FADA Films screens A Clockwork Orange

Black and white images by Jessica de Sousa.

FADA Film screens A Clockwork Orange

Date:              Thursday 30 April.

Time:             18:30 – 19:00.

Venue:           FADA Aphitheatre.

Film Information: Stanley Kubrick dissects the nature of violence in this darkly ironic, near-future satire, adapted from Anthony Burgess's novel, complete with "Nadsat" slang. Classical music-loving proto-punk Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his "Droogs" spend their nights getting high at the Korova Milkbar before embarking on "a little of the old ultraviolence," such as terrorizing a writer, Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), and gang raping his wife (who later dies as a result). 
After Alex is jailed for bludgeoning the Cat Lady (Miriam Karlin) to death with one of her phallic sculptures, Alex submits to the Ludovico behavior modification technique to earn his freedom; he's conditioned to abhor violence through watching gory movies, and even his adored Beethoven is turned against him.

Returned to the world defenseless, Alex becomes the victim of his prior victims, with Mr. Alexander using Beethoven's Ninth to inflict the greatest pain of all. When society sees what the state has done to Alex, however, the politically expedient move is made. Casting a coldly pessimistic view on the then-future of the late '70s-early '80s, Kubrick and production designer John Barry created a world of high-tech cultural decay, mixing old details like bowler hats with bizarrely alienating "new" environments like the Milkbar.

Alex's violence is horrific, yet it is an aesthetically calculated fact of his existence; his charisma makes the icily clinical Ludovico treatment seem more negatively abusive than positively therapeutic. Alex may be a sadist, but the state's autocratic control is another violent act, rather than a solution. Released in late 1971 (within weeks of Sam Peckinpah's brutally violent Straw Dogs), the film sparked considerable controversy in the U.S. with its X-rated violence; after copycat crimes in England, Kubrick withdrew the film from British distribution until after his death. Opinion was divided on the meaning of Kubrick's detached view of this shocking future, but, whether the discord drew the curious or Kubrick's scathing diagnosis spoke to the chaotic cultural moment, A Clockwork Orange became a hit. On the heels of New York Film Critics Circle awards as Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, Kubrick received Oscar nominations in all three categories. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi.

Poster Design by Jessica de Sousa

Rating:          R (adult situations/language, nudity, violence)

Genre:           Drama, Mystery/Suspense, Classics, Science Fiction/Fantasy

Directed by:  Stanley Kubrick

Written by:     Stanley Kubrick

In theaters:    December 1971 Wide

On DVD:        June 29, 1999.

Runtime:        2hr 17 min.

Distributors   Warner Bros. 

Review by Rotten Tomatoes (as quoted above - courtesy the reviewer)

Reviews cited at IMDb

Review by Roger Ebert

Review by Kim Newman

Anthony Burgess at home in 1968, Photograph Marvin Lichtner
Time & Life Pictures Copyright Getty.

Irvine Welsh: the savage greatness of A Clockwork Orange.

The Trainspotting author pays tribute to Anthony Burgess.

Courtesy Telegraph.

Few writers, whatever the claims made for them by literary critics, ever manage to spawn big cultural moments. One who genuinely did so was Anthony Burgess, with his novel A Clockwork Orange. And, as novelists are often contrary by nature, he was highly ambivalent about this state of affairs. Burgess would disparagingly refer to the book, published in 1962, as a “novella”, regarding it as an inconsequential sliver of his Brobdingnagian canon. He blamed (and there’s really no other term for it) the book’s resonance on the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, which appeared nine years later.

My generation was obsessed with this stylistic, inventive affair, a movie that spurned both mainstream Hollywood concerns and European art house affectations to stake out a unique terrain for British independent cinema. Kubrick’s movie was an influence on the Ziggy-era David Bowie, and it was those cool credentials that made me backtrack to the film, which I first saw at a late-night screening several years after its release. As is generally the way of those things, far fewer of us had enjoyed any exposure to the novel. As a writer who has had many of his own books adapted for screen, I’m a little uncomfortable at conceding that I was in this camp.

I can recall my father giving me a copy of A Clockwork Orange in my early twenties. Like myself, he had liked the film, but informed me that the book was superior, thus acknowledging, I think, Burgess’s genius as the source of that great phenomenon…

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The building blocks of the novel were probably Burgess’s deep sense of sin, inherited from his Catholic upbringing, the post-war optimism of the educational reform he was involved in, and his fear of a state socialism that manifested itself in high taxation rates for the wealthy. Related to all this was the outdated sense of Englishness to which exiles are generally prone to cling. It’s not outlandish to suggest that he was marked by the tragedy of the assault on his first wife, or that the novel’s protagonist, Alex, gets his love of classical music straight from the author himself.

All the above factors helped to produce the momentous work that often seemed to have grown too vulgar, noisy and petulant for its scholarly author. Yet A Clockwork Orange, with its fabulously innovative vocabulary and its vitriolic enmity to any type of state-orientated attempts to reform the individual, is nowhere near as peripheral to the Burgess canon as he hoped others might perceive it to be.

