Days of Heaven (Days of Heaven, 1978) Terrence Malick.
Chicago, 1916. After discussion with his foreman, who hit probably causing death, Bill (Richard Gere) decides to flee and emigrate with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and her little sister Linda (Linda Manz) to the great estates of Texas, where seasonal workers would be recruited by a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard).
not hide the deep admiration I profess to Terrence Malick, whom I consider the director's most important modern American cinema. He alone among his fellow peers, has managed to create its own language and non-transferable; understood language the conjunction of a series of formal elements, narrative and content that are repeated in a constant in all the works of an author.
There are many filmmakers who have style, but few that have a truly personal language, and Malick is, no doubt, one of them. His films like best or least, but what nobody can question is that we have a director who, when created, has always been consistent with its conceptual and aesthetic convictions.
The contemplative nature of his films and the poetic urge them, make Malick is an artist closer to European directors like Tarkovsky or Erice as other members who once constituted the so-called Hollywood Renaissance ( Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lynch ...).
's up small time films, revolves around two main themes: the loss of innocence and a return to paradise lost.
Following the postulates of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his films man can only be in the world, with whom he formed an all existential, hence the intimate relationship in their works is established between the human and natural setting, which filmed at a level of detail and amazing sharpness.
Its elliptical narrative, not sloppy, it departs from the classic standards and put in the service of an essentially visual film, heir to the silent era, giving always the image on the floor, usually tap the account being used, often through the narrative device of the voiceover.
All the above is found in Days of Heaven, his second film after the impressive debut which resulted Badlands (Badlands , 1973).
is a film unique and captivating beauty, tragedy overcome with a strange lyricism that runs from start to finish our senses spellbound. As in Badlands is the voice of a girl who introduces and accompanies us along a love triangle story again have a place where crime and flight.
Malick film in the characters return to paradise lost (so-called "bad lands" of South Dakota and Montana Badlands , the island of Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line , of Virginia The seventeenth-century New World or for growing large grain of Texas on the tape that concerns us here) to purge their sins, contrary to what happened to the biblical Cain, who was expelled from Eden after sin . However, this almost virgin nature always comes back to be tainted by the crimes of a man who is lost in the search of existential meaning. Photographed
a sublime way by English Nestor Almendros, who won an Oscar for his exceptional work, Days of Heaven gives us plenty of pictures to remember: the great house that looks out a picture of a chair Hopper fields in which only its monumental structure warns us of the human presence, train wagons infected people seeking work to be something in the mouth, the many ears of wheat swaying in the wind, the biblical plague of locusts that occurs near the end ... all generated by the inspired poetic vision of its director.
After this magnificent film, Malick directing reject The Elephant Man, he moved to France, remaining dormant for a couple of decades to get back in the late nineties with The Thin Red Line: the most complex war film , beautiful and profound film history, his great masterpiece along with the subsequent and misunderstood The New World.
Rating: very good .
