"She was a friend of mine." Final statement of which the importance lends itself to no purpose or resolution. A film which is, bizarrely, always in mid-sentence or at the end of something said, half-whispered, half-heard. A lot of dialog muffled by atmosphere or simply unheard. Days of Heaven begins with an easy enough dichotomy: big city (poverty, pollution, smog, industry, etc.) versus big sky (the Texas Panhandle region, harvesting, blue skies, gigantic clouds, roaming buffalo, etc.) Chicago versus Amarillo. One cluttered form of impersonality (of turn-of-the-century factories, of suffocation, of murder muffled by industrial noise) contra a naturalistic open-ended kind of impersonality (of wild fires, untrammeled beasts, locusts, nameless races of people, migration). And some of it connected through voice-over, in this case, the voice-over recollections -- almost always nugatory in relation to the plot structure -- of a young adolescent girl, Linda, whose Chicago-speak merely adds another flimsy layer of ethnography to Malick's historiographical project.
The editing of the film seems haphazard, too rapid for ingestion. Something is always left unsaid or half-heard. Constantly in medias res. With the exception of the locust and wild fire setpiece and the action-directed finale, very few scenes are ever satisfyingly developed. Malick's meditative reflections on history and geography are often reduced to picturesque clips and soundbites that are hurriedly piled one on top of another with the same speed that the seasonal workers collect and toss the wheat bundles from the tractor. He is in some kind of a hurry, perhaps from an excess of harvested images. Nestor Almendros' cinematography largely makes up for the alacrity with which the film zooms along; if our empathy for the characters is nullified by the velocity and fragmentariness of the editing, Almendros' lens-work (which before Days of Heaven had been mainly employed by french metteurs-en-scene, Truffaut, Rohmer, etc.) produces what stray moments of thought the film has to offer. The film is meant to be looked at, and its surface is intended to stand in for actual soil, actual grain. It is not Dovzhenko -- it lacks a socialist fervor, in some cases a spiritual fervor -- but it is about as close as a decent-sized american production from the 70s can get.
Malick has never been one for "ideas" per se -- for instance, as someone like Kubrick had always been -- but his films work in tandem with constructed and sometimes self-conscious americanisms that have recurred in a variety of north american filmographies. I will say this again, later: Malick's oeuvre is almost exclusively concerned with geography, american geography, and his image-ideas serve as historiographies of an american-oriented epistemology. An american epistemology is necessarily a geographical one: the endless search for the "New World," whatever it was, if it was anything at all. Days of Heaven is not about anything in particular (if it were really concerned for its "story" then it would have taken greater care to develop its largely undeveloped scenes, but Malick insists on zipping along, seemingly interested in immersing us in a staccato rhythm of natural history scenes and american dreamscape). On the one hand, the title alludes to the paradisiacal days spent by the three Chicago-bred characters in big sky country, a surrogate heaven and an escape from big city clutter, only to eventually suffer a second-hand Paradise Lost of sorts; on the other hand, Days of Heaven works as historical travelogue, and Malick seems to be more concerned with historicity and historical character, with geographical study, than he does with the semi-western scenario that drives the characters along (literally, semi-western, since we are in northeastern Texas, close to the heart-land of the country, and the camera takes a few John Ford glances on a bevy of nostalgic landscapes). It is with this reason that we overhear Linda say to herself (again, in Chicago-accented voice-over): "I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to be a mud doctor [a geologist]." A confession, perhaps, of one of Malick's fondest daydreams.
Malick has never been one for "ideas" per se -- for instance, as someone like Kubrick had always been -- but his films work in tandem with constructed and sometimes self-conscious americanisms that have recurred in a variety of north american filmographies. I will say this again, later: Malick's oeuvre is almost exclusively concerned with geography, american geography, and his image-ideas serve as historiographies of an american-oriented epistemology. An american epistemology is necessarily a geographical one: the endless search for the "New World," whatever it was, if it was anything at all. Days of Heaven is not about anything in particular (if it were really concerned for its "story" then it would have taken greater care to develop its largely undeveloped scenes, but Malick insists on zipping along, seemingly interested in immersing us in a staccato rhythm of natural history scenes and american dreamscape). On the one hand, the title alludes to the paradisiacal days spent by the three Chicago-bred characters in big sky country, a surrogate heaven and an escape from big city clutter, only to eventually suffer a second-hand Paradise Lost of sorts; on the other hand, Days of Heaven works as historical travelogue, and Malick seems to be more concerned with historicity and historical character, with geographical study, than he does with the semi-western scenario that drives the characters along (literally, semi-western, since we are in northeastern Texas, close to the heart-land of the country, and the camera takes a few John Ford glances on a bevy of nostalgic landscapes). It is with this reason that we overhear Linda say to herself (again, in Chicago-accented voice-over): "I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to be a mud doctor [a geologist]." A confession, perhaps, of one of Malick's fondest daydreams.
