Terence Malick: The New World

[oscar jubis]

As an admirer of Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, I was very excited at the prospect of experiencing Malick's THE NEW WORLD. I use the word experience deliberately. Since Days of Heaven, it's become obvious that Malick doesn't merely story-tells. His sounds and images attempt to provide a primal sensory experience to the viewer. His characters' inner monologues provide the discourse, as befits Malick's background in philosophy. The content of this discourse is very interesting_meditations on the nature of conquest and the conquest of nature, and the utopian new society that could potentially evolve from cultural synthesis and accomodation. Yet what is fascinating to me is the independence between text and image in Malick's films, the way he is inspired by silent film traditions unfamiliar to his contemporaries, or ignored by them. Malick thus allows his images to register with primordial power, with the voice overs being almost as detached from the visual content as intertitles from silent film images. He seems to submit to the 1928 manifesto by Eisenstein and Pudovkin, which argued that: "The first experimental work with sound must me directed along the lines of nonsynchronization with the visual images". This approach achieved maximum expression in the 3-hour The Thin Red Line. The new film is significantly shorter, how much so depends on which of the two cuts of the film you watch. The 150 minute cut originally released in NYC and Los Angeles has been replaced by the director with a cut that is 17 minutes shorter. I watched the shorter edition of the film and look forward to the possibility of viewing longer or "extended" cuts. Given the type of film it is though, much will be lost when viewing it at home, even in large home screens.

A dozen years later, I report having watched what has been labeled "the extended cut" of the film in a 4k restoration supervised by Malick and DP Lubezki. It's a glorious film in any of three available versions but the extended one (still under 3 hours) looks absolutely stunning. The Criterion edition is, of course, the one to watch. Cahiers listed THE NEW WORLD AS ONE OF THE TOP 10 FILMS OF THE MILLENIUM and this has become more of a certainty the more I get to know it and understand it.