Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film by Steven Rybin

Author:Steven Rybin [Rybin, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Direction & Production, Film & Video, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Social Science, Media Studies, Individual Director
ISBN: 9780739166758
Google: JONiea27BAkC
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2011-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

A Felt Unity

Yet Days of Heaven does not keep us wholly in isolation. One of the sources of Malick’s lyricism is that he occasionally makes us feel as if subjectivity has overcome isolation, an idea that has as much to do with our experience of his aesthetic as it has to do with his characters. There are passages in Days of Heaven when, even if only momentarily, a healing of the metaphysical rift is felt. One such passage comes just as Bill has made the decision to leave Abby, who has revealed the changing winds of her love. “He seen how it all was,” Linda tells us, as Bill leaves for Chicago; “she loves the Farmer.” As Linda tells us of this major shift in Abby’s emotions in a very matter-of-fact way, Malick shows us an image of Bill leaving, via plane, with the traveling circus; Linda, Abby, and the Farmer stand in long shot and watch them fly away. Ennio Morricone’s joyous score accompanies the dissolve to a series of images that marry Abby and the Farmer not only to each other but to the very rhythms of nature. They ride together in a horse carriage, trotting along a surface of fresh snow; the Farmer gives Abby a necklace, in an image which frames one of the Farmer’s family portraits behind her (almost as if Abby has become a part of the Farmer’s familial heritage); Abby learns to draw, she makes a snow angel with Linda; and she shares a moment of intimacy with the Farmer, in bed, that has nothing of the alienation and strangeness of their wedding night. Malick will then, in a moment, cut to time-lapse photography of wheat seed sprouting in this same montage sequence in which the love of the Farmer and Abby begins to bloom. This montage does not merely serve to indicate the passage of a season and the arrival of the next impending wheat to be harvested. Instead, the details of nature’s cycles of life and its first buds of growth, for one fleeting moment, seem of a piece with the human drama, rather than apart from it. Here the Farmer and Abby are not cleaved from one another, and the space of the world, by their subjectivities; they are a part of that world.

These days of heaven end quickly. Bill’s return to the land suggests that space has once again become sundered by isolated subjectivity. When Bill returns, after having spent time in Chicago, he approaches the house with a hesitation similar to his first entrance into the house earlier in the film. A few objects indicate a life that has gone on without him: a bike resting against the steps, a potted plant, a slightly askew front door. Shown in what are ostensibly point-of-view shots, these objects are nevertheless somehow apart from Bill; the life of these objects has continued without him present, and his subjectivity, as with the Farmer’s goblets, is absent from their presence. He sees Abby,

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