Duvidha (1973)

This review mainly focuses on Kaul's use of close-ups. Contains some spoilers.

An Intimate Apparition

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The close-up is one of cinema’s most distinctive tools. Ever since it was popularized by Griffith, filmmakers have used the close-up to help distinguish the medium, particularly from theater. Most often a close-up helps facilitate a parasocial interaction between the characters on screen and the viewer by recording the actors’ performances in greater detail. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, a late silent film starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti, is a common example of the technique's power: shot almost entirely close-up, we are made to have sympathy as we watch Falconetti experience the arduous, cruel treatment of the French court. Every subtle glance, every tremble develops a commiseration and a relationship between the audience and Joan. It wasn’t until many years later when filmmakers began to expand their conception of the close-up. One of the most accomplished films created during that period was 1973’s Duvidha, an Indian film directed by Mani Kaul, based on a Rajasthani short story.

Much of Duvidha plays out in close-up, but instead of creating any sort of relationship between the characters and the viewer, it disorients. The film opens with two newlyweds, Lachhi (the wife) and Krishnalal (the husband), traveling to their home. The sequence primarily serves to deliver important bits of exposition and indicate some characteristics of the couple—Krishnalal, being work and status-obsessed, is planning on immediately leaving town for a number of years for his work; Lachhi is not happy about this, but she does not put up a fight. Typically a film would express these things via shot/reverse shot, flashback, or other methods that bring the viewer closer to the material. Instead, Kaul uses close-ups to do the opposite. Almost all of the dialogue is delivered in voiceover while what is shown on screen are details: hands plucking fruit off a tree, wheels going across a dirt road, eyes closing under a ghoonghat, taking off a shoe, flipping pages, fabrics, fruit, jewelry… Kaul works in textures and impressionistic images, and even though the physical distance between camera and performer is quite small, he maintains an emotional distance throughout. 

Very little is provided in the way of emotional resonance. Apart from the words spoken in the voiceover, we do not get a glimpse at how Krishnalal or Lachhi feel about their relationship or the situation they are in. Beyond just the opening sequence, there are moments of psychological lucidity with Krishnalal (such as later in the film when he discovers that the ghost has taken his place with his wife), but Kaul never gives us anything similar for Lachhi. Richard Suchenski in Mythic and Modern: The Aesthetics of Space in the Films of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani makes a connection between Kaul and Bresson for this reason, “In Bresson’s films, there is a flattening out of the surface effects of cinema—dramatic performance, ostentatiously beautiful imagery, and so forth—in an attempt to emphasize the concreteness of image/sound relations as well as the spatial presence of bodies and objects” (33). He notes that Kaul does not go as far as Bresson in rejecting all of these cinematic norms—his films are certainly “beautiful,” ostentatiously or otherwise—but he does share with Bresson an attempt at removing imposed sentiment. As a viewer, one that is used to the conventional objectives and contrivances of cinema, this can be disconcerting because these filmmakers use techniques that bear the veneer of familiarity and yet the results of those techniques are unfamiliar. The close-up, a device that has been used time and time again to visually display a character’s internal monologue, is employed instead for the sake of abstraction.

Kaul used the close-up in this way to play with perspective. He “was acutely conscious of the way in which the camera’s basic recording mechanism fundamentally orients the spectator around a particular idea of the image,” writes Suchenski, “but he tried to push it in a different direction” (34). People, unavoidably, make assumptions—often shaped by life experiences, often by their culture, often by what art they have seen previously—so Kaul attempts to decouple those expectations from the images themselves. For instance, during a pivotal scene in the film, Lachhi gives birth to the child that she and the ghost conceived. Conceptually, it is quite provocative. A strained childbirth in nearly any other film would be exploited for emotionality, but Kaul never plays into it. Initially Lachhi gives birth in medium shots. It might seem for a moment like Kaul is going a different direction when the uptempo Rajasthan folk music kicks in, but then Kaul cuts to a close-up still of Lachhi with her hand on her face. The music switches to the drone that accompanies most of the film, and it becomes apparent once again that Kaul is dissociating the technique from our expected result. 

