Kubrick Paints With Light and Shadow

Rating: 9/10 (27 January 2013)

Had Rembrandt made films in the 20th century, they could have looked and felt something like this. Natural light taken to its extreme, painterly mise-en-scène and colour, wildly riotous humour. Death.
Indeed, each frame exudes audaciously utter compositional mastery, and Kubrick paints with light and shadow in ways quite unmatched, perhaps equalled only by the virtuosity of Malick and Lubezki's.
Kubrick, to my mind, is a superb humanist, somewhat like Imamura, yet his sense of humour is more approachable. The visual gags of the film are brilliant and hilarious. The first part of the film is fireworks from beginning to end, and it's the second part where Kubrick is able to offer a cataclysmic counterpoint that is decidedly slow in its accretion, escalating from the high-flying superficiality of Barry's character and his lack of forethought for the consequences of his actions. Or, if you like, things just befall him without any dramatic sense of cause and consequence.
"The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982) would be a fine place to go from here, since it's visually as painterly, made by a painter, influenced by another painter's notions.