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Overview
Michaels's critical approach explores Malick’s synthesis of the romance of mythic American experience and the aesthetics of European art film. He pays particular attention to paradigmatic moments: the billboard sequence in Badlands, the opening credits for Days of Heaven, the philosophical colloquies between Witt and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, and the epilogue of The New World. Michaels also sheds light on the two dark decades separating Days of Heaven from The Thin Red Line, when the director mostly lived as an expatriate in Paris. Two 1975 interviews with the famously elusive Malick round out the volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252075759 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2008 |
| Series: | Contemporary Film Directors |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d) |
| Age Range: | 3 Months |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Terrence Malick
By Lloyd Michaels
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Lloyd MichaelsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07575-9
CHAPTER 1
Terrence Malick: A Cinema in Front of Our Eyes
Is there another American artist—let alone an American filmmaker—who has so regularly been granted genius status after creating such a discontinuous and limited body of work? One who has managed to be revered without ever being popular, admired while remaining essentially unknown? Among writers, Thomas Pynchon comes to mind, but his literary output, while clearly not prolific, has remained relatively steady. Stanley Kubrick, the director most often cited in articles about Terrence Malick's career and cinematic vision, seems positively prolific and transparent by comparison. Malick's achievement in his four films to date seems without precedent, just as the trajectory of his life as a filmmaker—writer, director, and producer—appears unique.
The erratic pattern of his directorial output—four movies in thirty-five years, with a twenty-year hiatus between his second and third films—combined with his early academic training in philosophy and reputation for intellectual brilliance and reclusiveness have set Malick apart from the celebrated generation of young American directors who emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. Despite belonging to this accomplished group of contemporaries, he has frequently been described (again like Kubrick) as an essentially European filmmaker, with a narrative pace, visual style, and thematic opaqueness more akin to the continental art cinema than the New Hollywood. Readers looking for revelations about "the Runaway Genius" will be better served by Peter Biskind's eponymous article in Vanity Fair than by my introduction to the art of Malick's cinema. Instead, as the first study to incorporate all four of his features, this work will try to define certain recurrent concerns and habitual practices that mark his production to date. In keeping with the director's own educational and cultural background, my critical approach will be largely formalist, treating Malick as an American auteur and concentrating on his work as aesthetic objects of contemplation.
The long-anticipated appearance of The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005) confirmed Malick's original filmmaking gifts as well as his artistic "integrity," understood as a reluctance to compromise his vision to accommodate the simpler tastes of a new generation of multiplex audiences or the practical suggestions of his crew and an adamant refusal to promote or explain his work. "Malick would never let anyone do anything that went against his own ideas," the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros has reported (237). Despite his absence from premieres, festivals, and even the supplemental materials that now sell many DVDs, both films advertised the maverick "Malick" brand rather than their featured performers (an all-star cast in The Thin Red Line) or stories (the Pocahontas myth in The New World). As a marketing strategy, an updated version of what Timothy Corrigan has labeled "the commerce of auteurism," this appeal to curiosity about the director was probably doomed to fail. Few regular moviegoers remembered or ever heard of Terrence Malick, and those who did were as likely as not to ignore his resurrection. In any case, like Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), neither "comeback" film met box-office expectations. The critical reviews, while respectful, were rarely enthusiastic. For many cinephiles and professional critics alike, it seemed that Malick's time had passed.
If there is an anachronistic quality to these two most recent films, it may be their avoidance of special effects and computer-generated imagery, on the one hand, and their insistence on visual and auditory spectacle, on the other hand. Malick's movies stubbornly remain a theatrical medium, intended for magnified projection with multichannel sound. With their languorous narrative pace, arresting visual design, simple story lines, and relative paucity of dialogue, they do not comport well with the viewing habits of most Blockbuster patrons; instead, commentators regularly link each of Malick's four films with the aesthetics of the silent cinema. Hwanhee Lee, for example, foregrounds their appeal to "awe and wonder before any impulse to understand and interpret" their meaning. For all their visual attractions, however, Malick's features always aspire to go beyond the visceral effects of his New Hollywood contemporaries. His remains a cerebral cinema at the same time as it approaches, visually and aurally, the sublime.
Thematically as well as stylistically, The Thin Red Line and The New World contribute to a sense of coherent and continuous activity despite the prolonged interruption that marks Malick's career. Although it is difficult to interpret any single work as expressing his own philosophical or ideological perspective, the last two films do seem to clarify his ongoing thematic preoccupations (most obviously, the grandeur and indifference of nature) and consistent directorial techniques (most obviously, pervasive voiceover). In addition to defining a unified body of work—an oeuvre—The Thin Red Line and The New World suggest a personal dimension to Malick's filmmaking that is less evident in his first two films. Epic in scope, they nevertheless center on a crisis of individual ambition, a theme only briefly glimpsed in Badlands and Days of Heaven. In Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) and especially Captain Smith (Colin Farrell), Malick creates two talented, alienated leaders whose accomplishments in service to a national mission come at the price of lost years of fruitless striving. In the 1970s, he had portrayed Kit (Martin Sheen) in Badlands and Bill (Richard Gere) in Days of Heaven with a detachment less strongly felt in the later films. For the first time, one senses the director's identification with his most recent protagonist, Captain John Smith, whose quest for glorious discoveries results in professional disappointment as his boundless projects go un-financed and personal isolation as he travels a narrow path alone.
