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Terrence Malick: Movies
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Despite its complexity and open-hearted spirit, Terrence Malick’s The New World became one of the most divisive studio movies in recent memory. Even some of the filmmaker’s admirers rejected it as opaque, choppy, unstructured, too sentimental in depicting its central love triangle and too enamored with nature photography and Transcendental sentiments.
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Clearly, then, Malick's is a highly sophisticated, philosophically trained intellect. Yet the young philosopher decided not to pursue an academic career, but to pass from philosophy to film, for reasons that remain obscure. Given these facts, it is extremely tempting -- almost overwhelmingly so -- to read through his films to some philosophical pre-text or meta-text, to interpret the action of his characters in Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian or, indeed, Cavellian terms. To make matters worse, Malick's movies seem to make philosophical statements and present philosophical positions. Nonetheless, to read through the cinematic image to some identifiable philosophical master text would be a mistake, for it would be not to read at all.
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Born the son of an oil executive in Texas in 1943, Malick entered Harvard as a first-year in 1961, living in Matthews. He moved into Adams the following year, and concentrated in Philosophy under Professor Emeritus and respected film theorist Stanley Cavell, who provoked Malick’s interest in German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
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To be sure, Mr. Malick has made a few changes. He's jumped 21 Kochel numbers to No.488 and the slow movement of the 23rd Piano Concerto as the accompaniment to his lovers' dalliance in the forest. And he alternates it with a passage, almost as often repeated, from the Prelude to "Das Rheingold" by Richard Wagner that is meant to suggest momentous discovery.
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Since his graduation day forty years ago, Malick’s genius and idiosyncratic personality have given him a completely unique place in modern film. The 62-year-old Malick does not agree to interviews with the press and his contract stipulates that no current photos of him can be released for publicity. The timeline of his life, or what the public knows of it, is mainly a series of basic facts, interrupted about once every decade by the release of a revolutionary movie.
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Malick plays with the idea of mankind as one big organism with many faces. Like Charles Ives' ``The Unanswered Question'' -- used prominently on the soundtrack -- the picture presents a world in which humanity is moving in one direction and individual voices can rise up only briefly before being subsumed.
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