Talk:A Clockwork Orange (film)

Material

After completing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick searched for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He settled on A Clockwork Orange (1971) at the end of 1969, an exploration of violence and experimental rehabilitation by law enforcement authorities, based around the character of Alex (portrayed by Malcolm McDowell). Kubrick had originally received a copy of Anthony Burgess's novel of the same name from Terry Southern while they were working on Dr. Strangelove, but had rejected it on the grounds that Nadsat, a street language for young teenagers, was too difficult to comprehend. In 1969, the decision to make a film about the degeneration of youth was a more timely one; the New Hollywood movement was witnessing a great number of films centering around the sexuality and rebelliousness of young people, which no doubt influenced Kubrick in Baxter's opinion.

A Clockwork Orange was shot over the winter of 1970-1 on a budget of £2 million. Kubrick abandoned his use of CinemaScope in the filming, deciding that the 1:66:1 widescreen format was, in the words of Baxter, an "acceptable compromise between spectacle and intimacy", and "favoured his rigorously symmetrical framing", which "increased the beauty of his compositions". The film heavily features "pop erotica" of the period; the house of one of the victims of the "droogs" (friends), the exercise instructor Cat Lady, is full of erotic statuary and paintings, including a giant white plastic set of male genitals. Kubrick informed Ciment that the erotic decor used in the film was intended to give it a "slightly futuristic" look, the assumption being that "erotic art will eventually become popular art". Kubrick and production designer John Barry spent weeks perusing back issues of architectural magazines for inspiration. They cut out relevant material and kept it in a special display named "Definitiv". Whereas the novel had depicted the droogs in Alex's gang as "teenage juvenile delinquents who squash pets, smash windows and seduce pimply teenage girls", Kubrick wanted Alex and his gang in the film to function more as young adults, whose victims are also adults. McDowell, aged 28 at the time, was almost twice the age of the Alex in the novel. His role in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968) was crucial to his casting as Alex, as Kubrick had been impressed with his ability to "shift from schoolboy innocence to insolence and, if needed, violence". So central was McDowell to the film and his vision, that Kubrick professed that he probably wouldn't have made the film if McDowell had been unavailable.

An example of the erotica from A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Because of its depiction of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange became one of the most controversial films of the decade, and part of an ongoing debate about violence and its glorification in cinema. It received an X-rated certificate upon release, just before Christmas in 1971, though many critics saw much of the violence depicted in the film as satirical, and less violent than Straw Dogs which had been released a month earlier. Kubrick personally pulled the film from release in the United Kingdom after receiving death threats following a series of copycat crimes based on the film; it was thus completely unavailable legally in the UK until after Kubrick's death, and not re-released until 2000. The censor, John Trevelyan, himself considered A Clockwork Orange to be "perhaps the most brilliant piece of cinematic art I've ever seen, and believed it to present an "intellectual argument rather than a sadistic spectacle" in its depiction of violence, but acknowledged that many would not agree. Kubrick disagreed with many of the scathing press reports in British media in the early 1970s that the film could transform a person into a criminal, and argued that "violent crime is invariably committed by people with a long record of anti-social behavior". He defended the depiction of violence in the film, arguing that "The violence in the story has to be given sufficient dramatic weight so that the moral dilemma it poses can be seen in the right context", otherwise the viewer would not reach a "meaningful conclusion about relative rights and wrongs". The State cannot turn even the most "vicious criminals into vegetables". Biographer LoBrutto sees the film as more a "sociopolitical statement about the government's threat against personal freedom" than one which celebrates violence. Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, also sees beyond its violence, arguing that "No movie of the last decade (perhaps in the history of film) has made such exquisitely chilling predictions about the future role of cultural artefacts—paintings, buildings, sculpture, music— in society, or extrapolated them from so undeceived a view of our present culture". Rex Reed concurred, calling it "a mind-blowing work of dazzling originality and brilliance that succeeds on many levels of consciousness", adding that it was "of the most perfect movies I have ever seen in my lifetime". Ignoring the negative media hype over the film, A Clockwork Orange received four Academy Award nominations, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Editing, and was named by the New York Film Critics Circle as the Best Film of 1971. After William Friedkin won Best Director for The French Connection that year, he told the press: "Speaking personally, I think Stanley Kubrick is the best American film-maker of the year. In fact, not just this year, but the best, period".

References

Location of the film

I have changed 'In a futuristic London' to 'In a futuristic Britain'. While it is of course on record that the film was shot in London and the surrounding area, it simply cannot be stated with any confidence that the film is meant to take place in London. In the book it's not mentioned and it's often thought that Alex and co could actually be in Moscow. What's certain is that it is not clear. In the film, there is no mention that they're in London and the accents indicate that they could well be in the north of England. Given that all the characters speak English/ Nadsat, it's safe to assume that they're in Britain, but it is disingenuous explicitly to state that they're in London, in spite of the filming taking place there. NEDOCHAN (talk)