Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick
1)Malick only directed three feature films in his first three decades as a director.
2)Between his debut feature in 1973's Badlands and 1998's The Thin Red Line,
3) Malick only made one other feature: Days of Heaven in 1978.
4)Malick studied philosophy at Harvard before becoming a Rhodes scholar.
5) His films reflect a meditative philosophical style,
6) often employing voice over narration over shots of nature and animals.

Days of Heaven
1)Days of Heaven stars Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as a couple pretending to be brother and sister
    in 1916.
2)Gere’s character Bill is on the run after killing his boss in a steel mill.
3)He and Abby flee with Bill's younger sister Linda to the Texas Panhandle where they meet a rich
  farmer (Sam Shepard) who falls in love with Abby.

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. 

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978):

The Locust scene Click Here - This is what we saw for class

Small bit on the cinematographer Click Here