The shot in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ when Stanley Kubrick purposefully destroyed a camera
Stanley Kubrick may have been famed for his meticulous approach towards crafting every single frame of his filmography. Still, when it came to one of the many iconic scenes from A Clockwork Orange, he opted for the simplest method of capturing the shot he wanted.
Having become so beaten down by the assorted forms of torture and reconditioning doled out in a method of trying to rehabilitate his violent and sadistic tendencies, Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge has decided he’s had enough and seeks to take his own life by jumping out of a window.
Kubrick knew exactly how he wanted to capture the footage, relaying the visual information through Alex’s perspective and point of view. It’s not the most obviously Kubrickian means of getting exactly what he wanted. However, the filmmaker nonetheless decided the most straightforward means of getting the shot was by launching the camera out of the window.
Of course, there are plenty of variables that come with taking a hefty – and expensive – piece of equipment and tossing it from a great height to the unforgiving ground below, which necessitated some extra protection so that A Clockwork Orange wouldn’t burn through a brand new camera on each take. That being said, given Kubrick’s penchant for shooting dozens upon dozens of them, it’s impressive that Alex’s first-person plunge only took six attempts.
In a 1972 interview with Sight & Sound, Kubrick outlined the deceptively simple methods he used to ensure the camera would be capable of absorbing the damage. “We bought an old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera for £40. It’s a beautiful camera, and it’s built like a battleship,” he said. “We made a number of polystyrene boxes which gave about 18 inches of protection around the camera and cut out a slice for the lens.”
With the camera buffered by plenty of polystyrene protection, the most pressing issue was to ensure its survival. “We then threw the camera off a roof. In order to get it to land lens first, we had to do this six times, and the camera survived all six drops,” he continued. “On the final one, it landed right on the lens and smashed it, but it didn’t do a bit of harm to the camera.”
The lens may have taken a pounding, but thankfully, the camera itself was left intact, although Kubrick did acknowledge that “the polystyrene was literally blasted away from it each time by the impact”.
Not only that, but he also used the very same camera the next day and didn’t find any issues with it whatsoever despite having watched it plummet from a great height no less than six times 24 hours previously, leading him to herald the Newman Sinclair as “the most indestructible camera ever made”.
