Episode #5 - Bilge Ebiri (Barry Lyndon)

Click here to listen to the episode

“I’d like to think while I’m watching a film, I try and approach it on its own terms. I think to myself ‘What is the review this movie wants? And what is the review this movie is going to get?’ But really it’s about asking what is the ideal version of this movie? What is it trying to be and to what extent does it get there?”

            New York Magazine film critic Bilge Ebiri loves films that he can constantly revisit and pry deeper and deeper, so Peter has no problem prying into Bilge’s own head for his conversation on The Cinephiliacs. Bilge talks about his early exposure to the Hollywood New Wave in Turkey as a young boy, and then traces his cinephilia through his desires to trying to become a filmmaker (including working on a film by Nikita Mikhalkov) before finding his voice as a critic. The two then discuss his love of films that indulge their wildest pleasures, some of his favorite auteurs (a list that includes Terrence Malick and Christopher Nolan side by side), and his own feature film, New Guy. Finally, the two dive into the truly daunting task of investigating Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Barry Lyndon and try and make sense of a film that asks us to identify with “The Past,” yet always undercuts and manifests itself as something even more audacious.

0:00-4:48 Opening / Establishing Shots – Film Vs. Digital

5:04-1:14:17 Deep Focus – Bilge Ebiri

1:15:13-1:45:31 Double Exposure – Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)

1:45:32-1:47:58 Close / Outtake

Read Bilge Ebiri at They Live By Night, Vulture, New York Magazine, Nashville Scene, Moving Image Source, and IFC.Com.

Order a DVD of New Guy on Amazon, or stream the movie with a subscription to Fandor.

Follow Bilge on Twitter.

Highlighted Articles by Bigle Ebiri
-Christopher Nolan’s “Ideas”

-The Dark Knight Rises: Part One and Part Two

-Inception: Part One and Part Two

-Language in Terrence Malick’s The New World

-Interview with the editors on The Tree of Life

-More on The Tree of Life: First Impressions, its Spirituality, and Malick’s elusiveness

-On the career of Bernardo Bertolucci

-Discovering The Conformist

-On searching and discovering Salo: Or the 120 Days of Sodom

-An interview with Gasper Noé  on Enter the Void

-The greatness of Indulgent Cinema

-On Earworm Cinema

-An overview of Yílmaz Güney

-Barry Lyndon and the Shape of Things to Come

-Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, and Kubrick’s humanism

Other Highlights from the Conversation

-The 50^th New York Film Festival

-An explanation of The Master and 70mm

-Side by Side

-A post I wrote about “artificial grain”

-A history of Yale’s Filmmaking Program

-Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia

-John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

 Notes and Corrections

-I apologize for my audio during the conversation with Bilge, which sounded fine during recording and now sounds a bit like I’m trying to share his microphone or something.

-The quote by Howard Hawks is from Hawks on Hawks by Joseph McBride, in which he says “For God’s sake, see if you can’t get some fun out of it” (157).

-At some point during out Barry Lyndon conversation, I refer to Lord Wellington, when I clearly meant Lord Bullington.

Theme Music: “Forward” by Northbound

The Cinephiliacs on Facebook

The Cinephiliacs on Twitter