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Film-Philosophy International
Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615) Vol. 9 No. 33, June 2005 |
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John Bleasdale Please Make More Films: On _The Cinema of Terrence Malick_ _The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of
America_ Edited by Hannah Patterson London: Wallflower Press, 2003 ISBN 1-903364-75-2 195 pp. Defining the cinema of Terrence Malick is a dangerous
task. To begin with, in the space of thirty years he has made only three
films, each one in a different genre. This in itself shouldn't create much
difficulty. However, the films are themselves highly resistant to the generic
categories they inhabit. _Badlands_ (1973) is ostensibly a serial
killer/road/youth movie, but it is not really any of those things. Neil
Campbell describes it as 'a hybrid mix of youth rebellion text, road movie
and western'. [1] Kit murders several people but, as with Tom Ripley in
Patricia Highsmith's darkly comic novel, he so lacks everything we normally
associate with a killer -- his murders read more like elaborate accidents.
Aside from the killings, his rebelliousness is non-existent: he instructs his
imagined audience to listen to their teachers and parents and feels an
obvious desire to impress the policemen who capture him. Neither is Martin
Sheen that young -- playing a 20-something Kit while in his early thirties.
_Days of Heaven_ (1978) is another quirky brew. On one level a Greek tragedy,
and on another a meticulous reproduction of the kind of history frozen in the
still photographs of the title sequence, with its agricultural machinery and
brutal class politics. And finally _The Thin Red Line_ (1998), a film that
some critics rather ridiculously refused to define as a war film and one
baffled critic, Jonathan Romney of _The Guardian_, awarded four question
marks rather than stars. If each film is individually so combative of
categorisation then it would seem hopeless and perhaps even pointless to try
and succinctly characterise his whole output, small though it is. Hannah Patterson and many of the contributors of to _The
Cinema of Terrence Malick_ opt for a literary term: Malick's cinema is poetic
and he is a poet. And yet the phrase 'poetic cinema', like poetry itself,
immediately seems to beg more questions than it answers. John Madden, in
defining poetic cinema, offered this list: '1. Open forms, 2. Ambiguity, 3.
Expressionism, 4. Non-linearity, 5. Psychology, 7. Subjectivity, 8. Revision
of a genre.' [2] Hannah Patterson, in her Introduction to this critical
anthology, is suitably cautious in approaching the term, but decides that
three of Madden's criteria are present within the work of Terence Malick (1,
2, and 8). The book itself carries within the subtitle the phrase 'poetic
visions', yet this is indeed 'slippery', as Patterson concedes. [3] Could
Madden's criteria be said to define only poetic cinema? And why 'poetic'? Why
not 'novelistic cinema' or 'lyrical cinema'? The identification of Malick as
a 'poet', or a 'philosopher-poet', or an 'esoteric visual poet', is concerned
as much with aligning Malick to the literary as with telling us about the
type of filmmaker he is. Likewise, his reclusiveness and lack of productivity
is compared to literary figures such as Thomas Pynchon and J. D. Salinger,
and in a larger context could even be read as part of his art -- the way the
hermit novelist of Don DeLillo's _Mao II_ realises the cultural interest in
his absence has become more potent than anything else he can say. Ron Mottram
describes Malick as a director who has, 'avoided being swallowed up in the desperate enterprise
of American commercial cinema and who has truly moved to the sound of a
different drummer. That the result is the limited output of only three films
over a quarter of a century simply reinforces the uniqueness of his vision
and the seriousness of his purpose.' [4] In fact, in these days dominated 'by the simplified lies
of commercial and political speech, and the desire for diversion, Malick asks
the kind of questions that, in American intellectual history link him to such
writers as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and James
Agee'. [5] This comes close to claiming that Malick's not-making-films is a
positive bonus. The opposition of the almost literary auteur to mainstream
commercial Hollywood is reductive at best. John Orr presents a much more convincing and rewarding
setting for Malick when he compares him to one of his contemporaries, the
filmmaker Arthur Penn. Both have produced films that deconstruct the myth of
the west rather than revise the genre in the way Peckinpah, Leone, and
Eastwood have done. _Bonnie and Clyde_, with its displaced sexual energy and
charismatic bandits, is contrasted with _Badlands_ and Kit and Holly's casual
evil, asexual and vacant. _Days of Heaven_ is compared to Penn's _Missouri
Breaks_, but here the contrasts are great. Penn's socially vibrant 'filmic
theatre' and perhaps more than anything Brando's loquacious performance are
worlds away from Malick's vision, which, with its 'paucity of words and
profusion of images', seems to 'use film as a medium to invert the hallowed tradition
of all sacred texts, where the word reigns supreme'. [6] Joan McGettigan sees the film as a product of Malick's
'fundamental insistence on challenging generic expectations'. [7] A series of
familiar tropes are set up only to be revealed as empty. The Farmer, although
initially presented as enigmatic and heroic, is not a farmer at all so much
as a rich landowner, a businessman pure and simple. The relationship to the
land and the people who actually do the farming is remote and exploitative.
