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Biographies of great artists are of inherent interest, but in the case of Terrence Malick, one of the greatest living filmmakers, there’s an extra fascination because of the great question mark that looms over his career: the twenty-year gap between his second feature, “Days of Heaven,” released in 1978, and his third, “The Thin Red Line,” from 1998. Moreover, Malick hasn’t granted any interviews since 1979, further inflaming the special cinephilic hunger aroused by the very notion of a Malick biography. Now that book is here: John Bleasdale’s “The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick” (Kentucky). It’s a rapturously detailed, sensitively observed, critically insightful account, in which the filmmaker emerges as someone whose presence, long kept out of public view, appears to have entranced more or less everyone with whom he crossed paths—and whose personal life stands in peculiar and powerful relation to his artistry. It also illuminates his two-decade hiatus as a time of hidden art but art nonetheless.
Malick was born in 1943, in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. His father, Emil, an engineer who’d studied at M.I.T., was born to immigrants who fled the Ottoman Empire before the First World War. Malick’s mother, Irene, who attended the University of Chicago, was from a family of farmers, of Irish descent. She stayed home to raise Terrence (nicknamed Terry) and his two younger brothers Larry and Chris. The family moved to Waco, Texas, in 1952; Terry was a gifted student and a star athlete, but he fought bitterly with his father, and so, at age twelve, he was sent to an academically demanding boarding school in Austin. There, he played varsity football (and was a nominee for Texas Football Player of the Year), acted in plays, wrote for the school paper, and was introduced to movies made by such filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut. Malick graduated as valedictorian, and Emil wanted his scientifically talented son to go to M.I.T. But Terry defied him, choosing instead to study philosophy at Harvard.
The outgoing, free-spirited polymath studied with Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who wrote seminal books about cinema, including “The World Viewed” and “Pursuits of Happiness.” Malick was especially interested in the work of Martin Heidegger and went to Paris during his senior year, where he met Hannah Arendt. Furnished with a letter of introduction from her, he went to Freiburg to visit Heidegger, discussing with him plans for translating his work. (One of Malick’s Heidegger translations was eventually published.) Malick won a Rhodes Scholarship and, while in the U.K., worked as a freelance journalist. He returned to the U.S. and worked for Life magazine in Miami. He then worked briefly at The New Yorker, where he was commissioned to write an article about the death of Che Guevara. His research for it grew obsessive, but he never finished the piece.
At loose ends, Malick went to M.I.T. to teach philosophy, where he fell in with the university’s filmmaking teachers. A friend encouraged him to apply to the American Film Institute’s newly founded film school, in Los Angeles, and he was accepted. By the time he set foot there, in 1969, he’d already written a feature-length screenplay, about a young man and a teen-age girl on a killing spree in the Midwest. It won him instant recognition among his peers, who included Paul Schrader and David Lynch. He also got an agent, found lucrative employment as a screenwriter and script doctor, and decided to make a film from his screenplay. He formed a production company and raised money for an independent, non-union production. Shooting on his first feature, “Badlands,” started in July, 1972.
Movies are the great compensatory art, the creative redemption for people who are novelists, poets, musicians, playwrights, painters, photographers, or even philosophers at heart but not in practice—or those who have artistic souls but no preferred art form at all. Malick had been a colossal in-betweener, a master of many skills. He was lured in by the art that takes the most from the most; that borrows from theatre and literature, from photography and music and dance; and that is essentially technological. Entering the world of movies, Malick developed methods of his own in order to create experimental films—not in the conventional sense of avowedly avant-garde non-narrative but in the scientific sense. From the start of his career, Malick filmed not to show but to see, to discover. He sought to transform the well-patterned practices of filmmaking into an ongoing quest, a journey into the unknown.
Describing the making of “Badlands,” Bleasdale writes, “Takes were done of the script, followed by improvised takes, or even takes without dialogue, with the actors thinking their lines in their heads as they hit their marks.” Malick’s methods led to conflict with crew members. After the first cut, Malick fired the editor and, with the assistant editor, edited the movie himself. It was accepted as the closing-night film of the 1973 New York Film Festival and was released the following year. Though divisive, it was hailed for its stylistic and emotional originality. (Among the naysayers was Pauline Kael, who panned it in The New Yorker: “I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it.” Her “I”s must have been closed.)
