Content area
Full Text
. . . The film. . . manages to make poetry out of doorknobs, breakfasts, furniture. Trivial details, of which everyone's universe is made, can once again be transmuted into metaphor, contributing to the imaginative act.
. . . Emphasized or not, invited or not, the physical world through the intensifications of photography never stops insisting on its presence and relevance.
Stanley Kauffmann1
Because cinema visuals are intellectually clumsy (having no prepositions, conjunctions or grammer to speak of) the commercial cinema's natural tendency, at least in its present stage of development, is to disguise metaphors as props, decor, setting, plot-symbols, locale, and so on.
Raymond Durgnat2
In his adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick has purposefully used the film's decor to cinematically say what the novel only suggests: Art and Violence are two sides of the same coin, both the expression of that anti-social urge toward self-definition which equally characterizes the artist and the criminal. Through the commentative function of the film's decor which is most emphatically located in the various forms of fine art present in the mise-en-scene, Kubrick is able to articulate and develop this theme in a manner unavailable to the novelist in general, and to Burgess in particular, since the latter has limited himself to the confined interests and selective vision of his first-person narrator. The film is full of paintings and statuary which are not present in the novel. And, whether they be classical, baroque, rococco, impressionist, or modern, these works of fine art most often make their presence felt on the screen in the same moments and in the same frames with acts of violence or with violent characters. Conversely, in those scenes and in those frames which convey the most institutionalized, the most socialized, aspects of the film's futuristic world, works of art are significantly absent or they are purposefully mocked by the presence of poor and presumptuous imitations. Thus, the decor with its particular emphasis on painting and sculpture is a significant element of A Clockwork Orange and its use in that film should make us aware of the significance of decor to all films. As well, because the film has been adapted from a novel, its translation to the screen allows...