With Duvidha, it could seem like Kaul is embarking on a fool’s errand. One’s deep-rooted assumptions are not easily surmounted, but the endeavor is justified in its motivation. Suchenski connects Kaul’s work with Stan Brakhage’s 1963 essay “Metaphors on Vision,” quoting, “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception” (14). Kaul attempts to elevate a viewer’s cinematic palate by diversifying the effects of a tried-and-true film technique. That is not to say that he wants to dismantle how the close-up is traditionally used, but instead, by expanding its capabilities of abstraction, he takes away the prejudice of the “eye.”

The context of the film’s narrative elucidates Kaul’s methods even further. When the ghost tells Lachhi of the fact that he is not her real husband, she chooses to accept him anyways. This begs the question, who is the “real” Krishnalal? Of course, the original Krishnalal believes it to be himself, linking reality with the physicality of his conception, asking his mother, “Will you too deny the son to whom you gave birth?” Maybe the better question is whether or not Lachhi’s real husband is the original Krishnalal or the ghost. Kaul gives us no answers—rather, his technique enhances the dilemma. His dissociative close-ups lend an intimacy to the film that is simultaneously destabilized by the ambiguity of their expression. In a sense, it correlates with the conundrum at hand: while Krishnalal is her husband on paper, the ghost is the man who stayed. He is the one in her bed, the one that eats at her table, and yet he isn’t “real.” Once again, Kaul challenges our preconceptions.

Kaul, with Duvidha and his films thereafter, wants to confront cinematic standards. To quote the introduction of The Cinema Situation, a symposium written in part by Kaul, “There has been a gentle struggle, a push here, an upsurge there, a raising of more authentic voices, the slow birth of an indigenous cinema. But, it is beset with problems … The audience has come to regard film as synonymous with a particular breed of song, dance, vulgarity, burlesque, violence, crudity, escape, often under the mush of misleading progressive situations—rich man poor girl, rigid father growing son, erring husband devoted wife, etc. Is it ready, even in small measure, to receive a new experience from a familiar medium?” (10). To this day, Duvidha is demanding of its audience, but what it teaches is important. One’s perception of reality is a fickle creature, and whether with the close-up or otherwise, Kaul knew how to defy it. Our conception of “what film is” has certainly expanded since 1973 in no small part due to Kaul’s work.

Rating: 4/5

The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)

This is a comparison of Ray and Ghatak, but mainly a review of Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star). Contains some spoilers.

A Contradictory Camera

The oeuvres of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak are often compared in film academia, especially in the West, for a number of reasons. For one, the two filmmakers are within the handful of Indian filmmakers that most Western art cinema audiences have any awareness of (as of writing, they are the only Indian directors to have more than one film in the Criterion Collection, for example). More importantly, though, both filmmakers came from similar backgrounds—they were Bengali, contemporaries of one another, and made films about the hardships of the people in their communities. While Ray and Ghatak are both considered to be central figures in parallel cinema (also known as New Indian Cinema), what makes comparing them so interesting is the dissimilarity between their two approaches to filmmaking.

During his time living in London, Satyajit Ray famously saw Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a theater experience that later Ray said was an inspiration for the beginning of his film career (Robinson 48). De Sica was a pioneer in the Italian neorealist movement, and many characteristics of his style can be seen within Ray’s filmmaking: on-location shooting, simple camera movement, stripped-back production, topics related to poverty, etc. Not only do aspects of De Sica’s films overlap with Ray’s, but crucial elements of the Italian neorealism overall influenced New Indian Cinema generally, especially the desire for realism and naturalism. Ravi Vasudevan in “Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism in India Cinema” writes, “The popular compendium—studio shooting, melodramatic, externalized forms for the representation of character psychology, non- or intermittently continuous forms of cutting, diversionary story lines, performance sequences—was not acceptable within the emergent artistic canon [within India], for they undermined plausibility and a desirable regime of verisimilitude” (1).

Ray’s Pather Panchali in 1955 became one of the defining films of the movement precisely because of its adherence to the aforementioned qualities associated with the movement, shunning the ways of popular cinema. Ray is very careful with the camera; for the most part, he only pans when the action within the frame calls for it, and most of the film is shot in medium and medium close-up. Occasionally, during key moments of the film (such as Apu’s encounter with the train, beginning the film’s thematic thread of the nonstop rush toward modernity), he will break from his unembellished approach. Because of Pather Panchali’s success, Ray became the public face of parallel cinema, and this style defines the way Bengali cinema from the ‘50s onward is discussed today. 

