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The New World
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Two
immediately striking details about The
New World: firstly, the character played by Q’orianka Kilcher is named
Pocahontas, for the first and only time, in the final credits. Before that, 79
minutes in, there is an explicit barring of the utterance of this indigenous
name, when Mary (Janine Duvitski), who is about to speak the name (“My name’s Mary,
and yours, I believe, is …”), is interrupted: “She says it’s not her name
anymore. She hasn’t got a name” – to which the kindly woman replies, “How
unfortunate. Well, we shall have to give you one!”
What
defines this central female character across the film, then, is not the essence
of a single, original, true name, but
a succession of names. So, from start to end, writer-director Terrence Malick
structures the film around a displacement of – and investigation into –
personal identity, and the typical cinematic means of signalling and
characterising that identity.
An
even subtler example of this process occurs in relation to John Smith (Colin
Farrell). For the first 20 minutes of the shortest (and for a long time, the
most generally available) version of the film, (1) Smith does not “come
together” as an ordinary filmic subject – as, quite simply, an individual who can
be unambiguously identified via the act of opening his mouth and speaking lines
of dialogue. Over and over, when addressed, he merely grunts, or laughs. The
first few times that we hear his inner voice on the soundtrack, we are thus
unable to compare it, or ground it, in relation to any instance of this
character talking aloud. And the editing and sound mixing – which form a truly
complex weave of elements through the entire film – constantly create detours,
enigmas, misdirections that derail the standard attributions or reinforcements
of identity within scenes: other characters call his name, address him or talk
about him, look or point in his direction, but there are no reverse-shots to
clearly, cleanly close off the articulation. And the same goes for the
character’s potential point-of-view shots which – in a manner we know well from
Malick’s previous films – tend to wander off from a purely individual function
in order to embrace a more external, even cosmic, vantage point.
One
of the worst habits of film commentary amounts to an ultra-conventional
congealing of all the different levels that create a cinematic character into a
single, coherent, univocal, common-sense personhood – with every imaginable
metamorphosis of that character, every structuring contribution made by the
multi-levels of cinematic artifice, and every spacing or complication in
relation made possible by the actor’s performance, thinned out into a banal,
psychologistic humanism. (2) Such an approach brutally short-changes the work
of Malick – although some of his actors offer a better sense of how to approach
this dimension of his œuvre, as when Sam Shepard (in the 2002 documentary Rosy-Fingered Dawn) describes his role
as The Farmer in Days of Heaven (1978)
as one of playing a ghost, someone immaterial. But what is the problem with
assuming Malick’s characters to be more-or-less conventional screen presences,
with experiences and thoughts, drives and agendas – as we rightly assume of
around 90% of the films we see from week to week? What we miss, through the
imposition of such a grid, is everything that is ambiguous, halting and above
all constantly changing in Malick’s
constitution of his characters.
These
characters are (far) less three-dimensional people (so-called) than they are cinematic figures – perpetually drawn,
withdrawn and redrawn, created and devoured, in the play of contour and shadow,
light and colour, rhythm and montage, image and sound. And this is not merely a
formal demonstration of a general cinematic principle; it goes directly to the
heart of Malick’s most profound philosophical propositions. Instead of grasping
this flux, we project retrospectively the coherence that has accumulated (in
case of The New World, precariously
and fitfully) by the end of the film
back into its first, most tentative and mysterious steps (Kilcher is
Pocahontas); or/and we come in with too much pre-knowledge fed by trailers and
press kits, spots on E! Entertainment and items in Premiere, already
filling in, from the world go, the plot’s moves and the character’s identities
(ergo, Farrell is Smith).
I
have argued elsewhere that what makes Malick’s characters so ghostly is sense that they scarcely seem
to belong inside the stories that
carry them along, past such momentous events of murder, migration, invasion,
industry. Figures of history, or myth, or both (as is the case with
Pocahontas), they never assume the grandeur that their names and identities
have been granted by the passage of time and mass communication. Malick shows
them in the uncertain, twilight, becoming state before such a congealing of identity. This congealing is a historic
development that, frequently, they do not live long enough to see – since, from
Starkweather/Kit in Badlands (1973) to Pocahontas, via the
soldiers at Guadalcanal, Malick is clearly drawn to the tragic-romantic aura of
heroes and heroines who die young. But one of the elements that marks The New World as a distinctive departure
in his career is that, for the first time, it is a woman who takes this charged, quasi-sacrificial role – and who
therefore becomes the cosmic centre of the film.
