Kubrick adapted The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1) with the intention of recreating a bygone era. He envisaged his film as "a documentary on the 18th century" (2), drawing its pictorial references from the works of Hogarth, Menzel or Chodowiecki. Like the settings and costumes, the lighting had to be authentic. Defying all the technical difficulties, the director shot in natural light, illuminating the night scenes with candles and rarely resorting to artificial lighting.
This concern for realistic light had already been envisaged for Kubrick's Napoleon project. In 1966, during the shooting of 2001, he studied the possibility of filming by candlelight with chief cameraman John Alcott, carrying out a series of unsuccessful trials with wide-aperture lenses. Very interested in optics, Kubrick finally discovered the existence of three fairly sensitive photo lenses (50 mm, f/0.7) designed and manufactured by Zeiss for NASA. In three months, Ed Di Giulio adapted a lens to a Mitchell BNC camera for the filming of Barry Lyndon. The technique still necessitated a particular developing of the negative and the use of reflectors. With the low light intensity, the reduced depth of field of these Zeiss lenses made focussing tricky, and the actors were limited in their movements so as to remain sharp in the image. Inspired by the paintings of Georges de La Tour, the candlelit scenes, present especially in the second part of the film, are therefore more static than the exteriors in the first part, rich in zoom outs. Thus, in the seduction scene between Barry and Lady Lyndon, face to face at the gaming table, the action amounts to the exchanges of burning looks beneath the make-up of the impassive faces, almost like a tableau vivant. The warm, intimate light of the chandeliers and candelabra, also present in the tight shots, gives a particular grain to the image.
The film's sublime, innovative photography, rewarded by an Oscar, was big news in 1975. Regarding Kubrick, Alcott commented: "if he weren't a director, he would probably be the world's greatest director of photography." (3)
(1) An 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, the story taking place between 1750 and 1789.
(2) Remarks by the art director Ken Adam, in Philippe Pilard, Barry Lyndon (Paris, Nathan, 1990), p. 52.
(3) Interview of John Alcott by Michel Ciment, London, February 1980, in Kubrick: the Definitive Edition, (New York, Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 216.