Although they are often grouped together and were colleagues and friends during their time, Ghatak’s cinematic vision distinctly diverges from Ray’s. Ghatak takes all the most ostentatious moments from Pather Panchali and makes them center stage. In fact, his most famous film Meghe Dhaka Tara is markedly melodramatic, something which Vasudevan claims was to be avoided at all costs. Ghatak’s films feature a unique, to the time, mixture of melodrama, sociopolitical commentary, atypical camera technique, and realism. Past filmmakers in other parts of the world had achieved elements of the style but never its entirety. For example, Hollywood director Douglas Sirk released a string of film melodramas in the ‘50s that almost all dealt with gender, race, and class in one way or another, but he always cast big stars and his films miss that dash of naturalism that keeps Ghatak’s work grounded. If we look later in cinema history, there are far more comparable films, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s (for instance, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul which was in part an homage to Sirk’s Imitation of Life and All that Heaven Allows) and New German Cinema as a whole. Additionally, there are a handful of films containing that particular blend of aesthetics and intent from around Meghe Dhaka Tara’s release, such as Soviet film The Cranes are Flying. 

Nevertheless, Ghatak’s conception of film was unique to the time, especially within India. Bhaskar Sarkar writes in Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition that “combining classical, folk, and popular Indian aesthetics with Jungian psychology and Soviet-style montage was, for him, a legitimate way of forging a new kind of film language.” Furthermore, “Ghatak conceived of film as an omnibus art form: he drew upon sources as disparate as classical drama and music, folk theater and music, tribal dance, Buddhist sculpture, the Vedas and the Upanishads, popular music, mythology” (209-210). In other words, his films accommodate many influences, some of them seemingly contradictory.

Ghatak often uses his characters like objects, placed carefully within the frame, right at the edges in striking compositions. He also has a proclivity for immersing the characters within darkness. Yet he still maintains a compassionate connection with the people in his stories. For example, in Meghe Dhaka Tara, some time after Nita discovers that her lover Sanat has left her for her sister, and after her brother Shankar announces he will be leaving Calcutta, we get one of the most affecting moments of the film: Shankar teaches Nita one of his songs. Ghatak begins the sequence with a few close-ups of Shankar before cutting to a medium of the two of them. Besides the tiny points of light that poke through the weave of the wall behind them, they are almost entirely enclosed in darkness. A moderately paced dolly back, and now the two of them are at the very bottom of the frame. As their song progresses, we make our way back to them very slowly—until suddenly Ghatak cuts to Nita’s first close-up in the scene, a deeply uncomfortable shot, camera far below her, titled up. It is certainly not a flattering angle, and it isn’t something you’d find in more commercial filmmaking. 

That close-up of Nita is key: although it is jarring and somewhat voyeuristic, it also involves quite a bit of subtlety within Supriya Choudhury’s performance. As she tilts up her head, there is the hint of a tear, a glisten. The camera is slightly back focused on her hair and ears, so on the celluloid itself it appears as a few out-of-focus highlights located right at the corner of her left eye. It is this mix of complex filmmaking craft and empathetic character work that distinguished Ghatak within the mix of New Indian Cinema filmmakers. “Note the absolute primacy that Ghatak accords to the social existence of humans,” writes Sarkar, “his insistence on the materiality of human life … This polarized distinction between the personal and the social, the subjective and the objective, is a legacy of idealist philosophies: Ghatak’s films … appear to transcend these oppositions” (213).

Parallel cinema is known for its stripped-back, naturalistic style, and yet that doesn’t paint a full picture. Maybe if we were to ignore the rest of the movement besides Ray, we could draw such conclusions, but Meghe Dhaka Tara alone indicates the limitations of that perspective. Just as much as Ray, Ghatak and his elaborate, sympathetic camera deserve to be fully acknowledged within the cinematic canon.

Rating : 5/5

Naked (1993) and Sing Street (2016)

This is a hybrid review of Naked and Sing Street. Contains minor spoilers for the former and major spoilers for the latter.

Deconstructing the Irish Myth

Mike Leigh is an English film director. He has no immediate familial connections to Ireland or any Celtic identities, none of his theatrically released movies have ever centered around Irish characters, and not one of the recurring actors in his films is Irish. It might seem as if he was not qualified to confront Ireland’s complex history of representation in media, but in 1993, Leigh did it anyway, releasing the black comedy drama Naked to both widespread acclaim and controversy. 

