It's been said that what "The Shining" is to the dolly/Steadicam shot, "Barry Lyndon" is to the zoom. Jeffrey Bernstein offers an in-depth exploration of all those slow, still-life zooms in "Barry Lyndon" -- 36 of them by his count, and I believe him! (Here's the .pdf file.) I have so much reading to do.
The zoom, because it is purely optical and does not involve actually moving the camera, has unique visual properties. It tends to flatten the image as it enlarges it (I was going to say "gets closer," but of course that's the point -- it doesn't). Kubrick uses it so that his characters appear to be locked within the frame, and shots are presented like paintings -- portraits or landscapes. It's part of the canvas of the film, as it were. (BTW, my revised 1981 appreciation of "Barry Lyndon," one of my favorite films, can be found here: "Barry Lyndon and the Cosmic Wager.")
Bernstein writes:
In "Barry Lyndon" Kubrick elevates a ‘poor cousin’ as it were of film technique—the zoom in progress—to a central position. In the first twenty-one minutes of the film there are six zooms and one zoom-like track-out. The majority of these zooms are elaborate; the shortest in duration lasts no less than ten seconds, while the fifth (the Nora-Captain Quin love scene) lasts a remarkable thirty-four seconds, and the sixth (the opening of the Barry-Captain Quin duel) lasts thirty seconds. Six of the first eleven scenes in the film, including three scenes in a row, begin with elaborate zoom-outs. The audience can’t help but notice the zooms. Perhaps never before in the history of commercial cinema have zooms been employed to be noticed by the audience. And not only to be noticed, but to be thought about as well. It seems to me that Kubrick’s use of the zoom movement in "Barry Lyndon" is the most elaborate and sustained use of zoom movement ever seen in a film.You'll get no argument from me! Though Robert Altman and Vilmos Zsigmond do deserve special mention for their work in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Images" and "The Long Goodbye." In the latter the camera never stops zooming and moving, as if it were bobbing on the waves at Malibu...
(Yes, those last four words are a Joni Mitchell reference.)
Well, Barry Lyndon may win for the count, but we mustn't forget that the same technique was used to brilliant effect in A Clockwork Orange. I can recall two specific instances, and they certainly must not be ignored. The first is the famous opening shot in the Korova Milk Bar. The second is the scene in the rich man's house during which he and his friends torture Alex with Beethoven music. And I've just recalled a third. In that shot, Alex imagines himself as a great leader of Biblical times with several girls, some of them topless, waiting on him. One girl feeds him grapes. (I have posted captures from the first online. I can do the same for the other two.) These shots were brilliantly composed and absolutely unforgettable. To say that Barry Lyndon was the first film to employ this kind of zoom work does a great disservice to A Clockwork Orange.
JE: I don't recall anybody saying "Barry Lyndon" was the first to use this kind of zoom -- only that such shots are the hallmark of the film, because so many of them are used to create an effect. I remember the Bacchanalia with grapes image from "Clockwork Orange," and as I recall it's used very much in the way many of the zooms in "Barry Lyndon" are used. The opening shot of "Clockwork Orange," though, isn't a zoom. It's a dolly shot -- very different effect.
Kubrick was always a master of the camera. I think its important to look at the focus of the above frames. The beginning of the zoom shows us the two figures. The background is out of focus. As the shot zooms out the focus changes so that the whole landscape, including the two figures, is in focus.
This is not easy to do, so we know he did this on purpose (well, it is Kubrick... nothing he does is by accident).
Focus adds another level to the zooms in Barry Lyndon. I think Kubrick was trying to force us away from the characters. The beginning of the shot is only them, and we are slowly taken back and introduced to new framing that shows us other things and makes us ignore what we were originally focused on.
It's an interesting technique, and I can see why Kubrick is sometimes criticized for being "too cold". Still, you can't argue with his genius.
