Nature, Grace, Period: Malick Retro Opens at Toronto’s Lightbox

Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox will be presenting a full retrospective on American filmmaker Terrence Malick commencing June 4, leading up to the Canadian premiere of his newest film, the Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life, as it hits Toronto theatres on June 10. Of course, a ‘full’ retrospective on Malick will consist of only a mere five films – the same number as TIFF’s ‘New Auteurs’ filmmakers Denis Côté and Kelly Reichardt. Of course, there is nothing ‘new’ about Terrence Malick. He graduated from the American Film Institute in 1967, and his debut feature premiered in 1973, almost 40 years ago. Abiding to perhaps the most rigorous workflow of any filmmaker other than Kubrick (and even then, you’ve got yourself an argument on either side), Malick is one of the most fascinating directors the silver screen has ever known, and the prescient timing of this retrospection is nearly as dazzling as his oeuvre.

Not too long ago, the name Terrence Malick piqued an interest in ardent cinephiles who were fairly keen in their cinema history. He was the guy that made some key films in the 70s and then disappeared, not to be heard from again. Too bad, though. Had he kept on, perhaps he’d have ended up in some sort of canon – up there with Coppola and Bogdanovich, Altman, maybe Scorsese, too. The guy brought some key names, like Sissy Spacek and Richard Gere, into the cinema spotlight, assembled some of the most alluring, biblically grand photography of any film, ever. There was praise left and right for Badlands, his debut which he made at the modest age of 30. Tackling themes of love and death amidst a darkly comic gaze into pop-culture fasciation with violence and mayhem, it was damn-near a summation of the American independent film scene of that time, particularly the output from the BBS community.

When he followed it up with Cannes Best Director-winner Days of Heaven, aka the Second Coming – of cinema, the messiah, or Malick himself (or could it be ‘Malik’, arabic for ‘king’? was there a difference?) – glory be, American auteurs were certifiably thriving on the international platform. Building off of the austere landscapes, displaced heros, and poetic narration from his previous film, Malick formulated his own language of the evil and grace inherent in all facets of nature. Locusts are just as damning as taboo relationships, infidelity, and greed – or did the latter signal the former? Images and ideas swayed around and collided with each other through his unique style of shooting and montage. Lord only knew where he would go from here.

And then there was darkness. Stalled projects and a studio system favouring the new trend of blockbuster epics left more ambitious and independent filmmakers with an uphill battle, one that Malick wasn’t game to engage in. But despite the two-decade hiatus between film premieres, he was hardly dormant during the stretch. His newest film The Tree of Life notoriously derives from a failed project about the origin of the universe, titled Q, that he tried, and clearly failed, to get off the ground after Days of Heaven. Even the film that would eventually be his comeback, the 1998 WWII epic The Thin Red Line, really began coming together at the end of the 80s, when Malick started adapting the book into a script.

One thing led to another, and almost a decade after penning a script, Malick had himself a 170-minute near-essay film detailing a “war in the heart of nature”, which arrived just in time to compete with Spielberg’s ballyhooed Saving Private Ryan. Despite a like-minded scale and era, the films couldn’t have been more different. Malick upped the romanticism of his style even further, where soldiers and overseas wives and loved ones became strict archetypes in a survey of the destructive patterns that manifest in all living things. Lyrical monologues, often delivered anonymously – arriving from any man, or every man – began to take on abstract forms that no longer resembled human-to-human communication. These were spiritual thoughts, intended for higher beings, if not coming from them to begin with.

And on he went, speeding up the pace to a mere 7-year gap before another epic: the dramatization of the Jamestown ‘discovery’ of America, The New World. Carrying forward much of the formal and thematic qualities of Thin Red Line (i.e., poetic voiceover, roaming camera, nature/man conflict), The New World was a more subtle progression in Malick’s body of work. He moved back to a two-character dynamic (John Smith and “Rebecca”, aka Pocahontas), all while growing into a more operatic structure. Wagner’s Das Rheingold prelude Vorspiel separates the film into three movements (a much more apt term than the typical ‘act’ divisions), the crux of each being a collective discovery of a new world: one made by the British, the other by the ‘naturals’, and the final by Pocahontas, discovering the enlightened, spiritual ‘other’ space that she gleefully enters at film’s end.

The retrospective will culminate on June 17 when The Tree of Life opens at the Lightbox (a week after hitting other Toronto screens). The film is a product and magnification of Malick’s thoughts and aesthetics up to this point – essentially the film his followers have been hoping he’d make since first laying eyes on his 70s output. Placing man, Earth, children, parents, roots and nebulas in an entwined kaleidoscope of images, voices, and ‘feelings’, Malick scribes an existential essay on, well, pretty much everything. It is certainly the most ambitious project that he, or really anyone since Kubrick, has attempted. It has been as well, perhaps not coincidentally, his most divisively received work, as duelling critics plant the film either at the top or the bottom of his short, but dense, portfolio. Where it falls on the hierarchy for general audiences will be a continuing debate for years, and, fortunately, it’s a debate that the TIFF Bell Lightbox is interested in kicking off right away.

New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick begins tomorrow.