Embarking on a Journey of Understanding (I Guess)
A couple years ago, my brother had the fun idea to try watching our way through the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time with a couple other friends who enjoyed watching movies.
It’s been quite the experience for me. I have not, I admit, always enjoyed it. But it’s been stretching. I want to keep going. I’m learning things about myself. I can’t say that I have arrived yet at “getting” or “liking” film as such, but I have found the friction of the encounter enlivening in its own way.
The #152 slot on the Sight & Sound list is held by a movie called Days of Heaven, directed by the Texan auteur (and mystic?), Terrence Malick. The guys in my film club — for the most part — love Terrence Malick.
I have to admit that I haven’t really liked the Malick that we’ve watched, though.
I have never been a “film” guy. I went through a brief phase in undergrad where I sort of tried to style myself as such, watching films by Mike Leigh and Hanif Kureishi. But my love for movies has always been much more driven by spectacle. I love visual effects and movie magic. All of those things tend to play a role in “bad” movies (and also bad movies, sans scare-quotes).
So, I recognize fully that Malick just might not be for me. He does have that weird dinosaur sequence in Tree of Life that one might have expected to tick at least some of my boxes, but I don’t think that spectacle (in the sense of a visual suspension of disbelief) is what’s driving him.
I’d probably be happy to just let my dislike of Malick’s movies continue to reside at the core of my personal identity, dropping gems to the Malick-heads like, “Malick puts the ‘mal’ in Malick… or the ‘ick’,” but I don’t think that’s fair.
I also find myself irritated to not be able to catch the bug that has bitten all of these other fine folks.
So I’ve decided to embark upon a journey of discovery — somewhat against my better judgement. I have decided that I’m going to test a hypothesis. Not willing to simply ascribe my dislike of Malick to taste (which it very well might just be), I have identified a philosophical tenet that I believe Malick’s movies embody, which I want to analyze.
The tenet pertains specifically to materiality. What is “materiality” in Malick’s films?
I think I’ll make my next post in this series focus on the hypothesis a bit more. Part of my PhD thesis explored theories of materiality in Romantic writing of the early 19th century. That informs my approach here.
In parallel, I have been watching and re-watching Malick’s movies, starting with his first one, Badlands. I’ll be posting on each of those as well.
+ Jeff