When I accused someone of saying Barry Lyndon was the first film to use zooms the way it did, I was refering to what Bernstein said. "Perhaps never before in the history of commercial cinema have zooms been employed to be noticed by the audience. And not only to be noticed, but to be thought about as well." Yes, in the history of commercial cinema, zooms had been employed to be noticed by the audience and to be thought about as well before. By the same director who made Barry Lyndon, no less. Again, I must return to the shot in the rich man's house, and I think I should justify what I say with pictures. In fact, I may show several zooms, for it seems that the second shot of the film is also a zoom-out. I had forgotten whether it was. Since the first one was a dolly (well, hello,) I'll count it out.
And capturing frames, it looks like this title could stand to be redone. It's full of compression artifacts, o my brothers. But here is the shot of the filthy, dirty old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp, blerp in between, as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts.
The bottles.
The man all by himself, content in his drunkenness, in his own little world.
This man is, in point of fact, out in the open, surrounded by nothing. Isolated, and vulnerable.
And here come the shadows of some very unfriendly, violent people.
And from the library in his prison, he imagines himself "getting on to the bed with their wives' handmaidens. That kept me going."
Alex consumes grapes. His eyes are crossed as he looks at them. Lazy as can be, and being absolutely indulged.
And as we pull out, we see the three women who surround him.
What a lucky veck he is.
And it zooms out to here.
By the way, I would have done all of these with thumbnails. My host generates them for me. But your comments don't allow them, so there it is. Anyhow, with little Alex trapped inside a room just above, going nearly bonkers, the rich man he wronged earlier in the movie tortures him with the music of Ludwig van.
What a blissfully evil face he has. It actually reminds me of the legendary Beethoven in the ways I've seen him portrayed. Rather mad. And he's the one playing the music. It seems almost as if he's conducting it.
There he is with his reel-to-reel tape player and fancy stereo.
There are his bodyguard and one of his reporter friends, seemingly lost in thought.
His other reporter friend idly roles pool balls across the pool table and into the pocket on the opposite side.
And we pull back to here. It's quite an expensive stereo. You could really hear angel trumpets and devil trombones on that.
If any of these shots were done with dollies (well, hello,) then I've made a mistake. I think they were all zooms. Whether or not they were, the effect is the same (though different to the eye); we start with an image of something that fills the whole screen, and then we transform it into one small set of details of something enormous. The opening shot does the same thing. (And I did email it to you as an opening shot (hosted on my own webspace,) though you haven't emailed me back.)
And now to be fair, I will confess that I only saw Barry Lyndon once, and in its un-remastered form. The one zoom-out shot I remember from the film is the one in which a joyless Lady Lyndon sits in a chair, gazing into space, surrounded by chores, deprived of idle joys by her husband.
JE: I think "Barry Lyndon" is greatest among Kubrick's masterpieces (very close to "2001" and "Dr. Strangelove," but I think it's in some ways even more radical and subversive -- The Ultimate Trip, as latter-day ads said of "2001"). I've never counted, but Bernstein says there are 36 zooms in tghe film -- and that's a lot. He categorizes them by zoom-ins and zoom-outs and discusses each. Obviously, he's not saying "Barry Lyndon" was the first movie to use a lot of zooms, but he does suggest it may be the first movie in which zooms are used methodically throughout, in a way that calls attention to themselves as shots, as part of Kubrick's aesthetic plan (likewise, as I said, the labyrinthine Steadicam shots in "The Shining."
I look forward to examining your stuff about "A Clockwork Orange," which I've long thought is probably the least successfully realized of Kubrick's post-"Killer's Kiss" films -- though maybe the second half of "Full Metal Jacket" deserves that distinction. I still think they're all good, gutsy, worthwile movies. "Clockwork Orange" was vilified in its time, and Kubrick withdrew it from release in the UK (for 27 years), where it was not even released on video until after his death. How you interpret the last shot (a stationary shot, but I don't recall if there was any zoom action) really determines what you make of the film. I haven't seen it in many years (although I'm sure I've seen it at least four times), but you've got me thinking I may be ready to revisit it.