Days Of Heaven Research Articles

The Use of Natural and Artificial Light on Character Modelling and Character Relationships, Taking Days of Heaven and Whisper as Examples

Light plays a very important role in film and television, especially in terms of its impact on character shaping and relationship construction. This paper uses light as a starting point to analyse the effect of natural and artificial light on the portrayal of the characters taking the films Days of Heaven and Whiplash as examples, respectively. Furthermore, it compares the similarities and differences between natural light and artificial light in character modelling and proposes some suggestions on light modelling for practical shooting. The most important role of both natural and artificial light is to illuminate people. As natural light is scattered, it is mostly used as a base to restore a realistic and natural state of life. However, regarding natural light, special moments such as magical hours can be used to create a warm and ambiguous atmosphere. It is also possible to make use of existing shades to create rich light effects. Artificial light is very controllable and can be adjusted in terms of direction, colour temperature, softness, and texture to give different visual effects. The same person can be portrayed in different ways under different lighting.

Camille—Virtual Production Case Studies Considerations for Working With LED Walls for Independent Filmmakers

Camille is a short research and development (R&D) film created with the intent to share learnings with other filmmakers. By design, the film references Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and paintings by Andrew Wyeth. The director was interested in exploring ways to create naturalistic images and verité camera work using light-emitting diode (LED) volumes to prove that it is possible to capture supporting visual effects in-camera that add value to a project (even on an independent budget). Key reasons for using LED wall technology were: 1) no time or budget to travel crew to a real location; 2) no budget for permits, fire crew, and safety to execute a fire scene; and 3) to create extreme weather systems that could be art directed and scheduled around actors’ availability. This article outlines key case studies that demonstrate how the creative team incorporated realtime workflows, a new department and display technology into the filmmaking process, revealing both successes and pivots in the process.

The Enigma of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven: History, Nature, and Utopia in the American West

What exactly are the eponymous “days of heaven”? This question has been the subject of significant speculation in the scholarship devoted to the oeuvre of Terrence Malick, the highly regarded and n...

Sotto voce: Inscription as Voiceover in Malick’s Days of Heaven

Terrence Malick’s widespread use of voiceover is generally noted, as is its nonstandard bearing. Malick’s use of voiceover is non-standard in virtue of its loose narrative fit. That too is often marked. Much less discussed is the philosophical basis for Malick’s voiceover, more specifically its ontological function in bounding the filmworld with intentionality. This paper addresses such ontological questions. It first develops a general schema for voiceover and Malick’s use of it in several of his films. Malick’s discovery of the potential for oblique forms of voiceover in Truffaut is treated. The discussion then focuses on the film Days of Heaven (1978) and, in particular, on an undiscussed and easy to miss visual riddle in one of the key scenes, involving the marriage of two of the principal characters. The riddle concerns an inscription in what for most viewers will be indecipherable symbols written on a backdrop formed by the side of a wagon. It turns out that the inscription is in Blackfoot syllabary and translates the opening of the Te Deum prayer. The paper argues that the inscription is best understood as a cousin to voiceover and, in particular, to Malick’s conception of voiceover. The inscription has, accordingly, an ontological and critical function in conjunction with the scene it accompanies. The paper concludes with remarks concerning The New World (2005), a Malick film that includes several prayers in voiceover and more comprehensively and resolutely represents the linguistic presence and expressiveness of Native Americans.

“Strangers and pilgrims”: The migrant archetype in the cinema of Terrence Malick

The migrant archetype is a prevailing motif of the cinema directed by Terrence Malick to date: most of his main characters share the condition of being displaced or nomadic people. This article is focused on analysing six films –belonging to different periods of Malick’s filmography– in which this condition is significantly emphasized: Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2015). The aim of this study is to reflect upon the central role of the migrant archetype in the works of Malick, showing to what extent the essential features of this archetype are inherited from United States mythology. In the end, this connection between film and myth is due to a common ground: on one hand, the thought of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson about the idea of America, revisited in the last decades by the philosopher Stanley Cavell; on the other, the legend of the first New England settlers, in which the biblical theme of exodus and the figure of the pilgrim are fundamental. Thus, I aim to prove how –and explain on what grounds– both in the construction of Malick’s migrant characters and in the mythic representation of the American migrant the same feature stands out: the condition of “stranger and pilgrim”.

Fields of Progress: The Mechanization of Agriculture in Days of Heaven

Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) functions less as a traditional narrative in this article than as a postmodern filmic essay on the meanings and legacies of early-twentieth-century modernization in the agricultural districts of the southwestern Great Plains. Representing the border spaces of the Texas Panhandle in 1916, the film imagines a migrant space that hosts an uneven melange of machines, bodies, and terrains—one that highlights the social and ecological consequences of industrial modernity's appearance on the rural landscape. As it imagines flows of people and products between rural margins and metropolitan centers, Days of Heaven both anticipates and elaborates more recent historiographies, such as William Cronon's, that trouble common conceptions of urban core and country periphery. The film also illuminates questions about the overlap of the modern and the postmodern through a meticulously crafted pastiche of iconic twentieth-century American images. With an eye on these qualities, this article uses Malick's depictions of mechanization and his self-consciously referential aesthetic sensibilities to examine the objects that comprise late-70s postmodernism in the American grain, a version that is not so much a departure from the techniques, ethics, and spaces of modernism as it is their extension, amplification, and reproduction.