Naked opens on an alleyway in Manchester at night. Johnny Fletcher has rough sex with an anonymous woman that quickly turns into rape. He steals a car and flees to East London where his ex-girlfriend Louise lives. As Johnny runs down the alleyway, gets in the car, and escapes on the highway, the opening credits roll, and we hear Andrew Dickson’s score for the first time. It starts with a reverb-drenched low drum, sounding far away from what we are seeing, as if coming from the depths below. The booklet that comes along with the CD for the soundtrack describes Dickson’s thought process during the creation of the score, “Dickson was aware that it would have been very easy to titillate the action on screen or even turn it into melodrama - something he wanted to avoid at all costs. It was his wife at the time who had an epiphany and suggested to her husband, a collector of musical instruments, to simply beat his big military bass drum in order to give the scene a sense of foreboding” (Eicke 8). Then a double bass is added into the mix, then a viola, then finally a harp. The harp is really the focus of the score. It is relentless, “driven by a recurring ostinato” (Eicke 7), and it is the first subtle connection the film makes to Ireland. Of course, the harp is not only a Celtic instrument—and the way that Dickson refers to it, “classical” (Eicke 8), indicates that they most likely used a pedal harp more often found in concert halls rather than a traditional Celtic lever harp or other variant—but it is not only the choice of instrument that connects the score with Irish traditional music. The musical structure that the harp follows, the repetition of a theme, is reminiscent of Irish dance music. This very minimalistic composition is used again and again throughout the film. See below for Dickson’s sheet music for Naked. 

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As Naked continues, we follow Johnny, who Irish film scholar Padraic Killeen describes as a “motor-mouthed philosopher manqué who believes himself to be living on the cusp of history’s end” (76), as he wanders the streets of London over the course of a week.

Naked’s connection with Ireland and Celtic cultures would seem tenuous if based solely on the presence of a harp and some Celtic influence in its music, but the film contains much more than that alone. In fact, Killeen wrote about the connection, dissecting the movie’s relationship with Ireland in his essay, “Stained flesh – Ireland as idyll/damp patch in Mike Leigh's Naked.” He draws attention to a number of instances in the film where Leigh and his creative team make reference to Ireland. 

The first connection requires some conjecture. Johnny and Louise throughout the film refer to their pasts. As it would be against his style of filmmaking, Leigh never indulges in exposition, so we never get a full picture of any of the characters’ full backgrounds, but some inferences can be made. Johnny and Louise both hail from Manchester, a city that Killeen describes as “a heaving Irish émigré destination for the past two centuries” (79). In addition, both characters appear to be Catholic, as it is explicitly referenced in the script for Louise (“Louise is a Catholic. Did you know that?”), and as for Johnny, he consistently refers to the Bible with an interpretation that is certainly not Protestant. Finally, Louise’s surname, Clancy, is a name with Irish ancestry. All together, Killeen concludes that Johnny and Lousie must come from a predominately Catholic community in Manchester which more than likely consists primarily of people of Irish descent. 

The other allusions to Ireland come in the form of four props. The first is an ashtray that Johnny and Louise’s roommate Sophie use while smoking together at the beginning of Johnny’s spontaneous visit. Although out of focus in the foreground, it can be ascertained that it bears some sort of green text, and Killeen confirms that it is Celtic lettering for the word “Ireland.” 

Next is a book seen later in the film. As Johnny roams around London, he encounters a number of peculiar characters, one of them being Brian, a night security guard who holds similarly bold beliefs about the universe as Johnny. Brian reads a stack of books to help keep him sane while sitting in that empty office building at night, and one of those books is Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine. On a home video commentary for the film, Leigh mentioned that he included the book intentionally to “resonate with the other Irish allusions in the film” (Killeen 82). 

Through their conversation, Johnny finds out that Brian watches every night a woman across the street through her window. Recently he had seen her undress and fantasized about being with her. Later, unbeknownst to Brian, Johnny wheedles his way into her bedroom. They engage in some sort of flirtation with her drunkenly roving around the room while he chats about the things he sees around him. He picks up a stack of books, comments on Emma by Jane Austen, and then points across the room. “You from Ireland?” he says. She responds, “No, why?” “What’s that, a damp patch?” We cut to a poster that hangs on the wall: a map of Ireland. “Oh. I’ve never noticed that before.” Cut to the two of them having sex, and the map is never mentioned again. 

