Days of Heaven: The Criterion Collection (DVD)

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Noël Carroll described Terrence Malick as a filmmaker who portrays the "primacy of experience." Malick attempts to capture images and sounds and words that are largely unfiltered by our usual perceptual processes. His films emphasize the act of looking for its own sake; they bypass language and other intermediary channels to plug the viewer directly into experience itself. Malick´s films, like many of Werner Herzog´s, layer one pristine image on top of another to create a density of imagery so tangible it becomes, in Carroll´s words "too much there."

Malick´s extraordinary second feature "Days of Heaven" (1978) is so much "there" it feels like a blanket enveloping the viewer or, to less sympathetic viewers, an impenetrable shield that prevents access. A swarm of locusts; a rippling stream; wheat fields shimmering in a gentle breeze; Malick´s world is alive in a way that only a few filmmakers have ever rivaled. Oh, there are people in Malick´s movies too, and they matter, but they don´t necessarily take precedence over the landscape. All parts of the environment receive equal billing here: people, animals, insects, trees, clouds. Even the invisible is tangible here; the wind in "Days of Heaven" is practically a character unto itself.

Like Malick´s first film "Badlands" (1973), "Days of Heaven" features a couple on the run; unlike "Badlands" this is only a minor aspect of the film´s mosaic. Bill (Richard Gere) accidentally kills a factory foreman, and runs away with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his little sister Linda (Linda Manz). They take up work as migrant farmers on a plantation owned by an unnamed Farmer (Sam Shepard, looking much younger than I ever remember Sam Shepard looking). The Farmer, dying of cancer, falls in love with Abby; Bill persuades her to marry the Farmer in a poorly-articulated scheme to inherit his money. Spending any more time on plot summary would grossly misrepresent Malick´s achievement.

The film is framed with a halting, awkward narration by Linda Manz who sounds as if she is groping for the words as she speaks them, yet another means by which Malick undermines the interpretive power of language. Here the words spring forth like a natural phenomenon, not fully planned but blossoming slowly into fullness. Linda is an odd choice for narrator since she remains so aloof from the action of the film, but then again everybody in the film is aloof in his or her own way. By emphasizing natural elements and dropping startling new images into the film seemingly out of the ether (oh, look, a flying circus has just arrived) Malick de-centers his narrative. The characters (human and otherwise) circle around the singularity at the very core of the film.

The editing is free-form. Certainly there are times when Malick employs standard narrative strategies, such as when he cuts to a shot of Bill and Abby holding each other as they walk away, to a brief shot of the Farmer looking suspicious. Other times, Malick will cut from a line of dialogue right into an entirely unrelated scene; even within a single dialogue scene, the characters appear to wander off in different directions only to suddenly find themselves back together again. Rather than continuity, Malick is primarily interested in distilling each moment to its essence, in a sense creating the ineffable on film.