The Thin Red Line and The New World also depict more directly than the 1970s films Malick's interest in certain national myths as they shape the destinies of his major characters. Rather than being defined in psychological terms, his protagonists are all to some degree products of economic and cultural forces that they are powerless to control and that they imperfectly comprehend, but the particular historical circumstances of World War II and the founding of the Jamestown colony play a more prominent role in shaping the more recent narratives. Days of Heaven takes place within a discernible time and place in American history, but, as its title suggests, its mythic dimensions are more biblical than national. Although ostensibly situated in the Texas Panhandle (shot in Alberta), its landscape evokes the Fertile Crescent and Eden rather than any particular location in the American Southwest. The New World also conjures images of Eden—indeed, each of Malick's films incorporates its own fragile Paradise—but never loses touch with its specific setting, the Virginia settlement at Jamestown (where the film was actually shot), framing the epic narrative with dissolves of historical maps of the region in the opening and closing credits. As the Badlands and the wheat ranch are largely symbolic landscapes, Kit and Bill remain character types, influenced by images and values of American popular culture: Kit tries to give shape to his dissociated personality by imitating James Dean, the rebel without a cause; Bill is seduced and betrayed by capitalism's promise of "the big score." Still, their alienation and criminality are constructed as universal issues, derived at least as much from Albert Camus and Emile Zola as from Nicholas Ray or John Steinbeck. In The Thin Red Line and especially The New World, the fate of the American nation more firmly asserts priority over the fate of individuals.
Perhaps the most consistent quality among Malick's four features to date has been their resistance to the irony, fragmentation, and lack of conviction that characterizes postmodernism as well as much of modern cinema. Instead, to apply terms from literary history rather than the more customary philosophical labels that have been attached to his work, Malick seems a stubbornly romantic artist in depicting the isolated individual's desire for transcendence amidst established social institutions, the grandeur and untouched beauty of nature, the competing claims of instinct and reason, and the lure of the open road. He is no less a naturalist, however, in his portrayal of the indifference of nature and the determinism that rules man's fate. James Morrison and Thomas Schur have described this paradoxical aspect of Malick's art as an attempt, following Martin Heidegger, to redefine transcendence as quotidian experience (100). When looking for influences on his sensibility—and everyone has—one might as well call on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman as Heidegger. Malick's filmmaking is often called visionary or poetic, which John Orr identifies as recording a "sacred immediacy, in which advanced technologies have recovered the possibility of the sacred in a secular world" ("Cinema" 135). This impulse takes us back to American transcendentalism and Emerson's ecstatic vision of becoming a "transparent eyeball" in the midst of the Concord woods, to which Malick adds Emily Dickinson's melancholy awareness that "Perception of an Object costs / Precise the Object's loss—" (No. 1071). In contrast to modernism's paradigmatic wasteland or postmodernism's simulacrum, Malick's cinema "restores the beauty and power of the image as a carrier of meaning" (Mottram 14). That meaning may appear persistently undecipherable or unrecoverable, but the camera's fixed attention to the sheer gorgeousness or isolated perfection of the imagery it records insists on a resilient significance as it commands in the audience an irresistible awe. To return to the language of American literary romanticism, like the opening chapter of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Malick's films demand, "Surely all this is not without meaning."
Absent either an authoritative narrator among their many voiceovers or the testimony of the auteur himself, and given their sporadic production and the absence of a critical consensus about their value, these four films require viewers to see and think without external interventions. Perhaps this is their "philosophical" quality. Malick's coterie audience and the opacity of his style have led some critics to regard him as an elitist, but Stanley Cavell's description of modern art gets closer to the truth about his former student's achievement to date: "While the community of serious art is small, it is not exclusive. It is esoteric, but the secret is open to anyone" (14). By eschewing such technical means as rapid editing and special effects, Malick restores the spectator's sense, in Cavell's terms, that everything is "in front of [our] eyes" (xxii), awaiting our making sense of the experience. Such is the project of this little book.
Marks of the Auteur
With four features now completed, Malick has at least created a critical mass sufficient to consider their common attributes as constituting a sustained artistic vision. Because he has written as well as directed each of his screenplays, we may justifiably identify him as the author of his films. But if Malick's cinema lends itself to auteurist analysis, he remains a filmmaker almost without precedent or influence. While younger filmmakers like Harmony Korine, Christopher Munch, and David Gordon Green have been cited as acolytes and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) described as an homage to Badlands, Malick's own work stands apart (Morrison and Schur 30–31). Like Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Eric Rohmer, he has produced a genre unto himself, one best described simply by applying his name. His signature can be discerned in several recurrent concerns beyond the two formal qualities of his work already mentioned: the grandiose representation of nature and the distinctive employment of subjective voiceover narration.