Malick’s next film, “Days of Heaven”—about a young couple in the early twentieth century who, with a young sister in tow, flee Chicago for farm country and meet with disaster—was filmed in 1976. This time, Malick had financing from a studio, Paramount, but the film was no more conventional than “Badlands.” Again, Malick took a radical approach to the relationship between screenwriting and filming. On location in rural Canada, Bleasdale writes, Malick hated the footage he was getting: “His answer was to take more dialogue out of the picture, occasionally shooting whole scenes as a silent movie.” Then, to fill in the story, Malick had the teen-age actor playing the young sister (Linda Manz, in her first film) both recite and improvise some sixty hours of voice-over. Malick took a similarly unorthodox approach to cinematography—working only with natural light, and mostly shooting during the “magic hour” near sunset. Crew members again rebelled and the project fell behind schedule. The cinematographer Néstor Almendros, having worked closely with Malick on the film’s aesthetic, had to leave midway through for a prior commitment, but he won an Oscar for his work. When “Days of Heaven” was released, in 1978, some critics hailed it as a singular masterwork; Malick won the best-director award for it at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.
Then came the paradoxical curse of good fortune. Charles Bluhdorn, the president of Paramount’s parent company, was so impressed with Malick that he put him on the payroll so that Malick could make any film he wanted without regard for commercial considerations. Faced with infinite possibilities, Malick couldn’t choose. He laid the groundwork for a madly ambitious project called “The Cosmogony” (later, “Q”). Bleasdale describes the hiring of cinematographers to film “volcanic eruptions at Mount Etna and solar and lunar eclipses” and “micro-jellyfish at the Great Barrier Reef,” and of a computer animator tasked with “creating a sequence showing the creation of galaxies and stars.” There was also originally going to be a family story, Malick’s own family origin story—“a multicharacter drama set in the Middle East during the First World War,” Bleasdale writes, and Malick dispatched various location scouts to the region before dropping the idea altogether.
Malick also wanted to make a multimedia version of the life of Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man—but David Lynch beat him to the story. He wanted to do a remake of Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff.” (It eventually became a play, though it was never publicly performed.) He considered adapting Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer.” He moved to Paris and then back to Texas. He was offered the chance to make a film of D. M. Thomas’s novel “The White Hotel” and came up with his own alternative version of it, a story about the woman known as Anna O. in a seminal case study by Sigmund Freud. Malick was interested in adapting Molière’s “Tartuffe.”
He also considered adapting James Jones’s novel “The Thin Red Line,” about a company of American soldiers in the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942-43. Producers agreed to this plan, and he delivered the script in 1989—nine years before the movie eventually appeared. The contract was signed in 1991, but the producers had money trouble, went to a studio for financing, and got it in 1995. The film was shot, on a budget of fifty-six million dollars, two years later. Although it had a script—indeed, in one draft, five hundred pages of script—Malick again shot in a freely improvisational way. Bleasdale writes, “When early on in the shoot Malick called, ‘Cut,’ he was disheartened to see the makeup and hair people rush in to touch up the actors. From that point on, he decided never to say ‘cut,’ preferring to play scenes out until the cameras ran out of film.” The result was two hundred and twenty-two hours of footage, eventually whittled down into a nearly three-hour film. The result was nominated for Oscars in seven categories (including Best Picture and Best Director), and though it didn’t win in any of them it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and Malick was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle. It also took in ninety-eight million dollars worldwide at the box office.
The relative success of “The Thin Red Line” is likely due to its gripping literary source and to the fact that it’s essentially an action film, a war film. Despite Malick’s stylistic flourishes, he delivers the expected goods, particularly in an extended central section showing battle, and in which he reaches a high and refined emotional pitch in scenes involving the story’s existential core, death. The film includes sequences involving memories and fantasies, yet it’s not nearly as distinctive in its fusion of form and style as are Malick’s first two features. Neither is the movie that followed it: in 2004, Malick started shooting “The New World,” a story about Pocahontas and John Smith that he’d been working on while making “Badlands.” Here, too, Malick filmed improvisationally and copiously, in natural light. It’s a backloaded film, dramatizing the conflict of English settlers at Jamestown and the Indigenous Powhatan people whose land they occupied. It goes stepwise through its blend of romance and violence, until an inspired climactic sequence—reinforced by a philosophical idea—in which Pocahontas reaches England.