Male-bonding, an essential feature of Westerns such as _Shane_, between the
farmer and the outlaw Bill fails, and Bill's killing of the farmer is messy,
confused, and accidental, leading to a similarly messy and confused revenge
narrative. Bill is gunned down by indifferent policemen as he runs into the
river. As McGettigan notes, 'there is no redemption in it; it only inflicts
more pain, deepening the bitterness'. [8] Bill's death does produce one of
the most remarkable shots in a film which is rich in remarkable shots. As he
falls face first into the river, presumably at the point of dying, if not
already dead, we are given an underwater shot looking up at Bill's face as it
suddenly enters the water. Although brief, the shot is significant for
several reasons. Of course it's a nice visual analogy: Bill is leaving one
element to enter another, the image suggests. It provides Bill with a death
mask, a moment of astonishing beauty at odds with the futility and
hopelessness of his fate. This shot could also be seen as typifying Malick's
wider methodology; his telling of brutal stories with images which suggest an
almost terrible beauty, which the audience and director see but to which the
characters are for the most part blind. For the audience, Bill's death is
strangely a beautiful moment (the attack of the locusts likewise). The landscapes of Malick's films make them a rewarding
viewing experience, but the characters generally have a much more pragmatic
view of the world around them. Characters in all Malick's films tend to live
and eat and die outside. Houses and shelters by comparison are places of
death: the tomb-like house in _Days of Heaven_; Holly's home in which her
father is killed and which is burned down; the house in which Cato dies; and
even the machine gun dugout of _The Thin Red Line_. Despite or perhaps
because of the prominence of landscape in Malick's work, we never quite know
where we are. As Ben McCann writes: 'The landscape provides us with
recognisable co-ordinates, but we are rarely given exact spatial
specificity.' [9] In _Days of Heaven_ we know there is a house and a river,
but we don't know where one stands in relation to the other. This gives us an
almost dreamlike geography -- as McCann notes: 'The very human dramas
unfolding in both landscapes attain an even greater poignancy and
reverberation when one realises they are occurring against the backdrop of a
passive landscape, one that is simultaneously detached from, and vital to,
the development of relationships, power struggles and co-existence with
nature.' [10] Unlike Malick's earlier films, the soldiers of _The Thin
Red Line_ are vitally alert to their surroundings. Being able to read the
landscape correctly has a direct connection to survival, whether it involves
calling in the precise co-ordinates for an air strike, hiding in the long
grass, or using a river to escape. Like the migrant workers in _Days of
Heaven_, the soldiers do not belong to the world they find themselves
fighting in. It is something exotic and mysterious. The bewildered infantry
man discovers the reflex of a blade of grass in the midst of battle. The main
characters seem eager to read in nature analogies for their own world view.
