Days of Heaven
Hollywood Renaissance: 1964-1976
Film scholar Adrian Martin review
Adrian Martin recalls seeing Days of Heaven upon its theatrical release:
1)"I vividly remember the experience of sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theater in 1978, encountering
this work,
2) which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 mm!)
with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and were snatched away 3)before the mind could fully grasp their plot import;
4)what we could see did not always seem matched to what we could hear.
5)Yes, there was another “couple on the run”
6)Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as the lovers Bill and Abby,
7)he fleeing a murder he inadvertently committed working in a Chicago steel mill,
8)she pretending to be his sister during the wheat harvest season in the Texas panhandle near the turn of
the twentieth century
9)but this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant or ironic but positively cosmic.
10) And there was so much more going on around these two characters,
11) beyond even the dramatic triangle they formed with the melancholic figure of the dying farmer
(Sam Shepard)
12)now the landscape truly moved from background to foreground, and the work that went on in it,
13)the changes that the seasons wreaked upon it,
14) the daily miracles of shifting natural light
15)or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that took place
16). . . all this mattered as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the film.
17)Above all, the radical strangeness and newness of Days of Heaven was signaled to its first viewers
by its most fragmented, inconclusive, “decentered” feature:
18) the voice-over narration of young Linda Manz as Linda, Bill’s actual sister, who is along for the
ride, often disengaged from the main action but always hovering somewhere near.
19) It might have seemed, at first twang, like a reprise of Spacek’s “naive” viewpoint from Badlands,
20) but Manz’s thought-track goes far beyond a literary conceit.
21) It flits in and out of the tale unpredictably, sometimes knowing nothing and at other times
everything,
22)veering from banalities about the weather to profundities about human existence.
23)Sometimes even her sentences go unfinished, hang in midair.
24)In this voice we hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning, insight
25)—just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling together to perpetually make
and unmake what we think of as a landscape, and human figures finding and losing themselves, over
and over, as they desperately try to cement their individual identities or “characters.”
Introduction to the clip:
The following clips of the locust plague in Days of Heaven demonstrates the unique meditative style of Malick: the depiction of nature as philosophy against a world torn apart by jealously, greed, war, and chaos.
·
Please choose one scene
or shot from Days of Heaven and embed a screenshot or clip
into your post.
· Please explain how Malick's style
·
reflects his status as an auteur of the
Hollywood Renaissance.
·
You may wish to focus on Malick's composition,
·
the voiceover narration
of Linda Metz,
·
Ennio Morricone's score etc.
·
You also may wish to
include a clip of another scene from Malick's filmography to show the class how
his style has progressed over the past few decades.
I changed my essay, Here's the new one:
Ida Z. daRoza
Hollywood Renaissance
In Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) I saw many of the themes of the Hollywood Renaissance. This new era was no longer controlled by the studio system that had chosen the directors, cinematographers, editing and actors in the past. Directors could now be in control of their vision for a film. Mast and Kawin (M&K) said that now a film was “frequently labeled by or of its director,”
Another characteristic that emerged was “The offbeat antihero protagonists” M&K. We are sympathetic, or can understand the reasoning of the killer Bill in Days of Heaven just as we are to Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). There is psychological complexity in the storylines of these characters on why they have done wrong but for good reasons. The antihero films also show more graphic violence than in the past. It shows a break with the old Hollywood Code of not having sex and violence.
How these things were represented in the directors’ films and the style that they brought out in these films was unique. Mast and Kawin describe the differentiation between city and country films. Where city films relied on editing and country films relied on composition or mise-en-scene. Film shooting as with the French New Wave moved to shooting outdoors and using the natural light.
This was the first country film that I fell in love with, I almost wasn’t paying attention to the film plot the cinematography was so beautiful consistently from scene to scene.
The use of the golden wheat in most of the composition was done in a way that created a golden stage for the actors. It reminded me of Van Gogh’s many wheat pictures which I always thought were his dullest work. Now I can see the beauty through the Malick’s eyes. The landscapes of John Ford didn’t take my breath away as this did.
