The geography of Ireland has influenced art and literature since Celts first visited our shores. It’s therefore unsurprising that so many movies are made here. Star Wars, Braveheart (even though they were only partially filmed in Ireland), Educating Rita, Michael Collins and The Wind the Shakes the Barley to name just a few. And then there are the classics such as The Quiet Man, Ryan’s Daughter, Moby Dick and The Blue Max. But there’s one film that’s hardly ever mentioned, and it’s directed by arguably the greatest director of all time. That director is Stanley Kubrick and this is a brief description of his Irish film.
Courtesy of SK Film Archives LLC, Warner Bros and University of Arts, London
The Exquisite Spectacle of Barry Lyndon
William Makepeace Thackeray is best remembered for writing fiction, though his travels around Ireland, related in An Irish Sketchbook, remain an important anecdote in the narrative of Irish history. Vanity Fair was his seminal work, and a book Stanley Kubrick was keen to adapt into film before realising the impossibility of reproducing such an enormous canvass in a limited timeframe. That the great director turned to Thackeray’s lesser work, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, is more by accident than desire. The book has a strong narrative based on the real life exploits of Andrew Robinson Stoney, an Anglo-Irish, rakish adventurer who went on to marry into Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s Bowes-Lyon family. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, written in the first person, is a jaunty cad with a comic turn who at the very least fits suspiciously well into a contemporary stereotype. That the upstart Lyndon, clearly unqualified and certainly undeserving of English aristocracy, is born of and tragically returns to a metaphorical Wellington stable seems inevitable.
Barry Lyndon is an emotionally uninvolved character who becomes more isolated and undefined as the narrative progresses. This narrowing exposition of the central figure was something audiences and critics were unprepared for in 1975. At that time the movement of Lyndon from protagonist to antagonist and back to protagonist was too opaque and failed to stimulate empathy in filmgoers. Ultimately, the film achieved only partial commercial success despite the presence of Ryan O’Neal (Warner Bros insisted on a top ten Hollywood star). Yet the film went on to win four out of seven Academy Award nominations, one of which, unsurprisingly, went to John Alcott for Best Cinematography. Thus, unfulfilled expectation in the narrative was brushed aside in favour of aesthetics. And what aesthetics. It has the sumptuous quality of a Gainsborough, which precisely what Kubrick intended, and his fanatical creativity with lighting and legendary attention to detail make this film one of the finest ever made.
Like Gainsborough we are constantly pulled back to the artistic brushstroke of the director with gorgeous scenes and stunning locations. The entire movie is like crushed velvet, a sumptuous tapestry of unchecked vision and raw talent. Kubrick was in his element, every bit the master of art and the aesthetic. Working in natural light, he wanted to extend that indoors and was pedantic enough to get his hands on a specially adapted Zeiss lens designed for NASA’s satellite photography and Apollo moon landings. This enabled him to shoot the famous candlelight scenes quite literally by candlelight alone. The actors could barely move so as not to go out of focus. This creativity resulted in take after take, allegedly up to a hundred retakes in one scene, and most of the time there were no stand-ins. If this was an ordeal for the actors, it was a nightmare for the producers and only compounded by shooting on location.
Perhaps it’s those Irish locations we remember best, in particular Powerscourt House which was burned down a few months after the film was made. Hence we have the only celluloid record of the interior, a fact alone that makes this film important. Other locations included Dublin Castle, Waterford Castle, Moorstown Castle and the ubiquitous Cahir Castle. Most of the film was shot in Ireland until Kubrick was threatened with assassination or kidnap, allegedly by the IRA on account of filming British soldiers on Irish soil. Whatever the veracity of the threat, the entire production moved to England and the majestic locations of Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard (remember Brideshead Revisited) and the glorious gardens of Stourhead in Wiltshire.
Thackeray was a great writer with a keen eye, but it was the genius of Stanley Kubrick that created a gloriously upholstered masterpiece of cinema, almost all of which was shot in Ireland.
David O’Neill