I have never seen any of Terrence Malick’s other films, but I heard rumors a couple of years ago that he was working on a new film, and that he had been doing research into Jordon Belson’s work at the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles, and that additionally he had been looking into hiring some experimental filmmakers to shoot abstract sections of the film.
This piqued my interest somewhat, and when the film came out and the people I knew who had seen it seemed to be totally bewildered by what they saw, I figured it was worth going to see. Malick manages to combine lessons learned from the strain in Brakhage’s work dealing with re-envisioning the experience of childhood, with Tarkovsky’s working through of memory (particularly in The Mirror), and then a sort of overwhelming theological dilemma that seems like something out of one of Bergman’s earlier films, into something that, though not entirely new, is certainly engaging.
My main problems with the film are how overly slick it is; you can never quite get past the fact that it is a huge budget film, and for all of its apparent earnestness, periodically I couldn’t help but think about the vast amounts of resources required to fabricate it (in a conversation recently, someone described it as an “endless Calvin Klein ad”). Also, in the second half of the film, it succumbs to readily to a more conventional storyline, which is not terribly interesting, and seems almost shocking after the first half of the film, where the story is treated only incidentally, as fragments of an almost arbitrary quality to pull back down to a more specific locality what is otherwise being treated as generic and universal “story-telling”.
Certainly the stronger part of the film was the first half, with all of it’s elliptical editing, camera movement, cutting on like movement, bizarre montage… it was exquisite and much more interesting than the bland narrative that came to predominate later in the film. Nevertheless, it is quite a feat, and easily the most interesting film to see commercial distribution in … a very long time. I look forward to seeing it again before it leaves the theater. Here are some links to articles addressing the connections between this film and the work of experimental filmmakers, including Scott Nyerges, some of whose work was in fact licensed and used in the The Tree of Life. Here’s one article, and another, and yet another.
from Paul Sharits’ N.O.T.H.I.N.G.
The Los Angeles Film forum had a program of works by Paul Sharits a couple of weeks ago. Originally they were supposed to screen both Raygun Virus and T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G., favorite films of mine that I haven’t seen in a few years. When the program was changed and those two were removed, I was initially pretty disappointed, but after seeing the program I was in fact glad to have had the opportunity to see instead mostly films I’d never seen before. N.O.T.H.I.N.G., the only film on the program I had seen before, was a real pleasure to see again, but the real treats of the program were the first and last films of the program, Wintercourse and Brancusi’s Sculpture Ensemble at Tirgu Jiu. The former is the earliest of Sharits’ films, surviving a purge by Sharits of films made before his “pure films”. The work was an intricately edited montage of photographed images, building visual rhythms into what Sharits refers to as “haiku-imagistic” sequences. Brancusi’s Sculpture Ensemble at Tirgu Jiu was a very bizarre, and totally fascinating, encounter with a series of sculptures by Brancusi. Shot with sync sound on Super 8, the film feels like a bizarre home movie, but provides an alternate way of dealing with representing the relation an individual can have to the work of another artist.
Watch Wintercourse online here.