Brian and Johnny meet again the next morning and have breakfast together at the restaurant Brian frequents. They order food and discuss Johnny’s tryst the night before—suddenly Brian brings out of his coat pocket a photo, possibly a postcard, of a small house on a grassy knoll by the ocean. “What is this?” Johnny asks. “That’s where I’m gonna live.” “Where is it?” “Ireland. I’ve lived in that cottage before.” Referring back to their previous discussion revolving around Brian’s belief in reincarnation, Johnny asks, “What, in one of your past lives?” “Yes, as a matter of fact.” Johnny tosses the photo aside, “Fuckin’ shit-hole, innit?” Brian mumbles to himself, “Don’t waste your life.” 

Since Leigh has never directly commented on the presence of these Irish artifacts (besides the aforementioned remark he made in the DVD commentary), along with Dickson’s Celtic-influenced score, there are a number of interpretations that can be made. Killeen describes Naked as an “‘anti-odyssey’” or an “‘anti-epic.’” In many ways, Naked plays counter to what is expected in cinema—everything from the need for sympathetic characters to the way Ireland is used as a symbol.

Moya Kneafsey in her “Tourism Images and the Construction of Celticity in Ireland and Brittany” writes, “Romantic constructions of Celts tended to portray them as living simple, rural, pure lives close to nature, in contrast to the complex, corrupt, urban lives of modern people who had lost their connection to the natural world” (129). Initially it might appear that the allusions to Ireland in Naked kowtow to this common cliche surrounding Celtic cultures—the dirty streets of London stand in direct opposition to Brian’s Ireland fantasy—but it is more complex than that simple dichotomy. Killeen writes, “The enigmatic interruption of Ireland in Naked seems ultimately to facilitate a rebuke to fantasies of Arcadian escape from the pressures of modernity … In invoking and undermining, then, this master signifier – Ireland as idyll – Leigh may simply be denying the possibility of escape from, or cure for, the deeply anomic dystopia he depicts in Naked” (78). Essentially, Naked associates these indicators of “Irishness”—a humble cottage, a book about the Famine, a Celtic tchotchke, a map of Ireland, and Irish traditional music—with the dystopia of late ‘80s-‘90s London (or at least the version of London that Johnny inhabits). In doing so, Leigh challenges the notion of Ireland as a place separate from the rest of the world—in other words, their people go through the same hardships, the same conflicts, the same class struggles. Certainly Celtic nations have their own distinct cultures distinct from what is found elsewhere, but Naked unravels the romantic concept of Ireland as a place of refuge from the world’s modern problems.

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An interesting companion to Naked’s depiction of Ireland is 2016 musical comedy-drama Sing Street, directed by John Carney. As opposed to Naked, Sing Street is a fully Irish film—it has an Irish director, takes place in Dublin, and has an almost entirely Irish cast. The film is centered around Conor who, upon transferring to a new school, starts a band. All together, the filmmakers had ample opportunity to feature Irish music, and yet instead there is music from The Cure, Duran Duran, The Clash, Spandau Ballet, The Jam—all English bands. In fact, the film’s narrative is structured around the band being inspired by each of these bands, taking on new identities (and clothing) that emulates them, then writing and recording songs that fit their new styles (i.e. their first song is “The Riddle of the Model,” a new wave song obviously inspired by “Rio”). Being set in 1985, there were many Irish bands that could have been included in the film—the Dubliners, U2, The Pogues, etc—in addition to a diverse catalog of traditional Irish music. The exclusion of these artists, then, feels intentional. 

In many ways, Sing Street is similar to another musical comedy set in Dublin, The Commitments, from 1991. It follows Jimmy Rabbitte who, like Conor, decides out of the blue to put together a band. Once again, the film ignores the musical tradition of Ireland and instead opts for another style, this time soul, inspired by black American artists of the ‘60s.

The Commitments opens on a wide shot of a cluttered street in Dublin, then cuts to a medium shot of a man playing the fiddle. People rush by, giving him no notice, and we cut to other activities in the square. Jimmy appears, enters the bustle of the street, and we cut away to a young man singing sean-nós to an uninterested crowd. After these moments, no Celtic music is heard in the film again. 