In the novel, Burgess creates a dissonant, hyperreal but easily recognisable world. The violence is slapstick and theatrical, the language a beautiful challenge that pays off within the first dozen pages and just keeps on giving. William Burroughs wrote: “I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language as Mr Burgess has done here.” The “Nadsat” spoken by Alex does more than draw readers to admire his linguistic craft: it compels them to traverse the mechanics of their own comprehension, whereby they must deploy their grasp of syntax and dredge up any etymological knowledge they might possess as a means of determining the sense of those unfamiliar words from their contexts. The stylised formality and recurring bathos of Alex’s voice renders this process both sinister and occasionally hilarious.

Alex and his droogs wander an out-of-kilter city in a dystopian future Britain. Published in 1962, when we “never had it so good”, according to Prime Minister Macmillan, A Clockwork Orange is both an endorsement of and riposte to the reactionary responses to the burgeoning youth culture and the moral panic that has attended gangs of supposedly lawless, feral young men since, well, for ever. In the post-war, affluent, television age, the persistence and increasing stylisation of urban violence into youth cults seemed to present a new set of challenges to the bourgeois order.

Burgess, almost a self-made reactionary, does what all great novelists should do: antagonise bourgeois precepts, be they of the Right or the Left. With its exposé of the hypocrisy of rehabilitation, this is as much a political novel as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Much of Burgess’s enmity towards his creation stems from the missing last chapter in the American editions of the novel. His US publisher omitted it on the quasi-religious principle, beloved of that culture, that over here all is good, while across the street evil abounds. This is the childlike thinking that allows authors, film-makers and governments to create monsters in order to terrorise and manipulate the domestic population of that nation.

In this final chapter, Burgess has Alex growing out of his wrongdoings, looking back and regarding it as all a little bit sad and embarrassing – the antics of daft kids – and, as the cliché goes, determined that his own children won’t make the same mistakes he did. Basically, it’s the beautiful truth of redemption, and the stunningly mundane lesson of real life. It profoundly isn’t dramatic; but it has social truth, intellectual honesty and the intrinsic morality of proper storytelling. This raises the uncomfortable question: which is more important to the novelist? To the reader?

Burgess originally agreed to dispense with chapter 21 for money but, once he had made enough, insisted that it was reinserted. He was correct in doing this, although you can understand why Stanley Kubrick, though filming in Britain, chose to work from the US edition and omitted it. This understandably was a running sore for Burgess, though his ire was directed not at the film-maker, with whom he remained on good terms, but his American publishers. They relented subsequently, including the last chapter in later editions, with a 1986 introduction from Burgess himself titled A Clockwork Orange Resucked. This is wonderful reading, Burgess wallowing in his sententious and materialistic side, but also displaying his witty, self-deprecating and moralistic face. If a writer’s novels are their psychic children, A Clockwork Orange was the troublesome bastard who ran away from home, lived the savage life of a drug-addled, thieving wastrel and then won millions on the lottery.

The fact that it’s all the better for that proved to be a very hard one for its author to assimilate. Writers tend to indulge the necessary conceit that they do their best work in their later years: a payoff from a lifetime’s accumulation of knowledge, wisdom and skill. Like most creative artists, however, it’s often the freshness of their (relatively youthful) voice that tends to captivate the public. With his Joycean aspirations, Burgess would never be content to be described as the author of A Clockwork Orange. But while the jury has remained out on his other works, this “novella” established him as a great state-of-England writer, with a winning ear for idiolect, register, and the interplay of words and grammatical structure. However keen he might be to give Kubrick credit for the phenomenon, the omission of the end chapter aside, the movie follows the creator’s ideas and storyline pretty much verbatim.

Kubrick’s stylised terrain, down to Malcolm McDowell’s masterly portrayal of the witty, vicious, amoral persona of Alex, is lifted straight from the pages of the novel. Earthly Powers might well be the next Ulysses, but as yet very few are making such claims. Until they do, Burgess is stuck with A Clockwork Orange, a situation that around 99.9 per cent of people who put pen to paper in creative endeavours would gladly settle for. So unless a major reassessment occurs (and this is not out of the question), the suspicion remains that

Burgess did what many ageing writers do to mask their fading creativity: he steadfastly climbed the tree of knowledge. This is ironic, as it showed that he had learnt the lesson of the great historian A  J P Taylor, who reputedly once wrote on an essay the young Burgess handed in to him at Manchester University: “a lot of good ideas ruined by a lack of knowledge”. It’s a sparkling lesson in life, but perhaps not for novel-writing, where the inverse can often be the case, and writers are rendered impotent by the self-justifying desire to showcase erudition at the expense of emotional intelligence.

There are notable exceptions, but generally speaking the embracement of a reductive, conservative political philosophy seldom heralds an era of flowering for an artist. In most cases, the hardening of the political arteries is accompanied by a similar fate befalling the creative ones. In his later life, Burgess read, wrote, drank gin, despaired of bad reviews and lived the life of the jaded exile, wishing to be regarded as the grammar-school boy who’d done well, lambasting “socialist” Britain with its high rates of taxation.

For this we must forgive him, as, in A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess produced one of the great moments of 20th-century English literature. That this fact wasn’t nearly enough for him might be his own personal sadness, yet it stands as the ultimate tribute to him as a genuine writer of massive ambition. And it also perhaps calls on us to re-examine, and possibly reassess, the rest of his work.

This is an edited introduction from the new Folio Society edition of A Clockwork Orange illustrated by Ben Jones.