Wes Anderson’s latest. In theaters May 25, 2012. Looks great.
"The Tree of Life doesn’t move forward but pulses, like a massive organism, and its beginning and end point are the same: a ball of primal energy in the blackness, ready to generate more theophanies. Unlike Brakhage, Malick is not venturing into the universe hidden within the folds of perception. But like Vermeer, Turner, and Godard, both are revelators, reminding us, frame by frame, that all that is is light."
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Light Years: Kent Jones on The Tree of Life
This is not only the best essay about Malick’s The Tree of Life I’ve read yet, it’s also one of best essays about a film I’ve ever read. If you’ve seen The Tree of Life, read this.
Thanks to the Masters of Cinema for tweeting this.
Throughout his long career, Bass insisted that his objective was always the same: “To achieve a simplicity, which also has a certain ambiguity and a certain metaphysical implication that makes that simplicity vital. If it’s simple simple, it’s boring. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think and rethink.”
Saul Bass
(Source: The New York Times)
"I will miss walking on to a photochemical film set. It has a magic to me. When the director says: “Action”, and the film is rolling, it feels like something is at stake. It feels important and intense. In a way, death is present in the rolling of that film – we live, right now – and the director says: “Cut”. And that moment in time is captured on film, really."
— Keanu Reeves, ladies and gentlemen, speaking about the unique qualities of working in celluloid in The Guardian. There are other great thoughts and reflections in the article, but Reeves really nails something essential about film vs. digital here. The digital film revolution disrupts much more than just the nuts and bolts of film production—it changes what’s captured.
"Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there’s very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I’m like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare."
— Werner Herzog. From an interview with GQ in May 2011 after the release of Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
I’m trying to get the courage to drive 3 1/2 hours to see this.
A 1-hour 47-minute panel with J.J. Abrams, James Cameron, and Michael Apted talking with Steven Spielberg about his career. (The full-length discussion is the top-left link.) A great discussion with one of American cinema’s finest.
Witnessing “The Tree of Life”
I saw Malick’s “The Tree of Life” Friday night and as one might expect of seeing a Malick film, I’ve been thinking about it since. Lots of friends have asked me what I thought about it. I continue to struggle with this question, but I wanted to capture a few thoughts while they’re fresh on my mind.
“The Tree of Life” is a meditation on life in a cosmic sense. There’s your obligatory one sentence summary that describes what it is without revealing what it means. I’ve been saying it’s a “poetic meditation” until today, but to ascribe the terms poem, poetry, or poetic to any of Malick’s work is to state the obvious and become superfluous. His is not a cinema of story or plot or even character, but of feeling, of thinking, of musing. Many other filmmakers have used the first three to comprise something like poetry (John Ford is foremost on my mind), but Malick unlike any other American filmmaker has attempted to circumvent and even resist them in “The Tree of Life” to instill a pure sense of awe and wonder in the viewer. It is indeed an ambitious film.
Visually the film provokes this sense of awe by keeping the camera in constant motion. The scenes in small town suburbia are never static, always fluid, and nearly always moving from afar to near. The camera constantly draws near to things, as if a physical proximity to its subject will somehow bring us understanding. I will undoubtedly see the film again, and I will watch more carefully the second (and probably third) time around, but I don’t recall there being a single zoom in the entire film. Instead the camera investigates, but not mechanically as on a dolly, but fluidly using a Steadicam. I recall Malick being the first filmmaker to employ extensive use of the Steadicam for “Days of Heaven,” and I think it’s a tool he has used artistically unlike any other filmmaker. It has a mesmerizing effect—the camera itself is yearning to know something.
I think that’s at least one of the main things the film is essentially trying to show. When you ask the question that all must ask sometime in our lives, “What does it mean?,” instead of there being an answer, there is simply another question that must be asked. That the answer is “love” is so plain as to be unsatisfactory to us, and we are compelled to ask again in hopes of finding some grand explanation for every-thing. We are by our nature beings of hope, yet as mortal creatures we hope for things which are finite, definable, and understandable. Yet when we find the definition, when we gain an understanding, we still yearn for more.
“The Tree of Life” is arguably the first film which has had the courage to explore this yearning, to investigate its history and posit its origin. It is a mighty and glorious film.
I can’t help but end with this verse from Paul’s first letter to Corinth, a verse which I am certain must be engrained in the fabric of Malick’s being, and which compelled him at least in part to make “The Tree of Life”: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” It is this quality of seeing in full which “The Tree of Life” strives to show. Instead of a film you watch, it is something majestic which you merely witness.
And now, a postscript.
After the final image faded and the words “Written and Directed by Terrence Malick” appeared on screen, a man in the theater shouted, “Thank God! Let’s all get our money back!” Another man retorted with equal volume, “You can shut the fuck up!” My girlfriend and I talked about this reaction, and the similar reaction from various critics (however less frank and more nuanced), and I think she summed it up well: “I think it also has something to do with why people don’t like poetry. They don’t like to think, or they don’t like to have the patience to let something beautiful wash over them without needing to ‘understand’ it.” That this is arguably a film about our need to understand makes the scene that unfolded as the movie ended ironically poignant, and also, sad.
Mubi has great coverage of reactions, reviews, and interviews pertaining to Malick’s “The Tree of Life.”
The Tree of Life Trailer 2011 HD, via Mubi. This isn’t a new trailer or anything, but it’s still beautiful.
(Source: youtube.com)
A full year after it was initially floated as a hot fest prospect, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is set to make its world premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival.
Finally! Thanks to the chairman for the heads-up.
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Q: Much has been made of the decision to alter the color of the shooting scene at the end of the film to get an R rating in 1976. Why didn’t you restore it to the originally-shot, more colorful scene?
A: There are a couple of answers to this. One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me. However, there is an impression from some who think we could easily “pump” the color back into that scene and that is not as easy as it sounds. The film was not just printed darker, or with muted colors, as some think. There are two sections of the original negative that were removed from the cut and assembled camera negative.
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The Digital Bits - Sony’s Grover Crisp on the new Taxi Driver Restoration: I didn’t know they altered the color for the purpose of getting an R rating.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is indeed quite wonderful on Blu-ray, so I’m sure they did a top-notch job on Taxi Driver, too. Looking forward to it.
Feeling
The deeper the feeling, the fewer the words you use to express it. A sigh followed by a simple, “It was beautiful.” A far-off gaze with a “good times” interjected. A smile and playful eyes looking up to answer “How was it?”.
Cinema captures the timing, the body language, the inflections and gestures we make to express ourselves. It captures raw human emotion as we live it. Cinema captures feeling.
And I love it.
