A Clockwork Orange: The Making of Stanley Kubrick's Visionary Masterpiece

Late this evening, the Arte channel is broadcasting Stanley Kubrick's visionary masterpiece.

While waiting to (re)discover Stanley Kubrick's nightmarish and provocative dystopia, let's take a look back at his creation.

Exiled in England since the filming of his adaptation of Lolita In the early 1960s (the criticism of puritanical America having got the better of his genius), the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made his fourth film in the London area in 1971 after Lolita SO, Dr. Strangelove (1964), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

To follow up his science fiction masterpiece (still considered today as one of the greatest films of all time), while he was no longer making progress on his project for a fresco on Napoleon, Kubrick set his sights on the British author's futuristic novel Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orangefirst published in 1962 – which traces the fate of Alex, a young teenager fascinated by rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven, and who hangs around at night in an unhealthy urban city with his three famous droogies in search of adrenaline.

Everything has already been more or less written or said about this satire of modern society, this avant-garde analysis of our times, even the filmmaker confided about his film at the time of its release, in the pages of Saturday Review :

“Clockwork Orange is a social satire about whether behavioral psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons that could be used by a totalitarian government seeking to impose vast control over its citizens and turn them into little more than robots.”

The least we can say is that more than forty years after its release, the reflections raised by Burgess and then Kubrick are still as relevant as ever, particularly with regard to Jihad or any other form of extremism.

Tonight, Arte is broadcasting this timeless masterpiece in the second part of the evening at 11:50 p.m., and it will be an opportunity for you to immerse yourself in Alex's daily life (Malcolm McDowell), of his impulses and his thoughts.

But before that, we invite you now to discover the making of the film, a true immersion in the creation of one of the greatest works in history, which takes us for almost half an hour into the brilliant mind of the greatest director of the seventh art in the company of speakers who worked alongside him as Sydney Pollack, Steven Spielbergor George Lucas, to learn everything about this legendary film. And all in original version with subtitles.