Dear friends,
In his 1978 period drama Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick chooses to stage a key plot development as a shadow play. During a night of entertainments, Sam Shepard’s landowning patsy (“the Farmer”) observes in blown-up silhouette his wife Abby (Brooke Adams) and her supposed brother Bill (Richard Gere) having a moment of apparently more-than-sibling intimacy. The softened liminality of the visual—shadows on a lightly fluttering sheet, viewed from the character’s POV in mid-long shot—is one that defines Malick’s cinema. In this director’s stylistic logic, the shot represents a journey from ignorance to enlightenment through a moment of obscure, personal interpretation. The Farmer’s observation doesn’t contain anything inherently suspicious; rather, it seems to crown a series of signals that have been accumulating for some time. Malick often uses cloth, curtains and a variety of physical structures to visually represent passage, in a manner reflective of certain conventions in Japanese art and film, and this image of literal projection playfully takes us into his drama’s final act. But in Malick’s ironic Eden, the Farmer’s revelation begets progression for some and regression for others. Indeed, in this scene, behind the veil, Bill purrs to Abby, “I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”
In Malick’s fifth feature, The Tree of Life (2011), boundaries become yet more permeable, with most every shot in motion and each cut creating an almost tangible passage between states—spaces and periods, certainly, but also states of mind; snippets of thought and memory. Joining these other tools of the cinema on this higher plane of perception is the soundtrack, which similarly liquidises the diegesis into a dynamic whirlpool of ideas and emotions.
Malick’s style here is a clear progression from approaches he’d developed with The New World (2005), and, before that, his first “comeback” movie The Thin Red Line (1998), which represented a major breakthrough after a two-decade dormancy. This in turn, however, still bears close stylistic and formal resemblances to Days of Heaven and to his debut, 1973’s Badlands. In other words, The Tree of Life is itself another node in a fluid and evolving project: the Malick filmography as a whole. To be sure, the oeuvre of many a filmmaker possesses plenty of coherence and even deliberate reflexion and self-reference; what Malick’s 10 features represent goes deeper than this. Indeed, the trio of films he released after Tree of Life (To the Wonder; Knight of Cups; Song to Song) seem impossible to view separately from one another and from his preceding work, to an almost daring degree. And with his latest, A Hidden Life (2019), Malick reconciles his recent temporal experiments with the more accessible linearity that marked his films prior to Tree of Life. Though the film, which is essentially a biopic treatment of WWII-era conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter, is organised around a clear chronology, the voiceover epistolary narration that marks much of its duration manages once again to collapse distinctions in space and time and, movingly, keeps its separated protagonist-couple together, if only spiritually.
This is not to suggest anything as prosaic (or dunderheaded) as an overarching, pre-plotted blueprint to Malick’s filmography. He is, of course, working as he goes along and so much of the fascination to his evolutions is the sensation of watching his many philosophical concerns being worked out in real time—both meta-textually (as a stream of individual but related releases), and within the films themselves, which almost bear the scars and records of their time upon the editing table. The Tree of Life is something of a mission statement, in that case: Malick’s only film to dip into autobiography (though any literal meaning here should be taken with a pinch of salt) also, crucially, locates its examination of mid 20th century boyhood as part of a grand flow of time that is marked by not finitude but by its endless tendrils of experience, sensuality and interpretation. In other words, the specific project of The Tree of Life—presenting a singular subjectivity as set within the cosmos—reflects the film’s own position as part of Malick’s oeuvre and within traditions in cinema, in narrative art more broadly and even in human and pre-human consciousness. Pretty heavy, but that’s exactly what the film invites.
All this is what makes the very concept of an “extended edition” for this film utterly tantalising. If we can call Malick’s existing cinema one of “permeability” then this recut—released in the same year as his similar Voyage of Time, which itself has two very different cuts—deliberately invites questions about finality and authority, and shows that any “completed” work is only so by intuition, a kind of happenstance. (The exemplar “final brushstroke” comes to mind.) Malick’s art often rests (to an extent) on instinct, but this admission that the original Tree of Life, while functionally “final”, can in fact still be altered and developed is a fascinating meta-cinematic adjunct.
It raises not only interesting academic questions of semantics and epistemology as they relate to filmmaking and narrative practices, it also speaks to the very notion of time as a governing concept in our lives. In other words, if we use stories partially as a way of passing time, what does it mean for a creator to then dissolve their story even further into the logic of our “real” time—to transform the film from something “separate”, with its own ostensibly unalterable duration, into something that instead reflects the genuine malleability of our thoughts and experiences? In many ways, the film—released at the start of the 2010s—predicted much of what technology has since done to concepts of time, memory, record and the screen, and the extended edition—released towards the end of the same decade—takes active control of the oft disquieting questions that have thus arisen. We don’t need to list all those questions here. But it’s amazing to revisit The Tree of Life, and Malick as a whole, in view of the hours we now waste staring at screens, keeping engaged, hobbling our concentration, smothering our minds. Central to his project is the give-and-take between viewer and film, and now this process is looser than ever, and to what ends we can only guess at. In short, we’ve come a long way from live shadow performances.
—Calum & Eddie
