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 that exemplifies a particular aesthetic mode—cool, functional, computational pleasure rather than traditional aesthetic experience—within discussions of how cinema engages with visual formalism and machinic logic. The reading invokes it alongside Visconti's work to mark a distinction in how certain directors orchestrate visual systems, suggesting it matters here as a case study in how mechanical precision in filmmaking (particularly Kubrick's use of lighting and composition) mirrors or anticipates algorithmic aesthetics. This positions the film as relevant to the course's concern with how artistic systems can embody or prefigure cybernetic principles.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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