##################### THE NOVEL
Here are a couple of interesting items written by Burgess:
The book was called A Clockwork Orange for various reasons. I
had always loved the Cockney phrase 'queer as a clockwork orange', that being the queerest
thing imaginable, and I had saved up the expression for years, hoping some day to use it
as a title. When I began to write the book, I saw that this title would be appropriate for
a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like
a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness. But I had also served in Malaya, where the
word for a human being is orang.
(From 1985, Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, London, 1978)
These juveniles were primarily intrigued by the language of the book,
which became a genuine teenage argot, and they liked the title. They did not realise that
it was an old Cockney expression used to describe anything queer, not necessarily sexually
so, and they hit on the secondary meaning of an organic entity, full of juice and
sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton. The youth of Malaysia,
where I had lived for nearly six years, saw that orange contained orang,
meaning in Malay a human being. In Italy, where the book became Arancia
all' Orologeria, it was assumed that the title referred to a grenade, an
alternative to the ticking pineapple.
(From the prefatory note to A Clockwork
Orange: A play with music, Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987)
The name of the antihero is Alex, short for Alexander, which means 'defender of men'. Alex
has other connotations - a lex: a law (unto himself); a lex(is): a
vocabulary (of his own); a (Greek) lex: without a law. Novelists tend to
give close attention to the names they attach to their characters. Alex is a rich
and noble name, and I intended its possessor to be sympathetic, pitiable, and insidiously
identifiable with us, as opposed to them.
(From 1985,
Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, London, 1978)
This was a decision of the American publishers and in no way endorsed by Mr Burgess. The publishers also included a Nadsat glossary, which was also against Mr Burgess' wishes.
Perhaps, given American mores and morality, the publishers thought that having Alex (of his own free will this time) become "good" wasn't the done thing and so snipped that chapter. Burgess didn't like this editing not only because of the general principle of not tampering with an authors work, who wrote the book the be read as a whole; but also because, in fact, Burgess wrote the book to have exactly 21 chapters (as three sections of seven chapters), as this number has some significance for the work.
The presence of the Nadsat glossary was also against Burgess' wishes as it reduced the significance of the use of Nadsat in the book. By using Nadsat, Burgess hoped it would force the reader to see beyond the mere description of the various violent acts, as this would tend to straight-jacket their feelings for Alex, and therefore prevent them from uncovering any deeper meanings behind the work.
The first point to be made is that A Clockwork Orange isn't banned in the UK. That is, the censors/film-classifiers have not stopped the film from being shown in Britain. What is the case is that the person who owns the rights to the film (Mr Kubrick ) is simply not allowing it to be released. In a sense, it is a freedom of speech issue, but in this case, it is Mr Kubrick who is exercising his right not to speak, rather than people or the government supressing this right.
When A Clockwork Orange opened in London (uncut) in early 1972, it caused an immediate furore (largely because it opened at more or less the same time as other exceptionally violent but critically-acclaimed films like Straw Dogs and The Devils). Although the critical response was overwhelmingly favourable, the tabloid newspapers went ballistic, demanding that the film be banned and blaming it for every single act of juvenile delinquency that occurred during the period.
While the film played very successfully in England for nearly a year, it was then pulled from release in that country by Kubrick and Warner Brothers after a number of copy-cat crimes were blamed on the film by police, judges, and defendants. In one case a woman was raped by a gang of youths who sang "Singing in the Rain." Another case involved a savage beating by a 16 year old dressed in an Alex-like costume.
Kubrick deliberately delayed the wide release of the film (it played in just one cinema for over a year) in order to try to tone down the hysteria and to appear to be taking a responsible adult attitude towards his film. However, when the film finally went on general release throughout the country in 1973, the hysteria flared up again. Finally, in August, Kubrick decided that he'd had enough, and withdrew the film from UK distribution. As the owner of the UK rights, permission for any screening of the film (including private screenings) has to be sought from Kubrick himself. He has never granted it - not even when the National Film Theatre staged an otherwise complete Kubrick retrospective in 1979 (the time people first started to realise that something was wrong - it normally takes a few years for people to notice a film has disappeared!)
The story came under the spotlight a couple of years ago when the Scala Cinema was fined a thousand pounds for breaching Kubrick's copyright after they showed the film unannounced in 1992. The fact that the cinema closed two months after the court hearing has caused many people to jump to the rather hasty conclusion that the film was responsible - a rumour that has found its way into at least one book already! This is in fact untrue - the Scala had been doomed for a number of years for a number of reasons, largely to do with increasing rent, declining box-office income and the local council banning vital fund-raising parties on safety grounds.
Kubrick has described this film as: "...a social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioral psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots."
Kubrick shot most of the film on locations found by searching through back issues of architectural magazines. Alex's municipal flatblock was filmed at Thamesmead. The exterior of the writer's house was a home in Oxfordshire, the interior was another home in Radlett. The record shop was a Chelsea drugstore. Only 4 sets were built for the film: the Korova Milkbar, the prison reception area, and the mirrored hallway and bathroom of the writer's house. The sets were built in a factory in Borehamwood, near the old MGM studios.
Lightweight cameras, faster lenses, and improved sound equipment made filming on location much easier. The Sennheiser Mk. 12 microphones worked so well that Kubrick did not have to dub any dialogue for this film. (A lapel microphone is visible on the tramp in the scene where he recognizes Alex by the Thames.) About 85% of the film was shot either by replacing existing location light fixtures with photographic floodlights or by using lightweight Lowell 1,000-watt quartz lights bounced off ceilings or reflective umbrellas. This often freed Kubrick to shoot in any direction around a room without worrying about capturing lighting equipment in the frame. The scene with the cat woman is a good example.
I libri di Burgess su Amazon.com
homepage di L i t e r ae . STANLEY KUBRICK ...Immagini dal film A Clockwork Orange