6 comments:
I saw this Saturday and received a request to write about it, so before reading your piece I want to write my own from a fresh perspective. I'll return afterward, I promise. I feel compelled after reading a few of the fantastic pieces on your site - for my own sake, mind you. I hope you'll be accommodating. I'd appreciate it if you would, but don't feel compelled! The writing is enough, always enough, never enough.
Yeah sure, feel free. But I must admit that I'm unsure what your request is really asking me: do you want some kind of permission to reproduce something from my blog? Of course you can, so long as you make the citation or hyperlink.
I dig your site too btw. As you can imagine, I'm prepping for "Tree of Life" -- want to watch all of his films again. And I look forward to reading your piece on "Days of Heaven."
Not reproduction, no, just my existence here, the byproduct of reproduction. I stretched out my writing on this film to such a length in time that I saw The Tree of Life in the middle of writing and kind of lost hold of any ideas that related only to Days of Heaven. Not a great loss, because the film is a great one. That film's editing rhythms remind me of what you are saying here - that Malick is snipping off the ends of scenes and assembling them together, but I think that is to his great credit in The Tree of Life. I don't remember feeling that to be the case as much in Days of Heaven, but it seems applicable if not to the same degree. In The Tree of Life it works magnificently since there is no story to speak of outside of a structural configuration and the passing of time, and thus the dialogue bits which relate to anything immediate are clipped away, leaving only the bits of sentences which relate to their feelings at that moment, or merely the depiction of someone thinking or seeing or doing something in-the-moment, which is important, especially as their feelings are chronicled in a gradual shift. By stripping away all of the plot, all of the dialogue which would call attention to a plot, it becomes a map of the only things left apparent: the images, the time period, the feeling, and the evolution of the characters' thoughts and behaviors and interactions. This does relate to Days of Heaven, although these things are largely antithetical to the plot except in the way they color the way the viewer's understanding of the characters affects the plot, but I think this same understanding of the characters' feelings and progression is an important element in the film. There's also the way that time is used as determining factor in the characters' decisions and the chosen scenes - early on in the fields it is always late in the day (the only time when they can socialize and, one time, catch the eye of the landowner), later on it is in the morning or late at night (the only times when they can escape the now attentive eye of the landowner). When the 'brother' leaves his absence allows for his lover to get closer to her husband and by the time he returns the film has charted the shifting emotions in such a way that the aforementioned progression of emotions ensures that there is an understanding of a change, a change he senses himself. And time relates to the landowner himself as he is given a certain expectation of his time to live.
With this in mind I don't think it's to the film's discredit that there is a certain looseness to the way the scenes are played out, and I think the de-emphasis on plot serves the opposed dimensions of emotional development and the importance of time in a way that explicit dialogue would only distract from. I don't think this 'time' element is as important in The Tree of Life, but as far as a focus on emotion and a distending of the words from any plot-driven relationship I think it goes much farther and the results are fairly spectacular. My recent viewing of it certainly colors my view of Days of Heaven, given that it is more recent and these are the most similar elements of the two, but I think it brings into perspective the elements which are more definitive of his style and which perhaps he was developing in pieces during the filming (or, more importantly, editing - The Tree of Life seems very much like a film edited out of a great number of improvised scenes and strung together in a manner which is composed with reference to mood moreso than any conception held at the time of filming. I may be wrong about this, or wrong to some degree, but that's the impression that I got, and a very strong one at that. Malick is a notoriously drastic editor, though, so it wouldn't surprise me). I don't know whether you'll see this film in a better light after seeing The Tree of Life or whether your reaction to this one will mean that you will have a much less enthusiastic response to his latest than me, but I think you'll at least see some resemblance to what you have written here returning in his latest film, and probably to a greater degree. To me it is the element which makes his latest a far more interesting and rewarding film.
Now I understand what you meant. You didn't want to have the anxiety of influence (or whatever) on your back. I understand the feeling. I've avoided all criticism on "The Tree of Life" for example. Better to write that way, fresh, purposefully ignorant. Blank page openness.
Definitely that, and I also like to burrow into one or two ideas in some sort of depth and leave the rest for another conversation... reading another distinct viewpoint just distracts me and makes me focus in on that one when they could all work together to complement. Or I may just abandon my own points as too frivolous and take on a viewpoint I prefer - but then it doesn't really reflect much on me and my state of mind, and what is a lone blog in the wilderness of the internet to stand for but that?
You often seem to work not just with an open page but off the page, and I appreciate that. Something I have fallen out of for one reason or another but should get back into. It's fun, if nothing else, and usually much more.
Post a Comment