Sing Street has a similar moment early in the film, albeit briefer. Conor is recruiting members for his band, and the first person he is suggested he should see is multi-instrumentalist Eamon. Eamon tries out for the band, edited in a similarly humorous fashion as the auditions in The Commitments, by playing a variety of instruments: bass guitar, drums, keyboard, xylophone, uilleann pipes, and bongo drums. The two second clip of Eamon playing the uilleann pipes is the only moment in the film where any traditional Celtic instruments appears.

Beyond the choice of music, Sing Street also makes an implicit rejection of Ireland in its narrative. Conor has aspirations for “making it big,” something that his brother Brendan encourages. What “making it big” means to him, though (besides getting together with the film’s love interest, Raphina), is finding fame outside of Ireland. Part of his dream which is repeated throughout the film is to leave for London to jumpstart his music career. The end of the film finds Conor and Raphina on a motor cruiser headed toward London. It is a fantastical sequence—Carney has said in interviews that it is not meant to be taken completely literally, that the couple would most likely die at sea—a scene of jubilation, cheered on by his brother.

Sing Street de-exoticizes Ireland (like The Commitments before it) by instead making England (London in particular) the idyll. Of course, that is anything but reality, but by making England a place of opportunity far across the Irish Sea, and by emptying this Irish musical of any substantive allusions to traditional Celtic music, Sing Street questions the image of Ireland as a mythic place of ancient history and spiritual connection.

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“Magic, mystery, music and laughter: these are some of the essential ingredients of a holiday in Ireland, according to Bord Fáilte’s 1999 tourism literature,” Kneafsey writes at the beginning of her essay. "Celts have been positioned as ‘peripheral others’” (8). Naked and Sing Street deconstruct this Irish stereotype from opposite directions, but both ultimately rely on Celtic music, or the lack thereof, and the associations we have with that music. Dickson’s minimalistic score, which contains primarily a harp ostinato, fuels Naked—while we watch Johnny roll around in the dirty alleyways of London, when Johnny is beaten nearly to death, and during every rape (of which there are three), it never changes or stops. By the end, any of the audience’s preconceptions about when and how to use a harp have fallen away and instead have been replaced with these terrible images of perversion. In a sense, Leigh is saying that human depravity knows no boundaries, especially those between England and Ireland. Even the music of your childhood can be corrupted. Sing Street addresses the issue on a much lighter note, but nevertheless, comes to similar conclusions. The film acts as if England, rather than Ireland, is the meridian of “magic, mystery, and laughter.” The characters yearn to get to London while Ireland is stripped of any of its appeal (besides its charming characters), including its music.

If we look at Naked and Sing Street as a pair, perhaps within a shared world, they reflect on each other. The England that Sing Street deifies is the exact hellscape that Naked’s Johnny inhabits. Neither film achieves any level of realism, nor do they aspire to. Instead, Leigh and Carney carefully heighten and lessen certain characteristics of English and Irish culture, all in an attempt to dismantle the limitations of the Celtic mythos and ultimately break down the barriers between their peoples.

Naked Rewatch Rating: 5/5

Sing Street Rating: 4/5

Barry Lyndon (1975)

This review mainly focuses on the Irish music in the film. Contains some spoilers.

A Man with No Name

In 1975, Stanley Kubrick released one of his (relatively) lesser-known works, Barry Lyndon. Loosely based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray, it takes place in the second half of the 18th century in England, Ireland, and Germany, following Irishman Redmond Barry through his long and complicated journey from a state of little opportunity and wealth to one of great riches and then back again.

While Barry Lyndon is often remembered by critics and film scholars for its gorgeous painting-like cinematography and Hogarth-inspired visuals, a major element of its success as a period piece and epic is its music. Kubrick always had a fondness for classical music. His 2001: A Space Odyssey is well-known for juxtaposing science fiction technology with classical compositions as well as its opening sequence set to Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” and A Clockwork Orange’s soundtrack primarily features electronic and synthetic renditions of Rossini and Beethoven. Barry Lyndon continues this trend, but its devices are more subtle. 

It might seem odd to pick Barry Lyndon for analysis considering all of its Celtic music is contained within the first 45 minutes of this three-hour film, but what few Irish pieces the movie does contain are essential for its thematic underpinnings and the development of Redmond Barry’s character, especially his inability to ever settle down and his interminable condition as an outsider in all settings, names, and ranks he finds himself in.

