Take The Last Picture Show. You need only be sufficiently distracted, as I was, to see it as a 1950s original production: a good film of manners and the ambience of small town America, etc. A slight suspicion: it was a little too good, bett…Cool, cold pleasure which is not even aesthetic properly speaking: functional pleasure, equational pleasure, pleasure of machination. We need only think of Visconti (The Leopard, Senso, etc., which recall Barry Lyndon in certain respects) i…
Barry Lyndon
fictional · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Barry Lyndon appears as a Kubrick film invoked to illustrate a particular aesthetic strategy—one of cold, functional visual composition that prioritizes architectural and chromatic precision over emotional or narrative warmth. The excerpt positions it alongside Visconti's work to distinguish a modernist cinematic machinery from more conventional approaches to mise-en-scène, suggesting how calculation and visual control can become instruments of meaning-making rather than transparency. In the context of this seminar, Lyndon exemplifies how computational or algorithmic thinking about image-making (Kubrick's obsessive framing, lighting geometry) prefigures or models the kind of systematic control that defines contemporary AI aesthetics.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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