I often think of one of Auden’s great early poems, titled in later collections “A Summer Night” but originally called by its first line: “Out on the lawn I lie in bed.” It is based on a real experience, one that I wrote about in some detail here. Auden is enjoying the company of colleagues and musing on, among other things, the great question of why he should be so blessed.
Terrence Malick is a biblically literate man — to say the very least — but Holy Scripture in his films often is mediated through theological and spiritual sources. I’ll be writing about some of those in later posts, but here are a few examples:
Sometimes the biblical text is intriguingly buried, as when, in Song to Song, a movie in which Patti Smith appears as a counselor to one of our protagonists, we hear in the background her amazing song “My Blakean Year” — which contains these lyrics:
Hello, dear readers —
Posting will be slow here for a while. I am currently
(a) trying to get my mother established in an assisted-living facility, which is sad for everyone concerned but also necessary;
(b) trying to finish out the semester without any disasters;
(c) helping my beloved bride do the necessary preparations for her surgery next week;
(d) editing the proofs for the forthcoming paperback edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles — an edition that will correct a few errors from the first edition, so you should preorder now;
In Malick’s first film, Badlands, a teenage girl named Holly – having run away with a charming young man named Kit who has murdered her father – finds herself hiding out with Kit in the woods. She has brought along a few souvenirs of her previous life, including a stereopticon that had belonged to her father. As the images pass before our eyes, we hear her soliloquy:
Yes, I needed patience to watch that first cut of A Hidden Life, because it was well over four hours long. In its theatrical release it was just under three hours, but that makes it the longest of Malick’s movies — so far. Let’s do a quick run-through of his films, with their dates and running length:
Clearly, Malick’s movies have gotten longer since those first — but not in a way that makes them unusual. For instance, almost all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are over two hours, with Avengers: Endgame leading the way at 181 minutes. The two longest Malick movies are set in World War II, which Hollywood has a long history of treating expansively: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), William Wyler’s epic about returning American servicemen, is precisely the same length as The Thin Red Line; Patton (1972) is two minutes longer; The Longest Day (1962) six minutes longer still.
As I noted in an introduction to this site, I’m not a film studies professor. I have no formal academic training in the history or technique of film, unless a single, memorable undergraduate class counts — and it doesn’t. But that was the class that turned me into a cinephile, that enabled me to see the richness and depth of cinematic tradition, and also to see its possibilities as an art form. Above all, I’ve continued to watch films — many, many films, the best of them repeatedly. And I have read extensively about cinematic art and technique — and about the economics of the business (which interests me strangely).
A certain disposition to the world — possessed by some humans, though not many — leads to reflection. That reflection in turn leads to puzzlement, and the puzzlement may be formed into questions. Those questions may lead to answers, either tentative or assured.
When the questions and answers are articulated, we call that articulation philosophy and the person who articulates a philosopher.
Malick — who later said that he decided to go to film school because it didn’t seem worse than any other option — was a member of the first class of students at the American Film Institute Conservatory. One of his classmates, David Lynch, said that his time there was “completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great … you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing.” Another member of that first class, Paul Schrader, reported that
Coming soon…
