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Days of Heaven
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On Earth As It Is In
Heaven
For
all its exceptional qualities, Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) is a film that
blended fairly easily into the groove of the independent American cinema scene
of the 1970s – neither High Art nor pop genre, but somewhere intriguingly
in-between. In this sense, it seemed to belong with the work of Robert Altman,
Arthur Penn or Bob Rafelson in that period: stylised discombobulations of
oft-told tales, pointed critiques of movie-fed myths, ironic manipulations of
Hollywood clichés and stereotypes. Although it was clearly more emotionally
distant, and more severely formalised, than Nashville (1975) or Night Moves (1975) or Five Easy Pieces (1970) – and few
accounts of it at the time failed to mention the writer-director’s peculiar
non-cinephile past as an exegete and translator of Martin Heidegger – Badlands nonetheless formed part of a
potent trend: films that referenced other films, which mixed a feeling for the
natural landscape with a fascination for unnatural violence, which placed their
“last romantic couples” on the road to nowhere …
What
served to normalise Badlands –
despite its highly eccentric collage of soundtrack music (Satie, Orff, Nat King
Cole), despite its extremely tricky voice-over narration – was the simple fact
that it focused, from to start to end, on two central characters: criminal
lovers on the run (Martin Sheen as Kit and Sissy Spacek as Holly, modelled
loosely on Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate). This may have been as
classical narrative as the film got, but it was enough to secure it an enduring
cult success – fans who could lovingly quote its goofy lines and strike Kit
& Holly poses. What was truly remarkable and innovative in the film’s form
would only really become apparent many years later – by the time that
up-and-comers like Paul Thomas Anderson or David Gordon Green were fastidiously
imitating its unusual array of images, sounds, narrative off-beats and
performance gestures.
In
1978, however, Malick’s second feature Days
of Heaven came as a shock to everyone. I vividly remember the experience of
sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theatre and first encountering this work
which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 millimeter!)
with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and
were snatched away before the mind could fully grasp their plot import; what we
could see did not always seemed to be matched to what we could hear. Yes, there
was another couple on the run – Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as lovers
pretending to be siblings during the wheat harvest season at the turn of the 20th century – but, this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant
or ironic, but positively cosmic. And there was so much more going on around
these two characters, beyond even the eternal triangle they form with the
melancholic figure of the dying Farmer (Sam Shepard) – now the landscape truly
moves from background to foreground, and the labour that goes on in it, the
changes that the seasons wreak upon it, the daily miracles of shifting natural
light or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that take place …
all this matters as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the
film.
Above
all, the radical strangeness and newness of Days
of Heaven was signalled, to its first-release viewers, by its most fragmented,
inconclusive, decentred feature: the voice-over narration of young Linda Manz.
It might have seemed, at first twang, like a reprise of Holly’s naïve viewpoint
in Badlands, but Manz’s thought-track
goes far beyond a literary conceit. It flits in and out of the tale
unpredictably, sometimes knowing nothing and at other times everything, veering
from banalities about the weather to profondities about human existence.
Sometimes even her sentences go unfinished, hang in mid-air. Malick and his
collaborators in fact arrived at this thread serendipitously, through a mixture
of scripting and improvisation: rather than reading out a text, Manz was
encouraged, in a sound studio, to repeat and embellish, in her own inimitable
way, certain phrases and ideas that were thrown at her live. In this voice, we
hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning,
insight – just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling
together to perpetually make and unmake what we think of as a landscape; or
human figures finding and losing themselves, over and over, as they desperately
try to cement their individual identities or characters. In this mysterious
Eden – as Stan Brakhage or Jean-Luc Godard more or less said – God has not yet
gotten around to naming the animals.
Today,
with the hindsight allowed by The Thin
Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), it is clear that it was Days of
Heaven, not Badlands, that truly
announced Terrence Malick’s characteristic style and manner of filmmaking.
Where his debut was tightly scripted, its successor was, deliberately, a much
more loosely structured affair. Malick gave himself the freedom to shoot a
great deal of material – not all of it centred on the lead actors (who, it is
reported, felt rather left out), but also the land, animals, little spectacles
with groups of extras … with the intention of finding the best, final form for
the whole in post-production (sound editing being as crucial as picture editing
to his work). He has taken this approach to greater and ever-more adventurous
lengths in his subsequent films. While some industry-minded pundits tut-tut
Malick’s preferred shooting method as wasteful and unfocused, it is an entirely
valid creative process that aims – as in the cinema of Wong Kar-wai or Jacques
Rivette – to discover the film in the course of its material making, rather
than in the bloodless, abstract phase of its writing.
Writing,
of course, remains important for Malick, who is an extraordinary word-stylist.
The shooting script of Days of Heaven does not much resemble the finished film – in many cases, elaborate dialogue
scenes have been reduced in editing to a line or two, a mysterious reaction
shot, and a cut-away to some natural phenomenon – but the template is already
entirely evident: styles of speaking, the cycle of seasons, and an elemental
story line that can seem Biblical for the very good reason that it is: in
essence, the film’s narrative is derived from a passage in the Book of Ruth.