The film met with less critical success, did poorly at the box office, and was nominated for just one Oscar—for its cinematography, by Emmanuel Lubezki. But, as Bleasdale notes, it was here that Malick and Lubezki devised a new visual style, based on a camera moving on the so-called z-axis, in the direction of the view through the lens, plunging into the action and “taking the audience forward and into the world, probing, peering, inquiring, exploring with a restless, intrusive eye.” This method is no mere ornament; it’s a cinematic philosophy in action, and Malick soon found the stories to bring it to life on film. For his next project, he revived “The Cosmogony” but, in lieu of his paternal grandparents’ drama, centered it on his troubled adolescence in Waco and subsequent family tragedies. It had dinosaurs, too—Malick fusing paleontology and ontology, the origin of the world and the origin of his own world of intellectual discovery and emotional awakening.
This film, “The Tree of Life,” shot mainly in 2008 and released in 2011, is one of the great achievements of modern cinema; it’s not so much Malick’s relaunch as it is the ultimate flowering, in his sixties, of what he’d been working toward since 1969. He brings to the screen an idea that ragingly energizes his first two features and shakes the framework of the third and fourth: an effort to escape and to change the very premises of narrative filmmaking. His films reflect frustration with the fundamental similarity of most commercially released movies as pictures of actors acting, as a variety of filmed theatre. He seeks to break from theatrical dialogue and to turn language into an independent expressive element akin to images. His collage-like editing, which emphasizes nature (trees, skies, seas, animals) along with drama, places actors in the context of a world rather than centering his cinematic world on acting. Above all, Malick’s methods suggest a rejection of the norms of cinematography: by means of the roving, floating, surging camera, Malick unlinks the cinematic image from the history of art and photography, using the elements of time and space to repudiate the very notion of the fixed frame and to open the screen to the world at large.
“The Tree of Life” was met with great acclaim, garnering Oscar nominations for Best Picture as well as for its directing and cinematography, and did well at the box office (albeit far better internationally than domestically). In quick succession, Malick followed it with three movies—“To the Wonder” (2012), “Knight of Cups” (2015), and “Song to Song” (2017)—on keenly personal subjects (love and marriage, the film business, and Austin’s music scene), in which he refines his methods and expands their emotional power. Yet their box-office take was negligible, and many reviews were not just negative but derisive.
Most directors depend on the commercial success of their films to keep afloat, but, in the current market, directors whose names have artistic prestige are of value to producers and distributors independent of their films’ profitability. Yet Malick, though a living exemplar of the ideal of the auteur, has benefitted less from this phenomenon than other directors of his generation and calibre. Because of the twenty-year gap in his filmography, he can hardly be an object of rediscovery or nostalgia, like Martin Scorsese or David Lynch. Because of his avoidance of publicity, whether interviews or any other journalistic activity, Malick isn’t a character identified with his work. So it was that, despite crowning his career with four of the most original films of the twenty-first century, Malick remained as unestablished as ever. He thus went back to a more conventional mode of filmmaking, with a more rigid story and script, for his 2019 film “A Hidden Life,” which deals with yet another impersonal historical subject—an Austrian conscientious objector under the Nazi regime. It was as much of a retreat in inventiveness as in method, the least distinctive film that he has made, yet it received generally favorable reviews and did much more business than the three that preceded it.
But if “A Hidden Life,” like “The Thin Red Line” and “The New World” before it, marked a retrenchment, it is quite possible that it may likewise give way to a further breakthrough. Last year, Malick was at work editing another film, “The Way of the Wind.” Shot before the COVID pandemic, in locations ranging from Iceland to Morocco, it depicts scenes from the life of Jesus. One actor told Bleasdale, “We’re doing a crazy guerrilla student movie with this man.” This return to the source holds promise of a new beginning. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com