“Terrence Malick began the decade with the sort of unprecedented work of art people will be talking about their entire lives. The Tree of Life seemed to encompass the sum total of the middleclass American family experience before the turn of the century. So many people saw themselves in its kaleidoscopic view of existence, whether in the momentary thoughts of the beginning of creation building to the first instance of mercy occurring naturally, or in the reveries and small traumas of growing up with a distant and repressed father. The search for the beauties of existence when above you towered a thundering god of rationality and conflict so captivated audiences that anything Malick tried in its wake struck most as a paltry offering. When you had tapped into the mysteries of existence from the eyes of a child through to his adult reflection, it was difficult for most people to settle for less.
“Terrence Malick ended the decade with a film that once again captured the attention of the arthouse public. His goals were similar, to see pure love and show the excitement of being alive while a historical epoch killed millions all around his dreamers. His timeline is directly before his historical triumphs The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line, suggesting strongly that style is only acceptable to some when safely nestled in antiquity, as if treating life now with the same wistful gravitas is somehow distasteful. Nevertheless, he’s turned his sights on the men and women who rejected the arc of time, the flattening power of a bigoted ideology, knowing in their hearts where it would lead. Years after the bodies had been counted in Germany, the people in Radegund would still find space in their hearts to look down on the family of Franz Jägerstätter, the man who refused to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler.
“Malick gently drifting through time and space throughout his most busy decade has made it easier to draw connections between his thematic bulwarks. A Hidden Life never shows the true violence of the Nazi party because I believe Malick no longer has the heart to film violence on that scale and I believe he respects the enormity of the suffering and death. He would rather show what was lost, what Franz foolishly believed he and his wife could escape high up in the mountains, the great fabled German strongholds. He believed that in the same logic that allowed the Nazi propaganda machine to create monstrous gods from petty men he might find refuge. Of course there is no escaping the times, not really. ‘They’re sending farmers home…for now at least…’ writes Fani, the long suffering companion. The mountains loom large behind her always, a reminder that their shelter was a lie, that the shadow of something mighty and unfeeling would always dwarf them. The mountain, the unchanging historical object, would laugh outlast their protest and their love. So too will the images captured by the Nazis of their historical wrongs. Love joins the unspoken eternal, and violence etches itself into the mountain.
“Malick’s focus in A Hidden Life is uncharacteristic. His perspective in twain, the wife left behind and the soldier who refused to go soldiering, and his photography of the world around them is his most impatient and hungry, to show that no gesture affects just one man. Each vista brings Malick the same joy Ford evidently felt filming the buttes of Monument Valley - this is the closest Malick’s come to making one of Ford’s pictures, somewhere between the bitter grace of the cavalry films and the arch negativity of the curios like The Fugitive, also about a man of god hounded by the state. His depictions of both evil and tenderness have a 40s Catholic chasteness to them that somehow makes their implications all the greater. When lovers are reunited, your heart races for them, bereft the language in their hungry eyes. That is truly what it feels like, to touch someone you fear you might never touch again. So much lost, now found only in recreations of the past just as ugly and just as lovely as our terrible present.” ~ Scout Tafoya
No comments:
Post a Comment