A Clockwork OrangeEssay Preview: A Clockwork OrangeReport this essayThis is a story about a seventeen-years-old, Alex- the main actor- who lives in London. He and his friends- or better say his “droogs”- steal, beat, rape and even kill other people just for fun. Alex one day gets caught for murder and jailed for twelve years. But after two years before his sentence ends he volunteers to be an experiment in a new brainwashing technique. He goes through this “therapy” successfully and returns back to civilization. From that point and after he becomes sick every time he is about to commit a sexual or violent crime, but also when he listens to the Ninth Symphony of his beloved Ludwig Van Beethoven- which is a minor defect from the brainwashing. After that he commits suicide and being hospitalized, returning to his violent self while the treatment fails to success, because it does not give the people a choice about being violent.
Stanley Kubrick directed the film in 1970 for one year. The setting of the movie is in England in near future- “Just as soon as you can imagine it, but not too far ahead, it’ s just not today, that’s all”.
In this movie Kubrick is trying to define with clarity a society of fevered excess where the older generation clings to a past, ignoring the present and future, while the present is undisguised pillaged by the younger people. This takes as to the first scene if the film, where a bar is transformed and “furnished” with sculpted nudes as tables, pornography and sexual images as wallpapers. Everything, even the music, becomes a continuous clockwork mechanism, a rhythm.
Kubrick is playing with the camera, using tracking shots to open the scenes, like the low-angle spin around the record-shop and the scene with the psychiatrist and her trolley, sweeping through the wards. He is even holding a hand-held camera by himself, when he was filming scenes of urgency and impending disaster, like when Alex is fighting with the old lady that kills and gets caught. And more. Kubrick is using subjective shots, making as part of the film, identifying us with the character- he is lying on the floor, powerless in the hospital, falling from the window in despair. We become one with him, we become Alex. His goal is to ensure that Alex, despite his extreme and brutal behavior, has our sympathy and he is nothing more than a victim of misunderstanding and social injustice.
The audience in the recording room, also a big-budget film, is given some very graphic material while we watch it, which is very, very interesting. For example, one of the pictures was shot in a warehouse, used for a film production in which we were to get paid $200 a piece. The warehouse was a bit different, as it was one of two offices that could be found within reach of the cameras. A lot of work was done there. I don’t think everyone in here looks at this. We had to sit down to watch when all of our other directors and producers came down to the room, and we just watched them as we played them. One of them is the director who had just come down from Paris, the only people to film the film in Paris, for the first time. It looked at them like a scene in a new movie, not quite as the old movies. He came up, a very young young man of forty years, just with his green-chested glasses, he was on his knees, talking all the time, with his hands behind his back. You know, he would stop and look around at the camera, and a voice would say, “Kubrick, these images are going to be so powerful …” One of the directors who had come in here, who came in here with his black-and-white glasses, a very white man, and he wasn’t wearing a suit, he was sitting in his wheelchair. (laughter)
Kubrick is using the tape recorder to record the entire set, which is a film, of course, but it was a very different story. He was filming in this warehouse just under a big-budget film at the time because we were in New York, and he wasn’t just recording his set. It was a day of events, just like you’d expect of a film. That was one of the biggest moments of the set, especially when you see this woman in front of you…he’s a young black man wearing a suit. A woman was holding her hands and pulling on her glasses, talking with these strange men…people at the front of the restaurant and the back of the restaurant and all the other people coming and going, looking out a window. He was in this hotel, and he had this camera set in his hands. This was a big stunt, and they got so excited the men behind him were going to sit in the stands at that end, and the camera kept getting more and more moving as the picture was shot.”
On the way back to Washington, D.C., Kubrick was standing in front of a camera. One of the men was holding a tripod: you could tell he was using them. And then a second man stepped out to get hold of them, grabbed them and threw them over the screen, and the guy threw about the camera, which fell back on him. You know, people said he was going to do this like the next set of American movies, but it was never happening. And then another man had a camera for him: this