We saw the land as a living character during different times of day and the entire year of seasons. From the harvest to snow, summers playing in river and hunting in the fall. Within each of those seasons we saw the beauty of the properties of the day. As we saw the sun over the workers, the moon, smoke and fire. It was like a visual poem of the seasons and natural earth.
The unique landscape trait that I learned from Malick’s work was the filming during the “magic hour.” Besides the golden wheat below as a stage, the sky was always had consistently beautiful rich color achieved from filming in the dusk. I wasn’t familiar with the term “magic hour” and learned from a cinematography magazine The Beat in their 11/16/2017 article by Jourdan Aldredge that "If you’re not familiar with the term, “magic hour” in film and video production, it is the period just before sunrise or just after sunset when the sun is not visible, yet its light is diffused evenly. In the world of cinematography, magic hour filming creates a “magical” effect that makes it easy to light subjects evenly and quite beautifully." The article explains that a true magic hour can last only twenty-five minutes and provides tips on some ways cinematographers can maximize this time with camera work. https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/4-cinematography-tips-magic-hour/
This picture I believe captures the magic hour and composition of the two characters proportionally in the shot. I liked the frequent use of the house to give a vertical rise within the flat landscape.
Grade 3/3
No Feedback from Denah
Citlaly's response:
Hello Ida, I agree with everything you said! We can tell that the director had more liberty with his characters; we witness murder, ambition, and deception. Bill is definitely the anti-hero in the story, and I think we don´t view him as the villain due to his attractiveness. But we have to acknowledge the fact that he is a criminal. The cinematography was gorgeous just like you said. The colors in each frame were so concise and the composition carefully crafted. I read a similar article explaining the filming process for a shot in the golden hour, thanks for this article. Overall, amazing review, you talked about a lot of aspects of the film.
Response: Christopher Nathan:
Ooo - I love the idea of the golden wheat creating a Van Gogh-like stage for the actors!
Response: Miguel Villicana
Hey ida
The cinematography here in this film is amazing and beautiful and looks so relaxing to live in a area like that. The changing of season with the visuales was magnificent here Also it was interesting in how you were saying about the paintings of Van Gough in the film which they do kinda look like making it a great art between Van Gough and the Cinematography here. It was such a epic movie with these elements .
Response: Andrew OConnor Watts
Interesting points here, Ida! The use of landscape as a character is something I really loved about Days of Heaven and the screenshot you chose is stunning. I really appreciated how that character is treated with the same shifting dynamism of a human character by showing the landscape during different seasons and times of day, as you mentioned. As I was watching, I noticed how the vastness of the landscape seemed to parallel the characters' moral emptiness, an emptiness that also seemed to be accented by the frequent shots of scarecrows in the empty fields.
Citlaly's essay:
Hollywood Renaissance
Terrence Malik´s Days of Heaven (1978) follows the story of two lovers who disguise their romantic relationship as passing for brother and sister. When meeting wealthy dying farmer, they plan a way to inherit his wealth. Nevertheless, things don’t go as planned. In the scene I choose to analyze, Bill (Richard Gere) enters the room of the farmer (Sam Shepard) and finds him laying down with his lover Linda (Brooke Adams). He wakes her up and the scene cuts to them escaping to the fields during the sunrise. When they return from their short scape, Linda finds the farmer upset and looking for her. In the first part of the sequence we witness Bill opening a forbidden door, the shot is quite tight, slow and dramatic. Then Bill observers how Linda is hugging her “fake” husband and the tension is suddenly more intense in a different way; has Bill become the intruder of the relationship? Nonetheless, after the discouraging scenario for Bill and the confusing shoot for the audience, Linda goes out to enjoy a romantic yet risking sunrise. The composition completely changes to wide shots that capture the magnificence of the landscape and its colors. They go to what has been a safe place for them, the lake. They enjoy wine and ultimately their company. Bill drops his glass to the water, symbolizing that what they were doing wasn’t right, and at some point the lie would drown them too. When they return, we now witness a worried farmer looking for his wife Linda. The audience wonders whether he saw them or whether he will believe what Linda tells him. Malik does a magnificent job at capturing the farmer´s desperation and build a scene that continually changes its tone. When the Hollywood industry started to value directors more and promote films under their names, audiences would consume films because of who directed them. To achieve this, directors had to have a style or quality that would represent them as filmmakers, and the audience would expect these conventions in each of their films. Terrence Malik appears to have achieved this through the perfection in his composition, the showcase of nature and man, a philosophic view of life, a constant battle with morals, and perhaps a unique way of editing.