After a brief prologue showing the duel that killed Barry’s father, the omniscient narrator of the film introduces us to Barry while he plays a card game with his older cousin Nora Brady, a young woman with whom he entertains an infatuation. She flirts with him, but it is apparent that he takes the coquetry much more seriously than she does. Kubrick’s work often has an odd sense of humor, and it is definitely not restrained in the opening moments of the film. Brady puts a ribbon in her cleavage while Barry looks away, and then challenges him to find it. What proceeds is one of the more awkward interactions in the film as Barry very slowly, nervously, unsuccessfully looks for the ribbon. Eventually, she reveals it to him, and they kiss. Scoring the whole sequence is The Chieftains with Seán Ó Riada’s classic "Mná na hÉireann” (“Women of Ireland”). Being one of the most famous recordings of the song, it was released two years before the release of Barry Lyndonon The Chieftains 4. It is solely an instrumental version with no vocals.

Although serving little narrative consequence in the long run, this early scene helps establish Barry as an immature, naive young man. It seems like the sort of scene you would see in any other period piece, but some of Kubrick’s creative decisions complicate things, especially his casting and of course his music selection. Ryan O’Neal plays Barry. Before ’75, he had already made quite a career for himself, having been in Love Story (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon. Although both of his parents had partial Irish heritage, neither ever lived there, and O’Neal was born and raised in Los Angeles. He was in his thirties when they shot Barry Lyndon.

From the very beginning, there is an undeniable dissonance between the various elements of the film. O’Neal feels out of place in almost every scene, from Barry’s beginnings in Ireland all the way to when he settles in England. In 2020, it is easy to lose a sense of how peculiar the casting was for this film in ’75 since now, because of Kubrick’s later success and Barry Lyndon’s critical reevaluation, we remember Barry as O’Neal, but at the time of the movie’s release, O’Neal was most famous for films like Love Story, a sappy romantic drama that was a huge box office hit ($136 million on a $2 million budget). He played an upper-class East Coast Harvard graduate, quite a distance away from a down-on-his-luck young Irishman.

After Barry and Brady’s kiss, the film hard cuts to a line of British infantry. The non-diegetic “Women of Ireland” is replaced with a diegetic rendition of “The British Grenadiers,” a traditional marching song often played by the British, Canadian, and Australian militaries. It is here where we begin to see how Kubrick assembled Barry Lyndon’s soundtrack in a way that highlights incongruity, otherness. Leading the march is wealthy British Army captain John Quin who, following the march, we see interacting with Brady. Later, it is then revealed that her family intends to marry her off to Quin for their financial benefit. Being only vaguely interested in Barry anyway, Brady quickly sides with her family, and she is soon engaged to Quin.

Barry first sees Brady and Quin together after the “The British Grenadiers” when the British military personnel begins to dance with the local Irish women. The sequence is set to the traditional song “Piper’s Maggot Jig” performed once again by The Chieftains. During this high-spirited jig played with a group of wind instruments and fiddles, we see two elements of interest. First, Quin’s dance—he seems to make an attempt at keeping up with the traditional dance, but he makes such large strides and moves so slowly that he looks ridiculous. At a certain point, he stops, out of breath, and just stares at Brady as she continues to dance. None of it accrues him sympathy, however, as he has a plain look of mockery on his face throughout the engagement, whether he intended to or not. Second, the Irish jig is played by the English military’s band. Of course in reality these men were not playing the music since, as said earlier, the piece was performed by The Chieftains, but the film makes it appear diegetic, cutting to the band in-between shots of the people dancing.

The next scene is between Quin and Brady as he courts her. During this interaction, Kubrick inserts a slightly different variation of “Women of Ireland.” The song continues as Barry learns of their engagement at dinner. Everything about these scenes is geared toward alienating Barry: the camera often lingers on his lonely close-up, the lighting separates him from everyone else, and the music of his homeland is used and abused by Englishmen (as one of them steps in and steals his love).