Studies
of a director’s career often impose a tidy evolutionary trajectory upon
precarious production opportunities that are, in reality, far more chaotic and
contingent, at the mercy of the industry’s odd sense of timing. As is the case
with many filmmakers, Malick’s filmography – the feature works he has managed
to realise by the end of 2005 – is informed by many projects that he has
imagined, scripted, worked up to various levels, and still could conceivably
make if given the chance (for, as with Stanley Kubrick, one senses that, for
Malick, no project is ever altogether dead – The New World itself is a script dating back a quarter-century).
Looked at this way, the decision to address the story of Pocahontas is not such
a departure for Malick as it might seem. In particular, The New World bears the traces of his project for a German-language
film about psychoanalysis, The
English-Speaker, for which he auditioned actors in Austria in the mid ‘90s.
Although it is perilous to extrapolate too much from accounts of Malick’s
script drafts – which tend to be mere springboards for the films that are
actually, finally made at the end of a long and elaborate creative process – it
is nonetheless clear that The New World is, at some level, a displacement or transformation of many core elements in The English-Speaker.
Like
Anna O. – the fictively renamed subject of a famous therapeutic case discussed
by Freud and led by his colleague, Josef Breuer – Pocahontas comes to us as a
figure of popular myth (that mythic quality signalled, in the first instance,
by the telegrammatic brevity of their names). Relatively little is actually
known about either woman; what we have, largely, are the extrapolations and
projections woven upon their shadowy outlines by successive waves of
storytellers, whether psychoanalysts, historians, novelists, poets or filmmakers
– most of them male. (In Anna’s case, Malick does have at his disposal the
myth’s epilogue or sequel: the re-creation of this figure as the real Bertha
Pappenheim who, as Jacques Lacan reminded us, “is one of the great names in the
world of social welfare in Germany”.) (3) Malick’s approach to the legends of
these women is to take them on, precisely, as legends, not at all to demystify
them as Robert Altman did in Buffalo Bill
and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976); in fact, he imaginatively
expands the fictional share that has attached itself to these characters,
picturing the dreams that Anna relates to Breuer, and luxuriating in the
possibility of a romance between Pocahontas and Smith to a degree that would
make even the Disney Corporation blush.
Both
of these female characters, Anna and Pocahontas, undergo massive, dramatic
changes in their identity – and both, strikingly, become “English-speakers” in
a disconcertingly strange and sudden fashion. (Pochontas’ rapid assimilation of
the English language is a deliberate unreality which many initial viewers and
reviewers of the film found it hard to get past.) And both characters,
ultimately, allow Malick a way to enter into and interrogate the highly
charged, mythic-spiritual figure of the Earth Mother, cosmic carer and nurturer
(Pocahontas as dying mother, Anna’s final metamorphosis into a Mother
Teresa-style worker for the sick and the poor) – just as his male characters
allow a channelling and renegotiation of the crucified Christ figure.
Any
diligent researcher into Malick’s creative process quickly realises that any
text or document, fictional or non-fictional, that can be consulted – on Fugate
and Starkweather, Guadalcanal, Anna O., etc – has not only been previously
well-read and digested by Malick, but also (and this is the creative part)
somehow absorbed, incorporated, woven into the surface texture or deep
structure of his film on that subject. This gives his work a palpable depth or volume that is rare in world cinema –
comparable only to Kubrick, Carl Dreyer, Víctor Erice and a very few other
filmmakers (perhaps what unites this imaginary family is the amount of time
these directors usually had to wait before realising, in their lifetimes, a
relatively small number of major projects). In Malick’s case, even if his
approach to the material adopts an overall line, orientation or agenda, the
wealth of research creates subterranean echoes of other, neighbouring
interpretations of the subject at hand. In Badlands,
for instance, what normally forms the centre of every telling of the Starkweather
& Fugate case (as in the telemovie Murder
in the Heartland [Robert Markowitz, 1993]) – the mystery of how complicit
Fugate was or was not in the “murderous spree” – is utterly displaced, even
(many viewers might conclude) entirely disregarded; yet, the more one looks at
the film, the more one sees and hears odd images, gestures, pauses and silences
that hint at what Brian Henderson once tantalisingly described as a “larger
pattern of evasions, suppressions and silences”. (4)
The New World exhibits
a similar comprehensive weave of studied references – and the same pay-off of
subterranean richness. Only two examples of this vast process must here
suffice. The first relates to Malick’s use of artistic sources – pre-existing
versions of the Pocahontas legend, some grandiloquently ambitious in their
intent. As if in response to those who (not always kindly) compare Malick’s
aesthetic to that of silent cinema, The
New World kicks off with a fleeting citation-rewriting (his freedom with
source material rivals, in a different register, that of Jean-Luc Godard – but
aren’t both of them collage artists in a peculiarly modern vein?) of a poem by
that great on-the-spot theorist of silent film, Vachel Lindsay. (5) Where
Pocahontas, over the opening pre-credit images, intones, “You are our mother /
We, your field of corn / We rise – from out of the soul of you”, Lindsay’s “Our
Mother Pocahontas” – which itself begins from the citation of a meditative passage
by Carl Sandburg on “Pocahontas’ body” in its English tomb – contains the line,
“We rise from out of the soul of her”; there is a great deal of imagery from
the rest of the poem (“Held in native wonderland / While the sun’s rays kissed
her hand”) which seems to find its correspondence in Malick’s film.
