Viddy well O my droogies – A Clockwork Orange is back. So pour yourself a draft of the old moloko plus and get ready for over two hours of spilt red, red kroovy and lashings of in-out in-out all left without razdrazing by the censors. Veschs and chellovecks, re-introducing A Clockwork Orange by malchick Kubrick. Horrorshow.
In the UK A Clockwork Orange has always been a cause scandale and the source of much speculation. Famously the film was withdrawn from circulation by its creator Stanley Kubrick, and screenings were raided to enforce the reclusive director’s edict. For years its cult status has increased due to its rarity – clandestine fourth generation copies are closely guarded, or Dutch subtitled videos sold under the counter for hugely inflated prices. Apocryphal stories circulated – the film was withheld because of death threats to Kubrick’s family, because of copycat gangs, potential censorship or media hysteria. It was never cut by state censors, the BBFC, despite concerns over the film’s alleged glorification of violence – a fact that should have automatically allowed showings once the self-imposed ban on the film had been lifted by Kubrick’s estate following his untimely death. However its reputation was such that a thirty year old film was deemed to be dangerous enough to warrant a re-rating. Fortunately it was, after much debate, certified uncut and considered suitable for audiences over eighteen years of age. What a new generation of filmgoers will make of it is anyone’s guess – the trailer alone is so extreme in pace, colour and escalation it could be viewed as either exhilarating or totally bemusing.
From Book To Script: Kubrick’s adaptation of the book remains remarkably faithful, crucially in the adoption of Nadsat as the choice of language, Burgess’s slang adaptation of Russian vocabulary (for example horrorshow is a bastardisation of khorosho, Russian for good). Where the film departs significantly from the book is in its decision not to shoot the final chapter. Kubrick was not aware that this existed until after principle photography had commenced as many copies of the book did not contain the closing segment. On discovery he took the decision to go with his original script, a controversial move perhaps but a wise one. The ending of the original always felt a bit of a cop out anyway and would have certainly had a detrimental effect on the tone of the film that would have sat uneasily with gleeful celebration of delinquency. Another alteration was McDowell’s rendition of Singin’ In the Rain accompanying a beating, which was improvised on set and stayed in because it appealed to the director’s macabre sense of humour.
Making: Kubrick once again pushed forward film technology by demanding exceptionally wide lenses that provide much of the visual feel, turning straight lines into curves and allowing for extremities of expression. The fluidity of the camerawork and the sometimes outrageous length of the back-tracking shots are pure Kubrick but their assurance is remarkable for pre-stedicam days. As usual any hand-held work was shot by Kubrick himself, notably the rape and murder scenes. Alex’s suicidal leap, shot in awesome point of view, was achieved by a simple yet heartless technique – Kubrick loaded cameras with film and threw them out of a window, until the required shot was obtained. For the sound he insisted that all dialogue was all recorded on location, facilitating the need to create specialised highly directional microphones to record speech in adverse environments – the scenes underneath the bridge were recorded with traffic thundering overhead. The design of set and costume is exemplary, creating a world clearly recognisable and yet distorted and subverted – an authentic alternate future.
Notoriety: The film is split clearly into three phases – freedom, incarceration, release. The chief source of its notoriety is the first third which sees Alex and his droogs’ unbridled freedom to perpetrate crimes for kicks. This is the film’s most subversive move – Alex is intelligent and articulate, he creates violence and terror for a bit of twenty-to-one. There are no social reasons for his behaviour, he doesn’t even need the money he steals, he takes it because he can.
Music: Fresh as the day it was made, the Moog soundtrack remains one of the most coherent and wittily produced. The strains of Ludwig Van’s Glorious Ninth compressed into a few minutes of manic synthesiser work may make purists blanche, but is complementary to the pop-art visuals and perfectly reflects Alex’s day-glo world of excess. Music is as much Alex’s reason to live as anything – it gets him into bed with teenage girls and allows him to live his daydream ultraviolent fantasies. But ultimately when his capacity to hear Beethoven is taken from him he is at his lowest ebb. Beethoven is seen as inspirational, uplifting and creative but it also provides a backdrop to atrocities, reflects fascism and distorted ubermensch sensibilities. It is these dichotomies that litter the film – freedom is essential in a civilised country but comes at a price, Alex has a right to freedom but that in turn affects the liberty of others. Ethics is a tricky business with no definitive solution.
Film As Film: Part of A Clockwork Orange’s success artistically lies in its denial of reality – it celebrates film as film. This is not to say that you do not relate or emote to Alex but that the grandiose mise-en-scene remains uniquely filmic. Allusions to film and the filming process are sprinkled throughout the running time – in some respects this is to criticise what you see, there is no definitive film reality. When Alex is forced to watch a series of atrocity and snuff footage it is clear that a number of the sequences are staged, some of them ‘actual’, but to Alex’s drugged mind they are synonymous – the film is attacking the audience’s viewing process in deciding what is real. To some extent this renders all film as falsification, Alex’s reaction to film is beyond actuality and moral considerations. If A Clockwork Orange seeks to turn our relationship with the screen into something deeper than passively accepting its signs and meanings (the complicit act of watching was, of course, foremost in the voyeuristic films of Hitchcock and reached their nadir in Powell’s scopophilic nightmare Peeping Tom) it is in Alex’s daytime fantasies. Note that the act of watching against your free will is detrimental to your health – it certainly was for McDowell who suffered very painful eye injuries as a result of the forced viewing scenes – that doctor you see with the eyedrops is real!
“But, I want to look at the screen. I’ve been bought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall” – Anthony Burgess.
