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Teaching Session Montage Days of Heaven
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Written and directed by Terence Malick. Produced by Jacob Brackman, Bert Schneider and Harold Schneider. Photographed by Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler. Score by Ennio Morricone, with a selection by Camille Saint-Saens. Edited by Billy Weber. Running time: 95 minutes.
The film's plot is similar to the story in the Biblical Book of Ruth, and the film's title was derived from Deuteronomy 11:21 ("That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord swore unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.") Disharmony and tragedy in the poetic film's conclusion arise because of the conflict between the male protagonists in a fatal, fiery love triangle, who both demand the exclusive love of a female. A wealthy, lonely, land-owning, raw-boned farmer (Shepard in his acting debut) of the Great Plains falls in love with the girlfriend (Adams) of a hot-headed wheat-field worker (Gere), who is masquerading as the field hand's sister. The 'heavenly,' golden-hued, contented, and idyllic days of the drifters, who have found salvation on the wheat farm, are shattered with the discovered revelation of the real nature of the relationship between the brother and sister, and an accompanying plague of locusts and fire (typical of Old Testament judgments). Scheming deception, greedy avarice, jealous envy, adultery, and eventually murder result from the conflict. In 1916, America was changing, expanding, holding a promise of new prosperity. People heard the call and it made them restless. Empires were being built in the wide-open spaces, and so they came. Each one oddly, blindly searching for the days of heaven. (Voice over on trailer) Although allegedly located in the wheat-growing area of World War I Texas in the early part of the 20th century, the film was shot on location in Alberta, Canada over a two-year period. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Costume Design (Patricia Norris), Best Original Score (Ennio Morricone), Best Sound, and won one well-deservedOscar for Best Cinematography. The opening credits sequence, accompanied by a rendering of Camille Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals," provides sepia-toned historical period photographs (from the Library of Congress, various museums and photographic archives, and the NY Public Library) of turn-of-the-century city and tenement life (portraits, closeups, slices of life including play, marriage, work, politics, friendships, transportation, domesticity, and leisure time). The titles sequence ends with a photo of the teenaged girl that has been sepia-toned to appear like a real-life period photo. The exterior of a Chicago steel mill, and a view of junk pickers (one of whom is Abby) searching through industrial scrap. Inside, workers shovel coal into the red-hot, glowing furnaces, surrounded by the deafening noise. Molten iron pours out into molds. Quarrelsome Bill (Richard Gere) has an undisclosed, violent altercation with his foreman, punches him to the ground, and renders him unconscious - thereby forcing him to run from the scene and leave town as a fugitive. [Bill experiences further difficulty with another work foreman later in the film.] The voice-over narration of Bill's young sister Linda (Linda Manz) begins: Me and my brother, it just used to be me and my brother, we used to do things together. We used to have fun. We used to roam the streets. There was people suffering of pain and hunger. Some people their tongues were hangin' out of their mouth. Bill assures Abby that things will "get fixed up": Just got to get fixed up first. Things aren't always gonna be this way. You know that, don't you? (Linda's voice-over) In fact, all three of us been goin' places, lookin' for things, searchin' for things, goin' on adventures. They told everybody they were brother and sister. My brother didn't want nobody to know. You know how people are. You tell 'em somethin' - they start talkin'. She prophetically fears a fiery apocalypse that will consume everything in its path, unless one is judged to be good and saved by God's mercy in heaven: (Linda's voice-over) I met this guy named Ding-Dong. He told me the whole Earth is goin' up in flame. Flames will come out of here and there and they'll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames, the water's gonna rise in flames. There's gonna be creatures runnin' every which way, some of them burnt, half of their wings burnin'. People are gonna be screamin' and hollerin' for help. See, the people that have been good - they're gonna go to heaven and escape all that fire. But if you've been bad, God don't even hear you. He don't even hear ya talkin'.
That is the voice of the person who tells the story, and that it why ``Days of Heaven'' is correct to present its romantic triangle obliquely, as if seen through an emotional filter. Children know that adults can be seized with sudden passions for one another, but children are concerned primarily with how these passions affect themselves: Am I more or less secure, more or less loved, because there has been this emotional realignment among the adults who form my world? In the documentary Visions in Light director of photography Nestor Almendros says Malick: told me it would be a very visual movie, the story would be told through visuals. Very few people really want to give that priority to image. Usually the director gives priority to the actors and the story but here the story was told through images. In this period there was no electricity, It was before electricity was invented and consequently there was less light. Period movies should have less light. In a period movie the light should come from the windows because that is how people lived. Magic hour is a euphemism, because it's not an hour but around 25 minutes at the most. It is the moment when the sun sets and after the sun sets and before it is night, the sky has light but there is no actual sun. The light is very soft and there is something magic about it. It limited us to around twenty minutes a day but it did pay on the screen. It gave some kind of magic look, a beauty and romanticism.Ó I will use a recently issued DVD ofthe film and a sequence from Visions of Light. CM Oct 2002 |
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AIMS To explore the sequence of still images in a montage; To balance text and image; To determine the mood of the sequence; To determine any meaning; To analyse the nature of the dissolve as a transition; To discuss the role of colour/monochrome on the sequence; To assess the limitations of b/w and sepia; To discuss the role of music in narrative and sequence
To discuss the role of the title sequence in introducing the film. To relate the sequence to the creation of mood historical time social milieu Ask how this relates to your own project and the need to reflect the narrative. see also MalickÕs previous film Badlands and subsequent film The Thin Red Line. I have access to a copy of Visions of Light. |
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This session encourages you to take seriously the generation of mental imagery to an external stimulus (memory, text, invention etc.)
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