In
a more general way, the passion and anger animating Vachel’s projection onto
Pocahontas – he successively “renounces” his white American civilisation’s
“Saxon blood”, “Teuton pride”, “Norse and Slavic boasts”, “Italian dreams” and
“Celtic feuds” in order to be reborn as her descendant – resonate throughout The New World. Yet let us not elide the
small but significant difference entailed in this particular citation-rewriting, which is important as the fact
that the many questions uttered throughout The
Thin Red Line (1998), taken as thundering pronouncements by antipathetic commentators,
remain just that, unanswered questions (as in the Charles Ives musical piece,
“The Unanswered Question”, sampled during that film). To Lindsay, Pocahontas is
the holy Mother figure; but to Pocahontas herself, in Malick’s re-vision, this
Mother is something or someone else – the “spirit” whom she invokes in order to
“sing the story of our land” – and therefore precisely not her; she is not the mythic centre of the cosmos, more like its
ephemeral vessel.
Another
sort of example involves the use of historical documents. In an erudite
discussion of the film, Pierre-Yves Pétillon, a French specialist in American
culture, describes his sense that Malick simultaneously dramatises quite
different interpretations of the scant, elliptical historical traces of
Pocahontas’ life. (6) For example, was Smith really rescued from certain,
imminent death by the impetuous intervention of Pocahontas? It is easy to read
Malick’s version of the event in this way – but perhaps this is a too-easy
capitulation to myth, and more precisely to a myth as told and viewed through
white, Western eyes. Pétillon raises the cross-cultural debate among historians
– a debate we must assume Malick knows well – that what happened to Smith (even
if he did not understand it properly himself) was the performance of a pretend
execution, a kind of rebirth ritual signalling the adoption of an outsider or
foreigner into the tribe; in this scenario, the girl’s actions would have been
a premeditated part of the spectacle. And there is much to Malick’s highly
theatrical mise en scène in this
sequence that supports this contrary reading: the elaborate construction of the
dwelling that allows such dramatic lighting (it is one of the few emotionally
warm interiors in any Malick film), the choreography of the bodies, the
ambiguous facial reactions and gestures of the chief of the tribe …
More
generally, Pétillon poses a range of interpretations of the subsequent
relationship between Smith and Pocahontas that tallies well with Malick’s
increasingly radical mode of storytelling, fraught with mystery and
suggestiveness: either nothing (or nothing much) happened, and Smith fantasised
it as an immortal story to be forever told; or something (perhaps many things)
happened, but Smith discreetly withheld an account of the whole truth from his
various memoirs. The fantasy that accompanies (and often precedes) a
relationship, and the secrecy that follows it, posthumously: this is a familiar
dialectic in Malick’s cinema, where the basic facts of any event – whether an
intimate relationship, an act of killing, a military manœuvre or a collective
historical incident – are frequently, deliberately obscured.
Yet
it is the complex nature of a special event – the event of falling in love –
which is at the heart of The New World.
Intimate relationships between men and women figure in all of the films he has
directed to date (far less so in those he has co-produced, such as Endurance [1998] and Undertow [2004]) – but, as a love story,
this is his least inhibited, his most rapturous (although any explicit
depiction of sexual relations is, as usual for this rather tactful director,
omitted). This constitutes something strikingly new in his work: beyond the
largely alienated or affectless union of Kit and Holly in Badlands, the periods of lyrical rapture allowed his characters are
either furtive (Days of Heaven) or
brutally ephemeral (the flashbacks in The
Thin Red Line); either way, a harsh reality-principle imposes itself as the
victor in the game of passing time.
