Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick - 1975
Using very precise tracks in and out; even when the pace of them isn't always the same, the compositions are so precisely arranged, so exactly centered, that the impression is of great precision. These compositions are long, perhaps because they have a need to include the whole of something; a tree or a house, and certainly the requisite amount of a person/ One perhaps never sees half a face in Kubrick's pictures (not that I know him too well...)
The famed lens affects, that is, how it is shot in candlelight, and whatever he did to make the landscapes so full of that kind of burning feeling in not just sunsets but also the earth and sea, is without a doubt extremely distinctive. I'm not entirely sure what purpose it serves beyond that.
Kubrick's direction, for all its precision, actually seemed to me to be pretty classical; lots of SRS, not particulalry long takes, or short ones, lots of long shots perhaps.
So, the voicover, and this is perhpas more Thakeray than anything; takes an ironic view, surely. This is a deconstruction of the romantic, 18th Century libertine. Kubrick's faithfulness in his exact reconstructions succeeds in showing nerves at the duel, trembling, throbbing life, in the past age. We must start by saying Kubrick initially appears deeply contemptuous to his characters, though from there we can perhaps say he feels so more to their exploits, the endless betrayals and so on, rather than them. He doesn't often focus on the main 'action'; preferring tableaus of discussion to push on the piece. I can't wholeheartedly support this picture.