lewis). As with the picture above, Kubrick set out to make ever shot soft and its composition like a live painting. He succeeded in this by using a softer focus than any other film he has made and using only natural light for most scenes, something that goes against the grain of his usual work (see the bedroom shots from Eyes wide Shut for the most extreme example). I would go on record to say that the painting like effect created makes Barry Lyndon Kubrick's most diverse work. Strangely, it still has all the quirks of a Kubrick movie, yet something about it sets it apart from anything else he ever did. A true masterpiece indeed.
The Scene: Kubrick was so determined not to use anything but natural light that he turned to NASA technology to achieve the correct effect on set. Kubrick spent hours on end messing around with different lenses, film stock in the hope that he would avoid artificially lit sets of most period dramas he had seen. Ever the pioneer and genre breaker, Kubrick - a fantastic photographer in his early life - set out to light most dark or night time scenes entirely by candle light. Something by his own admission would be a huge challenge to pull off. You need only to look at the clip below to find out whether he was successful with these painting like shots. Kubrick settled on the use of three super-fast 50mm lenses developed by Carl Zeiss that were used by NASA in the Apollo moon landing. Thanks to the huge aperture and fixed focal length, the film ended up looking as Kubrick intended. Telegraph critic Tim Robey stated that the film has a 'stately, painterly, often determinedly static quality' which indeed was the effect Kubrick was going for and obviously achieved. Once again Stanley had pushed forward the realms of special effects and in a strangely ironic and fittingly Kubrick way: He had used space aged technology for a film set in the 18th Century, considering no such technology was used for 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is hugely befitting of Kubrick's way of looking at technology and turning it completely inverting it.