Terrence Malick

The greatness of Malick’s cinema is limitless and his artistic career is one of absolute anti-narration. While in his first two films, Badlands of 1973 and Days of Heaven of 1978, we can still see a somewhat conventional construct, while certainly his look goes beyond the individual characters and their little silly stories, it is with The Thin Red Line, which he made after a twenty-year hiatus, that the deconstruction of all stylistic rules become apparent and unavoidable. Plots have no importance anymore for a director who wants to use images to show what words cannot tell.
The protagonists of his pictures are immersed in landscapes of infinite beauty, mostly shot during golden hour, and hide mortal dangers that leave them with no way out. Man tries to model Nature in his image, but is overwhelmed by Nature’s violence. The Tree of Life is the end-all of Malick’s poetics: the highest issues in his philosophical studies find their exact counterpoint there. We can also appreciate the alternating macrocosm and microcosm in the filmmaker’s depiction of intimate family life in the 1950s, captured in home movie style (a style that was dear to New American Cinema indie filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas) countered by the birth of the universe on the notes of Zbigniew Preisner’s Lacrimosa.
Malick’s last movie was going to be titled The Last Planet, but is now known as The Way of the Wind. It narrates several episodes in Jesus’ life and has been partly shot in Italy (Anzio, Ginosa, Matera). The filmmaker’s perfectionism has been keeping production halted on the editing phase since May 2019.