It
is an intriguing and instructive exercise to draw out the panorama of
depictions of love in Malick’s films. Badlands is entirely anti-romantic from the outset: the love that Kit and Holly for each
other is purely a matter of alienated fantasy-projection – mutually felt (which
is why it can minimally function as romantic love, as coupledom), but quick to
disintegrate. In The Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven, love is like
quicksilver: it moves through people, and then moves on. Love’s attraction
suddenly shifts, leaving the abandoned party devastated. The films present this
shift in amorous attachment as simply another hard fact of the cosmos, like
death or the passing seasons: “She loved the farmer” is all that can be
concluded, with naïve yet infinite wisdom, by Linda Manz as the
child-onlooker-narrator in Days of Heaven;
while the dumped soldier in The Thin Red
Line staggers, the whole natural and human world moving around him, as he
reads the kiss-off note from his ex-lover, far away.
The New World widens
the picture on Malick’s perception of love. Love is more than a mutual
intoxication; it is (to use the terms of philosopher Alain Badiou) a full-blown event to which its participants must
strive to be faithful. (7) This is not fidelity of a moral, religious or social
order; rather it is a testament to the transformative,
even Utopian power of this emotional entanglement. In The New World, the love of Pocahontas and John Smith is, of course,
an emblem of the reconciliation of vastly different cultures, indigenous and
settler – something that the film shows without ever explicitly spelling it
out. As such, it smacks of what Stendhal called crystallisation: pure projection of a desired Otherness (which can
happen in two simultaneous directions, from both parties!). It would have been
easy to overload and overdetermine this crystallising aspect of the film – the
Utopian dream of racial union crushed by social pressures – but Malick avoids
it by demanding (as Pocahontas herself demands) that the intimate participants
be faithful to the event of love. Smith is here, once again, brother to Breuer
in The English-Speaker: in that story
(which hinges on the ambiguity of psychoanalytic transference as a basis for –
even a definition of – love, a relation that Hitchcock frequently dramatised in
both explicit and displaced terms), it is the man who fails the event of love
(through fear, obligation, compromise … ), reneges on its contract, and turns
away from its Utopian, world-changing potentiality.
Malick’s
work is in fact haunted by characters who bail on love – Miranda Otto in The Thin Red Line (the closest to The New World in this regard, since we
are shown the montage of rapturous union between the lovers), even (to take a
perverse logic internal to the film) Holly in Badlands. But when it is a man who fails love – men enmeshed with
the progress of history or civilisation, like Breuer and Smith – there is a
significance that strikes at the core of a Western Symbolic Order, with its
codes of rationality, discernment and stable identity.
Being
faithful to the event of love implies taking a huge gamble – trusting that the
mutual fantasy-projection element inherent in this relationship (the Other as
the sole possible saviour, as the figure of the New World in all its exotic
delight of difference) can survive across into time and reality, inventing in
its wake an appropriately transformed social arrangement. The New World is constructed on a constant, painful see-saw between
these stark options of reality and dream – where it is asserted, variously,
that the dream can replace reality, or overcome it, or change it (“Real – what
I thought a dream”) – which is, in another register of 20th century
lyricism, the great Surrealist creed of the Marvellous, of permanent
revolution; or, by contrast, that the dream is ephemeral, illusory, that it
falls away and reality rushes in once more (“It was a dream – now I am awake”).
It all leads to the great, immensely sad dialogue couplet (part of a mise en scène and shot découpage that rigorously insists on the
separate worlds now inhabited by the characters) in which Smith’s passion for
exploration, for opening new vistas on the maps of his culture, becomes – in
its very failure – a metaphor for his failure to remain strong and faithful to
the love-event: Pocahontas asks, “Did you find your Indies, John? You shall”,
and Smith replies, “I may have sailed past them”.
