Stanley Kubrick, Barry Lyndon (1975), 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 lesser-known novel by William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair). In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) 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 masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart. We will be presenting a rarely screened, mint 35mm print that the Yale Film Archive received in 2019 as part of an arrangement with Warner Bros. and YCM Laboratories to strike new 35mm prints of three Stanley Kubrick films. (The others: A Clockwork Orange and The Shining). Co-presented with the Yale Film Archive.