But this primal, almost mythic story ends up as thoroughly displaced as the
legend of John Smith and Pocahontas in The
New World; it is hardly surprising to learn that Shepard (who is a superbly
haunting presence in the film) thought himself to be playing someone who was
less a flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional psychological character than a kind
of sketch, silhouette or ghost.
The
Australian critic Meaghan Morris once suggested that Days of Heaven is a film in constant motion, and indeed about
movement in all its forms: human, natural, mechanical. Cinematographer Néstor
Almendros – whose work on François Truffaut’s eternal-triangle costume drama Two English Girls and the Continent (1971) may well have inspired Malick (just as, according to editor Billy Weber, The Wild Child provided a key
influence on their placement of voice-over) – evokes complex set-ups that never
made it to the final cut: the camera tracking and dollying in and through the
Farmer’s house – this odd mansion plonked in the middle of a vast field – while
various players entered and exited the frame in elaborate choreography. In
fact, even the simplest shots have a trace of this type of structure: the mise en scène of Days of Heaven aims less at fluid continuity between images or
gestures – indeed, it is a remarkably elliptical film – than the creation of
each filmic unit as a cell which
refers, in a non-linear way, to all other parts of the film, via echoes,
comparisons, subtle flashbacks and flashforwards … Hence the deep affinity
between Malick and F.W. Murnau, an affinity that persists through his
subsequent work.
Malick’s
underlying aesthetic aim – one he shares with several great directors, and which
was already evident in Badlands – is
to encourage the proliferation of a wide range of moods, sights, sounds and
surface textures, while simultaneously arriving at an overall, unifying form.
Nothing expresses this better than what is probably the most beloved and
oft-cited element of Days of Heaven,
its play of different musical inputs, those he appropriates alongside those he
commissions: the music veers from classical to folk, but what holds the
ensemble together is that Ennio Morricone’s grave score literally inverts the melody of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. One reflects
the other, just as land and sky reflect each other in those characteristic
Malick panoramas bisected by the horizon line …
Malick’s
films have sometimes been frozen, by those unsympathetic to them, into pious
homilies or grand statements: Man vs. Nature, the redemptive path to God via
love and sacrifice, the corrupting effects of Civilisation encroaching upon an
idyllic Wilderness … Yet nothing is so certain or schematic in his work. As
always, everything is in motion, seeming opposites ceaselessly transforming
each other.
Days of Heaven shows us,
in myriad inventive ways, how nature and culture are always intertwined, how a
certain kind of technology, a certain kind of civilising process, is part of
even the humblest garden arrangement, the most elementary use of a cloth to
cover the body, the fashioning of a piece of a tree to make music. This is part
of the deep Heideggerian legacy in Malick: there is no pure Being, only the
action of hands upon the world, fashioning (for better or worse) a living
space, a temporary arrangement of people and materials. And those cosmic shots
that conjure heaven and earth gazing at one another as in a mirror are far from
constituting a reassuring New Age bromide. Malick resembles, at one level, the
tragic philosopher Simone Weil: the God in Heaven in whom she so fervently
believed was not, in her view, by our side and guiding our every step, but
rather someone very far away, discernible only as a distant echo, someone who
has set in motion a terrible Destiny Machine that will first bring us pain, separation,
betrayal and wars before it will deliver us any faint or fleeting redemption.
Malick
is a true poet of the ephemeral: the epiphanies that structure his films,
beginning with Days of Heaven, are
ones which flare up suddenly and die away just as quickly, with the uttering of
a single line (like “she loved the Farmer”), the flight of a bird or the
launching of a plane, the flickering of a candle light, or the passing of a
wind over the grass. Nothing is ever insisted upon or lingered on in his films;
that is why they reveal subtly different arrangements of event, mood and
meaning each new time we see them (if we are and remain truly open to this
experience). Because everything is in motion, everything is whisked away
quickly, and the elements of any one cellular moment are very soon
redistributed and metamorphosed into other moments: just look at and listen to
the last minutes of Days of Heaven,
with its split-second swing between end-of-the-line melancholic emptiness and
wide-open possibility, for a sublime illustration of this ephemerality that is
miraculously caught and formalised in the language of cinema.
Why
twenty years between Days of Heaven and Malick’s magisterial comeback, The
Thin Red Line? The filmmaker, who is not fond of giving interviews, has never
spelt out the reasons, and so we are left with the reports and speculations of
those who have crossed his path: on the one hand, Malick never stopped working
on a variety of projects (one of which, the ambitious “creation fable” Q, eventually saw the light of day in a
transformed state as The Tree of Life [2011]); on the other hand, he resolved to bide his time and wait for the
opportunity to make his next film in total freedom, in a production situation
where his open-ended process would be respected. Days of Heaven, according to the accounts of several collaborators
close to the director, was not an ideal or easy shoot for Malick – his method
was still too new, even for the New American Cinema of the ‘70s. By the late
‘90s, in contrast, casts and crews alike were willing to give themselves over
to Malick’s singular vision. His particular kind of art cinema (if we must call
it that, although simply cinema will
do) is a paradox – because it depends for its existence (post Badlands) on large budgets, vast
production resources, Hollywood studios and big-name actors. Yet who can say
with certainty, in our age of new digital possibilities, where it may go in
future?
MORE Malick: A Hidden Life © Adrian Martin July 2007 |