We can observe in his following films how the composition is similar. Wide shots with man facing their emotions in the raw nature.
My Response
Old Essay:
Ida Z. daRoza
Hollywood Renaissance
In Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) I saw many of the themes of the Hollywood Renaissance. This new era was no longer controlled by the studio system that had chosen the directors, cinematographers, editing and actors in the past. Directors could now be in control of their vision for a film. Mast and Kawin (M&K) said that now a film was “frequently labeled by or of its director,”
Another characteristic that emerged was “The offbeat antihero protagonists” M&K. We are sympathetic, or can understand the reasoning of the killer Bill in Days of Heaven just as we are to Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). There is psychological complexity in the storylines of these characters on why they have done wrong but for good reasons. The antihero films also show more graphic violence than in the past. It shows a break with the old Hollywood Code of not having sex and violence.
How these things were represented in the film directors’ films and the style that they brought out these films were unique. Mast and Kawin describe the differentiation between city and country films. Where city films relied on editing and country films relied on composition or mise-en-scene. Film shooting as with the French New Wave moved to shooting outdoors and using the natural light.
This was the first country film that I fell in love with, I almost wasn’t paying attention to the film plot the cinematography was so beautiful consistently from scene to scene.
The use of the golden wheat in most of the composition was done in a way that created a golden stage for the actors. It reminded me of Van Gogh’s many wheat pictures which I always thought were his dullest work. Now I can see the beauty through the Malick’s eyes. The landscapes of John Ford didn’t take my breath away as this did.
We saw the land as a living character during different times of day and the entire year of seasons. From the harvest to snow, summers playing in river and hunting in the fall. Within each of those seasons we saw the beauty of the properties of the day. As we saw the sun over the workers, the moon, smoke and fire. It was like a poem of the seasons and natural earth.
The unique landscape trait that I learned from Malick’s work was the filming during the “magic hour.” Besides the golden wheat below as a stage, the sky was always had consistently beautiful rich color achieved from filming in the dusk. I wasn’t familiar with the term “magic hour” and learned from a cinematography magazine The Beat in their 11/16/2017 article by Jourdan Aldredge that "If you’re not familiar with the term, “magic hour” in film and video production, it is the period just before sunrise or just after sunset when the sun is not visible, yet its light is diffused evenly. In the world of cinematography, magic hour filming creates a “magical” effect that makes it easy to light subjects evenly and quite beautifully." The article explains that a true magic hour can last only twenty-five minutes and provides tips on some ways cinematographers can maximize this time with camera work. https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/4-cinematography-tips-magic-hour/
This picture I believe captures the magic hour and also how the characters are composed shown close up but the gorgeous landscape is not lost in the shot in a long shot.
My mandatory reply to another student's essay:
I agree with your assessment of the psychological tension in this three way relationship. Malick portrays it in mostly a visual style and very subtly with lots of vignettes of Bill seeing Abby's face with The Farmer (I don't think we ever get a name) and the Farmer seeing Abby and Bill. The second time The Farmer looks out and sees the couple speaking closely and having a quick hug and kiss. We see the pain in his face and its all done visually. We do not hear the conversation the lovers are having and there is no dialogue of The Farmer yelling or telling his thought. It's psychologically deep but done in Malick's own way of restraint and not overacted or with huge dramatic scenes.
quiz:
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