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A Clockwork Orange Fifty Years On

Oh the delicious thrill of finally acquiring a crap VHS copy of this from some dodgy market seller back in the eighties! (He also got me an equally crap copy of Reeves’ Witchfinder General.)

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If you think of Kubrick as a poet of film, then yes, he’s certainly one or “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Uncannily premonitory, this film, isn’t it?

But contrary to Michael McC’s general conclusion, I don’t feel like a performative victim at all. On the contrary, I regard myself as one of the luckiest sods whom I know, and very grateful for it. And, since earliest childhood on, and still now, an unswerving devotee of the very greatest of all the great composers - yes, even including JSB - Ludwig van Beethoven. I’ll see your D Minor Partita’s Sciaconna and raise you the Late Quartets (including the Big Fugue, natch…) :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I had a copy sent over from Holland, with Dutch subtitles. Same energy :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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It’s a decent review, and A C O is very much Kubrick’s film, but the underlying brilliance was Anthony Burgess’s. He was a journeyman writer and yet so damn good at it.

I’m in very early stages of trying to learn some Sanskrit and could really benefit from finding my copy of A Mouthful Of Air, Burgess’s reflection on the linguistic roots of English and other languages.

A quick bit of linguistic trivia which you may enjoy. The word buddha basically means “he that is awakened”. Based on the same root is the Russian word будильник - budilnik. Loosely means “he makes you awake”.

I must certainly learn the word for ‘he she or it that digresses wildly’…

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Good grief

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LOL! Love it, Twirl! I’d quite forgotten about Schroeder’s shared obsession. :rofl:

PS: I rate Burgess as one of the incomprehensibly under-rated writers of my time, at least in the Anglosphere. Extraordinary range, scope and inventiveness. Apparently he’s much more widely recognised in Germany.

Clockwork Orange is certainly a brilliant film. My only criticism of it is that in parts it comes across as a bit contrived; but I would guess this was the intent of Kubrick (who without doubt was one of the greatest directors of all time).

A similar film of this era was ‘If’, released in 1968, directed by Lindsay Anderson and also starring Malcolm McDowell. For me, ‘If’ comes across as being a lot more naturalistic, whatever that means. I suppose you would have had to experienced an English school education during this era to get all the nuances.

‘If’ was saying it decades before Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall’.

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If… is a fantastic film, yes. Lots of nods to continental cinema esp Buñuel eg the little surrealist touches like the headmaster being produced from an office chest of drawers. Watched it the first time while still attending a secondary school that had some startling similarities. In retrospect I wonder how the teacher running the Film Society got away with it.

A few weeks later we had the sort-of sequel O Lucky Man which is not bad either. Probably a bit too long.

Britannia Hospital completed the trilogy a few years later, memories of that are not so fond but could probably stand a rewatch. Comes across rather too farcical if I recall.

Lindsay Anderson, the director, also made This Sporting Life, one of the better social realist pictures that were all the rage for a while. When Hollywood lost interest and took away the cash, UK cinema mainly went back to its tradition of historical adaptations, documentaries, and bracing costume dramas.

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O Lucky Man; blimey, now there’s a film! I’m not sure how old I was when I saw it, but I was young, very young in fact and just about all I can remember is the scene where a sweaty young man in bed has his covers pulled back to reveal that his head had been grafted onto a pig’s body. That image stayed with me for bloody ages!!

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I know Kubrick felt somewhat hamstrung during the production, but I do have an enormous soft spot for Spartacus, a film that, as a child, I would scour the pages of the Christmas RT ( along with anything that involved Harryhausen and especially Jason and the Argonauts) to see if it were on that year.

I also particularly like Paths of Glory; not the most subtle of movies, but as Eisenstein amusingly said in reference to Vertov’s observational ‘kino eye’ approach, sometimes, in order to plough the audience’s psyche, what is needed is not a cine eye, but rather a cine fist!

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“Messiah” roughly translates as “wondered about a bit by themselves”!

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“O lucky Man” is a very disturbing film and compares well to “A Clockwork Orange”…even today writers and directors shy away from such direct comment…mainstream cinema is led by the market…

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BH was overly farcical - but still quite rivetting…anybody up for a ‘Brain Milkshake’ : )

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Can’t recall where he said it, but the inestimably brilliant Kurt Vonnegut once remarked along the lines that there are as many versions of Burgess’s Clockwork Orange as there are readers - but there can be only one version of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange - - give me the book anyday, though the movie was truly fabulous.

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I have a feeling Michael Powell stole that quote. He certainly used the eye motif a lot e.g. all the The Archers films opened with the bullseye sequence. As wartime propaganda goes, A Matter Of Life and Death is transcendent, and used to be another of those films you could rely upon seeing in among the Christmas schedules.

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I didn’t know Powell had nicked that; interesting and in a way, Peeping Tom is a perfect mix of Vertovian observation and Eisenstein’s ploughing fist.

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