Just as the parasitic vines allow Colonel Tall to justify his own cruelty by
illustrating that nature is cruel, so Witt finds signs of divinity in the
beauty of his surroundings. He idolises the village where he and another
soldier are AWOL, asking a local woman why the children don't ever fight. Her
answer, which has not been heard by some critics and probably not by Witt
himself, is that Witt hasn't seen it, but they do fight. [11] Any reading of
nature (and Witt sees the villagers as natural) which seeks to validate human
ideology is going to be necessarily partial. This can also apply to Malick's
construction of nature. His promotion of the natural beauty and his specific
concentration on light effects align him to Witt rather than Tall. The
crocodile from the opening shots which could have suggested a natural origin
for malignancy is later shown captured and trussed on the back of a military
jeep; pathetically weak in comparison to the levels of wickedness and
destruction man can achieve. Any notions of the crocodile as a symbol of
moral value is another way of manhandling and trussing nature. _The Thin Red Line_ almost seems to have pushed Malick's
technique to breaking point. The voice-over narration is no longer the single
and strongly individual female voice of _Badlands_ and _Days of Heaven_
(explored by Anne Latto in her fascinating essay), but rather a regiment of
voices who mutter like a kind of philosophising universal soul, at once vital
and distracted. The landscape becomes a character in the film and the
contrast between the beauty of the world and the horror of events reaches its
most extreme manifestation with the corpse of a Japanese soldier literally
blasted into the earth. In recognition perhaps of the discontinuity of Malick's
career, the film is considered separately in the anthology. Martin Flanagan
focuses on the phenomenon of the film's release and reception. He suggests
its critical and commercial under-achievement as a result of the film's
generic unorthodoxy. Likewise, in reviewing the difference between the film
and James Jones's novel, Stacey Peebles Power concludes: 'It is a war film
that, ultimately, is no longer about war; appropriately, it *transcends* the
genre. In fact we might better classify Malick's _The Thin Red Line_ with his
other films . . . in a genre defined by the auteur rather than by the subject
matter'. [12] And yet the film is the most generically placed of Malick's
film. It quite simply is a war film. Although it has little in common with
_The Sands of Iwo Jima_ and _Saving Private Ryan_ and the other blockbuster
treatments Martin Flanagan cites, the film can be happily placed in a genre
that also includes _The Big Red One_, _Apocalypse Now_, _Paths of Glory_, and
_Das Boot_. To conclude that the film 'transcends' the genre of war film
concedes far too much to those who would limit genre to the replay of
prescriptive formulae. The last essay of the collection defines _The Thin Red
Line_ in a new genre entirely: Heideggerian cinema. Prompted by Malick's
background as a student and translator of the philosopher, Marc Furstenau and
Leslie MacAvoy read the film as a cinematic expression of Heidegger's 'poet
in destitute times'. Witt and Welsh in their discussions and voice-overs
present varying points of view of humanity in the world. But 'for the film to
be poetry and for Malick to be a poet', the authors assert, these questions
must not simply be presented, rather the director 'must present these
questions and issues in such a manner that they become questions and issues
for us. The film must poetically bring forth its subject, and since that
subject is human existence or dwelling, the film must present this dwelling,
and it must do so in a reflexive way that draws attention to this
presenting.' [11] In this way the camera glancing to heaven comes to
represent 'a measuring in which our position with reference to the gods is
assessed'. [12] Finally, I should also mention Richard Power's essay on
the music and James Wierzbicki's essay on the sound design of _Days of
Heaven_, effectively reclaiming some aural space for an artist who has been
overwhelming seen as primarily visual. This collection is the first concerted
critical appreciation of Malick and will undoubtedly provide the starting
point for what in time will no doubt be termed 'Malick studies' -- if only he
would make more films. Venice, Italy Notes 1. Neil Campbell, 'The Highway Kind: _Badlands_, Youth,
Space, and the Road', p. 37. 2. John Madden, _The Poetry of Cinema_ (Kidderminster:
Crescent Moon Publishing, 1994), p. 1. 3. Hannah Patterson, 'Introduction', p. 2. 4. Ron Mottram, 'All Things Shining: The Struggle for
Wholeness, Redemption and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick', p.
13. 5. Ibid. 6. John Orr, 'Terrence Malick and Arthur Penn: The
Western Re-Myth', p. 72. 7. Joan McGettigan, 'Days of Heaven and the Myth of the
West', p. 50. 8. Ibid., p. 60. 9. Ben McCann, 'Enjoying the Scenery: Landscape and the
Fetishisation of Nature in _Badlands_ and _Days of Heaven_', p. 83. 10. Ibid. 11. John Streamas notices it and uses it to combat the
idea that Malick is presenting the villagers as exotic savages; 'The Greatest
Generation Step Over _The Thin Red Line_', p. 145. 12. Stacey Peebles Power, 'The Other World War: Terrence
Malick's Adaptation of _The Thin Red Line_', p. 158. 13. Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy, 'Terrence
Malick's Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in _The Thin Red
Line_', p. 183. 14. Ibid. Copyright © Film-Philosophy 2005 John Bleasdale, 'Please Make More Films: On _The Cinema
of Terrence Malick_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9 no. 33, June 2005
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005/n33bleasdale>. |
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