Nathan on Malick
Many people love Terrence Malick's work, but not enough love his most recent efforts. The man translated Heidegger's Essence of Reasons into English in 1969 and famously vanished after his 1978 masterpiece Days of Heaven, missing from the public eye for twenty years, leaving behind one 1979 interview in which he told Sight & Sound, "I'm being watched. That could trip me up."
Smart man, that Mr. Malick. What little exposure I've had to fame has already caused its entanglements, and for films as pure in vision as Malick makes, one needs a clarity of mind and soul that simply isn't possible in Hollywood, nor so many other places. One day I'll perhaps write more than this piece on why I chose to leave L.A.
Watching his 1998 The Thin Red Line, I was elevated to a higher awareness of so many things, from the realization of how much more cinema could be than a storytelling device to larger matters– the nature of memory and dreams, the deep-seated beauty of acceptance, and wonder, and awe. Terrence Malick photographs light as if it were a presence, because I believe he finds, as I do, that it is; light has been a metaphor for truth in all human societies, and following its guiding silence in spaces both vast and intimate has led to revelations of thought and beauty I dare not reduce to words here.
In 2005 I was thrilled to see he had a new film coming out (if you've seen none of his pictures, start with The New World); you must understand that at that point Malick had only made three films in thirty years. I thought we would only get four films total, but beginning in 2011, when his The Tree of Life won the Palme d'Or (watch the extended version), he would enter a new phase of abundance, releasing a film about every two years for the next decade and doubling his entire filmography in what felt like the blink of an eye.
This is when viewers began to diverge in their estimation of him. When his films were sparse, people knew not to take them for granted. But his "late period," which I consider my favorite work of his, began to draw labels like "indulgent" and "pretentious."
Fascinating.
Have you ever noticed how "indulgent," when used as an epithet by a critic deriding a film, is almost always an indicator of creative visual schema, and "pretentious" so often refers to artists trying to do something they actually find of great value to them? Don't you want a unique authorial voice, a director who's actually trying to do something with the medium? If film is a visual art, do you then ridicule a director who chooses to speak to his audience through visuals, conveying as much meaning with the camera as anything else? Sometimes these terms have value, as when a director's reach exceeds his grasp, but have you noticed how the words are so often used by people who don't make films?
Speaking about all art mediums, I would rather see imperfect attempts than successful banality. Why not reach for the stars, the most and best we can express?
Malick's films continue, more than ever, to be spiritual experiences for me. There has always been value in cherishing that which is ordinary, and I consider his new prolificness an impossible blessing. No other films look or sound like Malick films, and none reach me so potently with their eye for beauty in every corner of existence, their recognition of deep and gentle wisdom; things it's better to experience than speak about. I've always felt cinema could do so much more than tell stories, and feel it has largely been underused given its power. Malick's late films fulfill the promise of what cinema can be, where image, word, music and sound reach a level of fusion and abstraction that result in an interiority and concrete communication other films can only pretend to.
His "zig-zag" trilogy (comprised of To the Wonder, Knights Cups and Song to Song) is his first set of films to take place completely during the modern era, and the lessons, observations and themes they contain fill me with exhilaration and ruminative joy. Not to mention those stupefying natural-light 35mm images, all shot by the incomparable Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki and redolent with a sublimity no other art form can reproduce.
If you're wondering why exactly it is no other films look like these, Malick and Chivo came up with a set of parameters for image capture (playfully called "the dogma" and detailed in full in this essential ASC article), including always shooting in natural light, using deep focus and deep stop, wide-angle primes, never underexposing, no front-lighting, filters or zooms, going for only crosslight during magic hour, avoiding primary colors, and backlighting whenever possible. (You'll see a lot these same ideas at work in my photography, which I'm the first to admit is inspired by the approach here.)
As well, the intricate editing plays just as large a role; infinite meaning is created in these endlessly unexpected juxtapositions. It may look haphazard, but it isn't– at least a year is spent on editing each film alone, and Hidden Life took three years to edit. The implications of each cut are carefully considered, and sourced from a massive amount of footage; Malick shoots a lot, searching for accidents, often tossing out the script entirely, giving us instead moments of acting truth impossible to manufacture (the butterfly on Chastain in Tree being a famous example). Notice how he surprises us, never cutting back an "A" composition in a dialogue scene with an A and B shot of 2 actors; the third shot will always be from a new angle. He breaks from this only once for a climactic dialogue scene in Hidden Life, to excellent dramatic effect. You know what a jump cut is; an elliptical edit is a cut that similarly removes time, but where the following shot is from a different angle. Almost every cut in post-New World Malick is elliptical. I find this heady rush of image and meaning intoxicating.
These essays are mostly here because there hasn't been enough written about their brilliance, and I humbly offer my pieces until those with more insight than I begin to come forward. The links below, on each of the trilogy's films, plus his latest, lead to my essays, trailers, and links to relevant writings by others I find enlightening. People haven't caught on to these pictures yet, but they will. You heard it first here.
Enjoy!
Smart man, that Mr. Malick. What little exposure I've had to fame has already caused its entanglements, and for films as pure in vision as Malick makes, one needs a clarity of mind and soul that simply isn't possible in Hollywood, nor so many other places. One day I'll perhaps write more than this piece on why I chose to leave L.A.
