Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature by Leppert Richard;

Author:Leppert, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 124

Terrence Malick (director), Days of Heaven (1978), title (1:19).

There are only three photographs of pleasures, apart from the ice castle: one of a nicely dressed young woman in white sitting on a rock in profile to the camera and staring out at the sea, and two by photographer H. H. Bennett shot at Wisconsin Dells. The first captures two working-class men in a canoe (c. 1890–95), and the second, well known and often reproduced, documents a young man, in fact Bennett’s son, leaping in midair between tall rock outcroppings (1886).3 These few images of simple exurban pleasures, set against the others forming the montage sequence, establish a troubled binary relation that constitutes the film’s driving force, one fraught with tensions—social, ideological, political, and spiritual—and marked by the separation of the natural world from its historico-cultural other.4 By and large, the people photographed belong to the nameless masses or, in the case of close-ups, are individuals whose unique faces matter only as types, part and parcel of a population of extras, such as the sweatshop workers in a garment-industry facility, the lot of them approximately as important as the acres of laundry hanging on lines suspended between tenements shown in one of the last photographs in the sequence. Life beyond the parameters of hard work and occasional leisure is referenced in a single image of President Woodrow Wilson standing together with five other men in long coats and doffing his top hat to an unseen crowd, an otherwise absent presence of wealth, position, and power—an image that helps to fix the specific temporality of the film.

The last photo is a full-body medium shot of a poor teenage girl sitting on the ground and looking at the camera. The image, modern but made to look like those that precede it, is of actress Linda Manz, who narrates the film’s voiceover as Bill’s younger sister, Linda. The camera moves in to frame her blank stare (fig. 125), then slowly dissolves, overlapping with a five-second exterior “live” shot of a grim iron foundry, set against an equally dull sky, the site where her brother Bill works.

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