The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet

A still from Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick's idiosyncratic study of the qualities of light in the 18th century.

At the tender age of 17, Stanley Kubrick (1928 – 1999) was hired as a staff photographer for LOOK magazine, where he began to develop an appreciation for the power of visual imagery that he would hone throughout his career. A perfectionist, Kubrick became known for his controversial and provocative films which possess his distinct cinematic style and meticulous attention to detail. With 26 Oscar nominations and 9 Oscars to his credit, Kubrick won plenty of acclaim. But only one of his films managed to win an Oscar for cinematography — his period piece, Barry Lyndon (1975), that traced the adventures and misadventures of an Irish gambler and social climber making his way in 18th-century England. The remarkable visuals of this film were achieved through the use of a special 16-inch-long glass lens that, 29 years later, reveals Kubrick’s accomplishment in creating a startlingly unique visual experience.

Each scene of Barry Lyndon glows with the soft light of 18th century painting  because Kubrick shot even night scenes without artificial or electric light. The most dramatic are the candle-lit scenes, which have become part of the Kubrick legend. In an article in American Cinematographer magazine, camera engineer Ed Digiulio recalls that “At the very early stages of his preparation for Barry Lyndon, Kubrick scoured the world looking for exotic, ultra-fast lenses, because he knew he would be shooting extremely low light level scenes. It was his objective, incredible as it seemed at the time, to photograph candle-lit scenes in old English castles by only the light of the candles themselves!”

Kubrick procured one of the fastest lenses ever made. Building on research into nighttime infrared optics by the Nazis in World War II, Zeiss developed a special 50 mm planar lens for a NASA project to photograph the dark side of the moon. John Alcott, Kubrick’s cinematographer, in an interview with American Cinematographer, recalls the grueling technicalities of the lens.”This Zeiss lens was like no other lens in a way, because when you look through any normal type of lens you are looking through the optical system and by just altering the focus you can tell whether it’s in or out of focus. But when you looked through this lens it appeared to have a fantastic range of focus, quite unbelievable. However, when you did a photographic test you discovered that it had no depth of field at all—which one expected anyway. So we literally had to scale this lens by doing hand tests from about 200 feet down to about 4 feet, marking every distance that would lead up to the 10-foot range. We had to literally get it down to inches on the actual scaling.”

This wasn’t the last challenge Kubrick would face. He asked his camera engineer, Ed DiGiulio, to fit the enormous lens to a Mitchell BNC camera. Although Diguilio said that it couldn’t be done Kubrick insisted. When Diguilio asked Kubrick why he didn’t use a market lens with a fill light, Diguillo says “he replied that he was not doing this just as a gimmick, but because he wanted to preserve the natural patina and feeling of these old castles at night as they actually were. The addition of any fill light would have added an artificiality to the scene that he did not want.” Degiulio totally rebuilt the BNC, and succeeded in mounting the lens. The lens also produced a limitation for the actors. In the candlelit scenes they had to move slowly and be careful not to leave the limited depth of focus, consequently the movement these scenes is hypnotically slow.

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768. Oil on canvas. Location: Tate Gallery.

The technical challenges were monumental, and the results are equally stunning. Because of the shallow depth-of-field, the scenes are painterly and dream-like. The lighting is soft and dramatic, mimicking the work of 18th-century English painters such as Joseph Write of Derby. Although the film was a commercial failure (because it was slow, long, and emotionally reserved), it was widely hailed as an artistic success, is on many best-films-of-all-time lists, and remains an icon of innovative cinematography. There were were only 10 of these Zeiss lenses ever produced. Three are owned by Kubrick, six by NASA and one can be found at the German Movie Museum in Frankfurt.

—Kim Harty