As
I write, The New World still feels
like a new film, a young film – and my piece thus takes the form of notes, of
approaches, because the rush to judgement so typical of contemporary film
criticism (more than ever, in the Internet age) seems particularly ill-equipped
to take the measure of Malick’s achievement here. We do well to remember that
no Malick film has ever been received unanimously well at the moment of its
initial release. Key critics and major publications have always had massive
reservations on first seeing Malick’s work: re-read Jump Cut on Badlands, Sight and Sound on The Thin Red Line – and Cahiers
du cinéma on The New World. In
fact, some of the same critiques have circulated, almost verbatim, since 1973:
Malick cannot tell a story coherently; you cannot care about the characters; he
over-invests in his own status as an auteur-artist; his films are too pretty
and too vague; they express a phony, nostalgic innocence for a simpler time;
they are ideologically naive, even reactionary; they are formless and
meandering in their structures – both undercooked (in the scripting) and
overcooked (in post-production). Pauline Kael said of Days of Heaven “The film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang
all your dumb metaphors on it”, (8) and her acolytes have been happy to recycle
the terms of that abuse of Malick’s work beyond her death.
But
even some of the world’s finest and most progressive critics safeguard their
skeptical reservations, as when Jonathan Rosenbaum muses: “When he resorts to some of the exquisite
visual syntax of F.W. Murnau's silent cinema, as he did in Days of Heaven and The Thin
Red Line, does that mean he also wants us to revert to a 1920s
understanding of what these films are about? And if not, how, exactly, does his
understanding go beyond the 1920s?” (9) But I remain unconvinced that Malick
wants us to adhere to a “1920s understanding” – whatever that would be – any
more than other admirers of silent cinema, such as F.J. Ossang or Sharunas
Bartas, do when they recreate certain vintage filmic styles for their own present-day
ends. It seems clear, given the weaving of so many texts of all kinds from the
historic period and since the period, that Malick is not in the business of
boxing-in our interpretation in such a conservative manner.
Where The Thin Red Line accumulated its
cult reputation quite rapidly (it is, by far, the most written-about Malick
film), and was widely considered a masterpiece within two or three years
(judging by the many canon polls on the Internet), The New World has experienced a boringly inevitable backlash. The
20-year wait for the former massaged widespread excitement and goodwill, but
the (only!) seven-year interval before the latter has invited, bizarrely
enough, a jaundiced, seen-it-all-before disenchantment, as if Malick filmed too
soon. As well, a curious note of technological savvy had entered, in the
interim, the consciousness of many critics: The
New World was taken by some (including such normally astute commentators as
Thierry Jousse and Dave Kehr) as the worst embodiment of that modern phenomenon
known as the AVID film – edited (and perpetually re-edited) on digital
computers, which (according to these commentators) encourages maximum freeform
sloppiness in the filming, and results in the lack of a strong, overall rhythm
or structure in the global montage. (10) Of course, the film also attracted
immediate champions (including critic Matt Zoller Seitz and filmmaker Wim
Wenders), but their assertions of love were polemically fuelled – and perhaps
skewed – by the general indifference they heroically hurled themselves against.
(11)
Within
the first year of its after-life, however, sensitive revaluations of The New World began to appear –
including two, rigorously argued, in Cahiers itself by two critics relatively new to the magazine, Cyril Béghin and Stéphane
Delorme, both influenced by the school of figural analysis that emerged in
France during the 1990s. (12) They articulate the central aspect upon which
subject and form are married in the film: the type of ceaseless montage I described at the beginning of
the piece, a swirl of fragments that create a lyric swirl of perpetually
metamorphosing identities – on the condition that the process of metamorphosis
can either fulfil itself, or become tragically stalled, on the basis of whether
the individual subject stays true to the love-event that is taking him or her
apart.
There
are risks, as well as rewards, in the aesthetic path that Malick appears –
especially in light of The Thin Red Line and The New World – to now be on.
Placing so much store on a certain kind of on-location improvisation – less of
story line or dialogue than of gesture,
of expressive action – and leaving the filming wide open in its options with a
view to exploiting all-over discontinuity in post-production, creates rich
possibilities for a radical, decentred montage structure; but it also places
unfamiliar and heavy demands on his actors, and on his own impulsive
inspiration at the moment of filming the gesture of an actor’s body in natural
space. Like many viewers, my feeling on first viewing the film was that the
choreographic work with Kilcher, and the gestures of love between her and
Farrell, was far more inspired than the sometimes schematic presentation of the
British colonisers in their foaming, decrepit anger (although this makes
logical, systematic sense: the colonisers are too much themselves, too static,
too fixed in their social roles).
