Terrence Malick :: Days of Heaven

The light about to end. Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, seen from afar.

One should begin with the simplest and most forgotten thing: that this film exists for only about twenty minutes a day. Néstor Almendros — with Haskell Wexler completing the shoot — filmed it almost entirely in the magic hour, that sliver after sundown and before dark when the light comes from nowhere in particular and seems to emanate from things themselves, and when there is time, each evening, for only a few shots before it goes out. A film set in 1916, in the wheat fields of Texas (Alberta, in fact), built around a triangle of migrant farmhands that ends in blood and a plague of locusts: but the plot is almost a pretext, a frame kept deliberately thin. What Malick really films is a light that is ending — a film made by waiting for the light to happen.

There's a Japanese word, mono no aware — the pathos of things, the sensitivity to impermanence — born in Heian literature and bound to the cherry blossom: the beauty of the sakura not in spite of its lasting a week, but because it lasts a week. You watch Days of Heaven and you see exactly this. The wheat fields swaying and whispering in the foreground while the human figures stay small and distant at the back; the golden light always in the act of leaving; the film itself which, like the sakura, is beautiful in the exact measure that it is about to fall. An eye schooled in mono no aware skips the drama of the love triangle and feels instead the transience that steeps every frame. Ozu, in Tokyo Story, filmed that same everyday sadness beneath ordinary things. Malick films it beneath a wheat field that is about to burn.

Malick grew up, cinematically, on Tarkovsky — on Ivan's Childhood, on Andrei Rublev — and Days of Heaven, with its conflagrations, comes after the burning barns of Mirror, which Malick had certainly seen. But the real debt runs deeper than the iconography: it's metaphysical. In Tarkovsky nature watches — a presence, a duration of its own that doesn't coincide with ours. Water, fire, the wind through the grass: elements with a time of their own, indifferent to ours. Malick takes this lesson and carries it into the American wheat: the farmhands pass, the season passes, love and jealousy pass, and the earth stays watching with the same mineral calm it will keep afterwards. It's the same awareness the Russian Zvyagintsev will inherit in turn — man set in a boundless environment, cut down to size by the immensity around him. From this angle, Days of Heaven is no American rural melodrama: it's a Tarkovskian film about the disproportion between us and what outlives us.

And then there's India: in Indian visual thought there is darshan — the seeing that is also a being seen, the reciprocal gaze between the devotee and the divine, in which light is itself manifestation, presence, gift. Almendros's light works this way — it is the thing itself. When the sun filters low across the wheat, when a crystal glass lies at the bottom of a river and catches one last ray, this is less an illuminated landscape than a darshan: a light that offers itself and, in offering itself, takes us in. This is why the film won't be reduced to beautiful photography: the beauty here isn't decorative, it's theophanic. The plague of locusts that sets the third act ablaze is then more than narrative catastrophe — it's the exact reverse of the gift, the same light withdrawing, the divine turning its gaze away.

Three cosmologies, one single intuition: that true beauty lies in the instant when something is about to end, and that light — of a sunset, of a harvest, of a youth — matters precisely because it won't hold. One presence is missing to bind it all together, and that is sound. The editing cost Malick two years, and found its breath only when he grafted in the improvised voice of Linda Manz, a young girl narrating in voice-over a world she doesn't fully understand: the consciousness that speaks is a child's, and it says things the way they'd be said by someone who knows they won't come back. Over it, Morricone writes a score of strings and woodwinds — a traditional register he usually avoided — quoting Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, and turns it into music "more remembered than lived." It's the most precise definition of the whole film. Days of Heaven doesn't so much tell a summer as remember one while it's still happening, looking at it already from afar in the very instant it is lived. The way you watch the light of the magic hour knowing that in ten minutes it won't be there — and for that very reason you can't look away.