Watching his 1998 The Thin Red Line, I was elevated to a higher awareness of so many things, from the realization of how much more cinema could be than a storytelling device to larger matters– the nature of memory and dreams, the deep-seated beauty of acceptance, and wonder, and awe. Terrence Malick photographs light as if it were a presence, because I believe he finds, as I do, that it is; light has been a metaphor for truth in all human societies, and following its guiding silence in spaces both vast and intimate has led to revelations of thought and beauty I dare not reduce to words here.
In 2005 I was thrilled to see he had a new film coming out (if you've seen none of his pictures, start with The New World); you must understand that at that point Malick had only made three films in thirty years. I thought we would only get four films total, but beginning in 2011, when his The Tree of Life won the Palme d'Or (watch the extended version), he would enter a new phase of abundance, releasing a film about every two years for the next decade and doubling his entire filmography in what felt like the blink of an eye.
This is when viewers began to diverge in their estimation of him. When his films were sparse, people knew not to take them for granted. But his "late period," which I consider my favorite work of his, began to draw labels like "indulgent" and "pretentious."
Fascinating.
Have you ever noticed how "indulgent," when used as an epithet by a critic deriding a film, is almost always an indicator of creative visual schema, and "pretentious" so often refers to artists trying to do something they actually find of great value to them? Don't you want a unique authorial voice, a director who's actually trying to do something with the medium? If film is a visual art, do you then ridicule a director who chooses to speak to his audience through visuals, conveying as much meaning with the camera as anything else? Sometimes these terms have value, as when a director's reach exceeds his grasp, but have you noticed how the words are so often used by people who don't make films?
Speaking about all art mediums, I would rather see imperfect attempts than successful banality. Why not reach for the stars, the most and best we can express?
Malick's films continue, more than ever, to be spiritual experiences for me. There has always been value in cherishing that which is ordinary, and I consider his new prolificness an impossible blessing. No other films look or sound like Malick films, and none reach me so potently with their eye for beauty in every corner of existence, their recognition of deep and gentle wisdom; things it's better to experience than speak about. I've always felt cinema could do so much more than tell stories, and feel it has largely been underused given its power. Malick's late films fulfill the promise of what cinema can be, where image, word, music and sound reach a level of fusion and abstraction that result in an interiority and concrete communication other films can only pretend to.
His "zig-zag" trilogy (comprised of To the Wonder, Knights Cups and Song to Song) is his first set of films to take place completely during the modern era, and the lessons, observations and themes they contain fill me with exhilaration and ruminative joy. Not to mention those stupefying natural-light 35mm images, all shot by the incomparable Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki and redolent with a sublimity no other art form can reproduce.
If you're wondering why exactly it is no other films look like these, Malick and Chivo came up with a set of parameters for image capture (playfully called "the dogma" and detailed in full in this essential ASC article), including always shooting in natural light, using deep focus and deep stop, wide-angle primes, never underexposing, no front-lighting, filters or zooms, going for only crosslight during magic hour, avoiding primary colors, and backlighting whenever possible. (You'll see a lot these same ideas at work in my photography, which I'm the first to admit is inspired by the approach here.)
As well, the intricate editing plays just as large a role; infinite meaning is created in these endlessly unexpected juxtapositions. It may look haphazard, but it isn't– at least a year is spent on editing each film alone, and Hidden Life took three years to edit. The implications of each cut are carefully considered, and sourced from a massive amount of footage; Malick shoots a lot, searching for accidents, often tossing out the script entirely, giving us instead moments of acting truth impossible to manufacture (the butterfly on Chastain in Tree being a famous example). Notice how he surprises us, never cutting back an "A" composition in a dialogue scene with an A and B shot of 2 actors; the third shot will always be from a new angle. He breaks from this only once for a climactic dialogue scene in Hidden Life, to excellent dramatic effect. You know what a jump cut is; an elliptical edit is a cut that similarly removes time, but where the following shot is from a different angle. Almost every cut in post-New World Malick is elliptical. I find this heady rush of image and meaning intoxicating.
These essays are mostly here because there hasn't been enough written about their brilliance, and I humbly offer my pieces until those with more insight than I begin to come forward. The links below, on each of the trilogy's films, plus his latest, lead to my essays, trailers, and links to relevant writings by others I find enlightening. People haven't caught on to these pictures yet, but they will. You heard it first here.
Enjoy!
On To the Wonder: The trick is to realize Ben Affleck isn't the main character, despite his marquee name status. Try watching the film through Olga's eyes. The cut joining the last two shots evokes the world for me.
On Knight of Cups: This picture conveys everything about why I left Hollywood with a delicate sensitivity I've felt but never shared with others, and with an uncritical generosity of its gaze I find centering.
On Song to Song: Malick refines his pure cinema approach to perfection here. As with the above– analysis and links to further reading.
On A Hidden Life: there's a beauty in the character's (and by extension the film's) refusal to explain itself. It draws us in repeatedly with its incomprehensibility, the unknowable size and shape of existence, goodness, and the human soul. I see the film through Fani (the wife's) eyes, as she is as much a protagonist as Franz.
I also cover Malick in greater detail in my thesis– more here.
I also cover Malick in greater detail in my thesis– more here.