Yet
I firmly believe – and time has proven this true of Malick’s previous films –
that one needs to suspend conventional, normative judgements of what works and
what does not in The New World. For
what is truly experimental in it – its polyphonic weave of image and sound, its
exploration of a philosophy of love, its subtle evocation of the weave of and
breakdown between cultures – is far more difficult to grasp, and far more open
to cinema’s future, than what seems (perhaps deceptively) familiar.
Writing
ten years after the appearance of Badlands,
Brian Henderson began his discussion of the film by attempting to bracket off
all those distortions introduced by what he termed “polemical dispute”:
defensiveness, anger, dismissal, over-investment. The appearance of subsequent
Malick movies, according to Henderson, merely “further complicated” the emotional
murk on this battlefield. “This is not a
favourable background for the serious criticism of any work”, concluded
Henderson, “still less for that open-ended exploration which a new and
unstudied work invites”. (13)
Actually,
pondering Henderson’s sage advice, it strikes me that love of a Malick film is rather like love in a Malick film – especially The
New World. The element of fantasy-investment – the haste to enshrine the
film, secure it a place within a precariously shifting cultural history – is an
unavoidable drama, hard to separate one’s “better self” from. This drama leads,
inevitably, to both an inner experience of intense euphoria and a kind of
aphasia that can only speak its name in the ineffable language of love – a sort
of lyric dance around what is unspeakable in the work, beyond words, beyond
rationalisation, a pure potential or possibility which registers as a kind of
Utopia.
At
the same, staying faithful to the profound event of each Malick film (like each
Carl Dreyer or Víctor Erice film) imposes on the lover the obligation to say
more, to speak clearly, to move from assertion to analysis and thus, somehow,
ground in reality the verifiable concrete materiality of the work – without
snuffing out the feeling that it prompted within oneself in the first place.
Malick’s films take time, in every
sense: they carve out a sense of time beyond everyday reality as well as
everyday cinema, and they require a long, slow intimacy – successive periods of
appreciation, description, critique and revaluation. Every Malick film still
beckons, to those of us who love them, as something “new and unstudied”, an
experience demanding its witnesses and its testament.
MORE Malick: The Tree of Life, A Hidden Life
1.
There are three versions of The New World:
the general international release version of 135 minutes; a 150 minute version
briefly circulated at the start of its public life (at the 2006 Berlinale and
as a screener to achieve eligibility for Oscar nomination) and then withdrawn;
and a definitive 172 minute “director’s cut” (although all three were cut by
the director!). All versions subsequently became available on the Criterion
Blu-ray edition of 2016, with precedence there given to the third. back
2.
See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms
of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: British Film Institute,
2004). back 3.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 157. back 4.
Brian Henderson, “Exploring Badlands”, Wide Angle, Vol. 5 No. 4 (1983), p.
49. back 5.
Vachel Lindsay, The Chinese Nightingale,
and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1917). back 6.
Pierre-Yves Pétillon, “Trajectoires à propos du Nouveau Monde de Terrence Malick”, Panic, no. 3 (2006), pp. 88-101. 2018 postscript: This remarkable piece remains sadly unknown in the
vast English-language annals of Malick criticism and scholarship. back 7.
See Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In
Praise of Love (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2012). back
8.
Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (London: Zenith, 1982), p. 137. back
9.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Edelstein et al, “The Movie Club 2005”, Slate, 28 December 2005. back 10.
See Thierry Jousse, “Munich, Malick
et la politique des auteurs”, Panic, no.
3 (2006), pp. 25-27; Kehr’s remarks (“Malick as Messiah”) are no longer online
at his webpage. 2018 postscript:
undoubtedly the most reprehensible instance of Malick backlash from a noted
critic to have emerged in the past decade – and even before the extremities of Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017)! – is Robert
Koehler, “What the Hell Happened with Terrence Malick?”, Cineaste, Vol. 38 No. 4 (2013), pp. 4-9. back 11.
See Matt Zoller Seitz, “Just Beautiful”, The
House Next Door, 25 January 2006;
and Walter Chaw, “Wim, with Vigour”, in Film
Freak Central, 2 April 2006. back 12.
Cyril Béghin, “Princesse montage”, Cahiers
du cinéma, no. 617 (November 2006), pp. 95-96; Stéphane Delorme, “Un
lyrisme élégiaque”, Cahiers du cinéma,
no. 619 (January 2007), pp. 86-88. back
13.
Henderson, “Exploring Badlands”, p.
38. back
© Adrian Martin April 2007 |