Whatever their ultimate evaluation of the quality of a particular work, reviewers have repeatedly acknowledged Malick's ambition and assurance. The director whose cinema may most closely parallel Malick's own is his near contemporary, Werner Herzog. Especially Herzog's earlier films—Signs of Life, Fata Morgana, Aguirre, Wrath of God, and Hearts of Glass—reverberate with the same audacious drive to "'get images nobody had ever seen before,'" which a colleague described as Malick's obsessive motivation (qtd. in Biskind, "Runaway" 204). Herzog also shares Malick's epic impulse, along with his tendency to employ remarkable musical sound tracks and to depict alienated, primitive, or dissociated characters without resorting to psychological explanations for their behavior.
Like Herzog, Malick makes movies about history but also about the time of their own production. Badlands, for example, is set in the 1950s and based on real-life characters and events, the killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but the protagonists more clearly reflect Arthur Penn's version of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker than their actual progenitors. Similarly, The Thin Red Line, while ostensibly depicting the American assault on Guadalcanal, hardly names its specific geographical location and, as John Hodgkins suggests, reflects the ideology of the first Persian Gulf War rather than the Second World War. Malick's retreat from postmodernism, it seems, involves eliding the course of history with a meditation on universal conflict and change.
Another index of this interest in the universal aspect of human experience can be found in Malick's construction of character. His protagonists, even when they are recognizable historical personages, like Kit (Starkweather) or Captain Smith, deliberately lack psychological depth, so much so that they are often barely recognizable as individuals. It is possible, for example, to watch Days of Heaven without being aware of a single character's proper name. Because the actors cast as enlisted men physically resemble one another, rarely converse, and are usually seen in full uniform, it can be difficult to distinguish the individual soldiers in The Thin Red Line, while in The New World, one of the three major characters, John Rolfe, is never identified by name. In both later films, the heavily accented or overlapping dialogue and multiple nondiegetic voices further blur the recognition of individual personalities.
By deliberately creating flat characters without background or other personal traits, Malick imposes a distanciation that requires the audience to engage with a film's (increasingly metaphysical) ideas or to view human figures as part of a larger design instead of identifying with the dramatic conflicts of its characters. His oppositional pairs, like Bill and the Farmer, Witt and Welsh, Smith and Rolfe, thus may "appear as objects and function metaphorically" (Morrison and Schur 94) without fully involving our sympathies. Unable to recognize the heroes of character-driven classical Hollywood narratives, Malick's audience may be uncertain how to characterize these figures, cautiously responding to his protagonists with platitudes like the deputy's, "You're quite an individual, Kit," at the conclusion of Badlands, and wondering about the manacled prisoner's final cryptic expression: "Think they'll take that into consideration?" However seriously we may regard these characters or consider their behavior, they remain set apart from us, viewed almost exclusively in long shot and understood as representatives rather than idiosyncratic human beings with an existence beyond the diegesis.
Beginning with Kit, Malick has created a series of major characters—Bill and the Farmer, Witt, Pocahontas—all of whom die young, yet with a placidity that belies their doomed fate. Kit responds to the deputy's concluding compliment with a self-satisfied grin as Holly (Sissy Spacek) describes his execution in flat voiceover; Bill's flight from the armed posse ends with a startling cut to a silent, slow-motion, underwater view of his final moment in the shallow waters, followed by a long shot of the dead man's float. What was probably perceived as a measure of Kit's pathology and was conveyed through technique in Days of Heaven becomes in the last two films a more self-conscious evocation of something spiritual and self-fulfilling, approximating grace. In contrast to the grisly, absurd death of Sergeant Keck earlier in The Thin Red Line, Witt faces his execution at the hands of the Japanese with a transcendence that fulfills his yearning to die with the same tranquility as his mother. Pocahontas's premature passing takes place off-camera, unexpectedly, following her self-composed final meeting with Smith and calm return to her family. "Mother," she says before falling fatally ill, "now I know where you live." Although her fate may seem tragic given the strange turns her life has taken, Malick confirms her Native American spirituality by avoiding a deathbed scene and denying the audience its attendant catharsis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Terrence Malick by Lloyd Michaels. Copyright © 2009 Lloyd Michaels. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments, xi,TERRENCE MALICK: A CINEMA IN FRONT OF OUR EYES, 1,
Badlands, 20,
Days of Heaven, 39,
The Thin Red Line, 56,
The New World, 78,
INTERVIEW BY BEVERLY WALKER IN SIGHT AND SOUND (1975), 101,
INTERVIEW BY MICHEL CIMENT IN POSITIF (1975), 105,
Filmography, 115,
Bibliography, 117,
Index, 121,