Barry has a violent confrontation with Quin and, as a result, has to leave Ireland to avoid the law. He is robbed at gunpoint as he exits town and is left to walk off without any belongings nor a horse—meanwhile, the last two pieces of Irish music in the film make their appearance. First, there is a sorrowful rendition of “The Sea-Maiden,” and then as Barry meets the thieves, we hear a very mysterious, unsettling version of Ó Riada’s “Tin Whistles.” Both were once again performed by The Chieftains.

Barry does not step foot in Ireland again until his fall from grace at the very end of the film. Upon his return (with only one leg and no money to his name), no Celtic music is heard. In a sense, after his confrontation with Quin and his ejection from Ireland, he had decided his homeland and its culture were dead to him. The rest of the film, replete with English and German classical compositions from the period, follows Barry as he tries to distance himself from his origins—he changes his name multiple times, joins both the British and Prussian armies, and, in what becomes his ultimate failing, he attempts to acquire a noble title. The portion of the film containing Celtic music is brief, but it serves an essential function of setting the stage for Barry’s struggle with identity. As Barry parades around like he is German, Prussian, English, we the audience know the truth about Barry. Having been estranged from his home at an early age, he is ceaselessly an outsider, physically and mentally, and something within him is incapable of finding true satisfaction wherever he goes.

While Kubrick heavily depended on classic Celtic compositions and the associations that the audience has with them, there is no reason to believe that Kubrick and the other creatives who worked on the film had any intention to belittle Ireland’s culture or mock its music, even if Barry and other characters within the film are dismissive of them. If one takes a look at how films with actual bigoted intent—or even films that unintentionally propagate bigoted or stereotypical views—went about depicting other cultures and minorities, then it becomes apparent that Barry Lyndon does not have this shortcoming. In “Music as Ethnic Marker in Film: The ‘Jewish’ Case,” Andrew P. Killick examines depictions of Jewish people in popular media. Some examples include explicit Jewish stereotypes, but the majority are more covert (with the typical stereotype being that of the “Shylock,” a Jew who is completely driven by profit). He does not “posit a deliberate conspiracy of anti-Semitic composers” but rather “that the use of this ‘Jewish music’ in association with lyrics expressing desire for money can help to reproduce and perpetuate a prejudice in the broader society without anyone’s having deliberately set out to do so” (Killick 187). The key here is the “Jewish music” Killick describes. In almost all cases, it is not actually Jewish music. Instead, it is an approximation of what (often American or British) composers think sounds like Jewish music to the general public. Fiddler on the Roof codified this sound which Killick categorizes into two groups: “the rustic dance and the synagogue chant” (189). Writers and composers would use this stereotypical Jewishness essentially as shorthand to communicate to the audience a character’s greediness and ugliness. Killick also examines the various adaptations of Oliver Twist over time, particularly how later versions hid its anti-semitism by taking the allusions out of the text and instead using the music to “furnish the principal clues” (193).

Unlike the examples Killick touches upon, Barry Lyndon relies upon already written music completely. There is no opportunity to caricature the Irish identity through music. Additionally, Barry Lyndon is not about the Irish or Celtic culture as a whole but rather Barry’s indefatigable struggle of identity within and without his Irish roots.

Martin MacLoone comes closer to finding trouble with Barry Lyndon’s depiction of Ireland in his book Irish Film: The Emergence of Contemporary Cinema. Although he mainly discusses the trend of depicting Ireland as either “bathed in romantic sensibility” or “torn asunder by violence and internecine strife” (34), he also passes “judgement on the ‘outsider’ tradition of representation” (33) that has also been present in much of cinema centered around the Irish. Indeed, Barry Lyndon is one of these films—Kubrick presents Barry as an “other”—but what confounds this argument is that Barry is a misfit in every environment. The Irish are not the “other” in Barry Lyndon; it is Barry himself. In fact, his “Irishness” has nothing to do with with his “otherness.” As we see later in the film, his failing as a British aristocrat and the breakdown of his family ultimately is due to his brash, selfish, inebriated ways, not his ethnicity.

Kubrick’s obsessive tendencies are well-documented and discussed, but often analysis of his films fall short of fully acknowledging the breadth of his craft (in addition to that of his numerous collaborators). In particular, with Barry Lyndon, the peculiar casting and the minimal but elegant Irish music selection interact in such a unique and metafictional way, all coming together for a single purpose: relating the life and times of foolish Redmond Barry, an eternal wanderer, a stranger to everyone.

Rewatch rating: 5/5