Days of Heaven (1978)

Badlands was tight? Really?

Wow, if Badlands was a "tight" movie I can't even fathom what Days of Heaven must've been like. Still I bet it had more going on than Gus Van Sants "Twenty minutes without a cut in which a guy makes a sandwich" trilogy.


Still, I can't wait for MILK though. But that's another story.

I can understand that but if there really is nothing going on and the camera is still there. It seems just more of an art piece and even a test of patience rather than some kind of attempt at story telling.

Days of Heaven is one of my absolute favorite films and I highly recommend the recent Criterion release of it. The film's story itself is, quite literally, biblical: it takes the sister-wife narrative structure that recurs quite a few times in the Old Testament--circumstances lead a man and his wife to leave their home, he's afraid the guys oogling his wife will kill him if they see him as a sexual obstacle, so he poses as her brother and a king or other social elite takes the "sister" as a wife with tragic consequence--and marries it to Malicks views of society, which are heavily influenced by Heidegger. Things that kind of telegraph that sensibility and should be noted are:

1) Notice that the murder that sets the narrative in motion takes place in an industrial complex.

2) The land that the family flees to and finds success in is rural, which is kind of a "back to nature" flight.

3) The long tracking shot of the train and the screen time given to the plane goe into the Heiddger/Arendt bent that technology has made the world smaller and radically changed our sense of communit and our concept of the political.

4) The murder that concludes the narrative is commited with a screwdriver, which is another mechanical implement/sign of technology and industry.

I love Badlands, but I love Days of Heaven more. Both are personal favorites of mine, I really need to check out Thin Red Line and New World.

The story is simple but I find it compelling enough, and if you're going to tell a story using mostly images this is how you do it as far as I'm concerned. This or 2001.

The New World is I think highly underrated, to me its both sides of Malick finally achieving some sort of cohesion, also it was shot on 65mm, and for some damn reason is not on Blu yet.

Also, the context is partly silents, so think of it in reference to Sunrise.

Just watched this, just an amazing movie. I think I connected with Badlands more and probably appreciated A New World's craft a little more, but I think there's something at the heart of Days of Heaven that I can't rationally explain. I'm an atheist, but the film feels almost mythical to me, like some unwritten old-testament story carried out at the turn of the century. I think partially it's due to the locusts, but I think the relatively sparsity of dialogue and broad character relationships makes it feel far grander and broader than it is. It's a story of jealously and a hope for something better, about how want can destroy things, about men separated by their circumstances and affections, but because it's all played out in muted tones it just gains this universal feel and cadence. 

 

I kind of love a scene early on which juxtaposes the farmhands working through a field with a threshing machine and the various animals living in the grass. It's shot almost apocalyptically from the animals point of view, and tranquilly from the farmhands. Just really striking.