A House Is Not a Home: The Farmer's House Holds Passion in Days of Heaven

A House Is Not a Home: The Farmer's House Holds Passion in Days of Heaven

Mud Doctoring: On Days of Heaven

Mud Doctoring: On Days of Heaven

Beauty's Failed Seduction: The Thin Red Line

Beauty's Failed Seduction:The Thin Red Line Elizabeth Bradfield (bio) Gorgeous. Sumptuous. Palm fronds and the high light they wave through. Hillsides of wind-blown grass shifting through hue and shine. Clear waters that rock and hold American soldier Witt (Jim Caviezel) and a few island kids, all the embodiment of delight. Terrence Malick knows how to film Eden. He does it in other films, too—The New World and Days of Heaven in particular. His lens is rapturous when it turns away from "action," and part of me admires and even loves that he reaches toward beauty in times of horror, that he insists on the discordant coexistence of the larger world's ongoing gorgeousness and the industrialized human's noisy violation of it. But there is also a smoothness to these moments that I immediately want to pick apart. Such a beautiful, seductive surface. So lush, tender, and quiet. I can't help but ask, What is he trying to slip by me? What is he using nature to sell? When the natural world (which in Malick's world of The Thin Red Line, troublingly, seems to include indigenous people living traditionally) is offered up as balm and perfection set against The Moral Decay of War and Modern Man, I feel like I've crashed right into Wordsworth. And then there's the voice-over, making of those beautiful scenes a vehicle for the tender soul's ruminations. A magnificent backdrop to ground the inner thoughts of the outsider who wonders not at the gorgeous world itself, but while bathed in it. Can you get any more Romantic-lyric than that, wandering "lonely as a cloud," reveling in its beauty without any responsibility for its care or well-being? Malick is not oblivious to the Romantic influence and legacy. imdb's "Trivia" section even informs us that the movie's final voice-over, in which Private Train (John Dee Smith) says, "Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face?" is taken largely from Wordsworth's Prelude. ("Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—/Were all like workings of one mind, the features / Of the same face"). Of course I should have noticed this myself, but, as he probably intended, I was suckered into the wash of it all—beauty's soothing murmur. What does Romanticism as a way of engaging with the natural world offer us in the long-industrialized world (as opposed to the recently industrialized world of Wordsworth)? What does it offer me, as a viewer? In 1998, when the film was released, ecocriticism had already begun opening our eyes to the importance of this conversation in literature. Lawrence Buell published The Environmental Imagination in 1996, challenging us to upend our use of nature in art, to see it clearly for itself and not just as pathetic fallacy. [End Page 46] As a naturalist, I spend a lot of my life debunking and correcting people's responses to nature. No, that deer is not responding to some deer-love you exude from your soul, it has just been habituated to humans and taught to expect food from them. No, snakes/sharks/spiders are not malicious, they're just living their lives. No, ants are not pests, they are essential to a functioning ecosystem. It makes me tired and it makes me feel like a jerk. I know Malick is an avid birdwatcher, which endears him to me and reassures me that he has some interest in and knowledge of the reality of animals' lives. It also speaks to what I sense is his patience and openness to surprise entering from the periphery of things. And the naturalist in me is relieved to find that the birds (hornbill, rainbow lorikeet) and reptiles (crocodile, not alligator) are indeed native to Guadalcanal, where the film takes place, although I'm suspicious that the cute marsupial is not the region's Phalanger orientalis but another species—the creature in the film darker than what the guidebooks offer. To me, there's nothing worse than movie-making laziness when it comes to accuracy about the...

Two Letters about Two Viewings of To the Wonder

Two Letters about Two Viewings of To the Wonder Morgan Meis (bio) 1 Dear ______, Our shared enthusiasm for To the Wonder puts us at odds with most of the world. Certainly the critical consensus stands against it. Have you read some of those reviews? What is it that we see in this film that others don't? For me it all begins with the images of Mont St-Michel, that venerable Catholic pilgrimage site in Normandy. Malick's images of the place startle my memory. My first trip to Mont St-Michel happened when I was eleven years old. I wasn't raised in the Church, but I believe that in some sense what happened to me when I was eleven ended up bearing fruit twenty-five or so years later. My Catholic baptism in Sri Lanka took place when I was nearly forty. This process connecting time and spiritual conversion is something I think Malick captures well in To the Wonder. On one hand, you can look at the experiences in your life in a pretty flat way. I could just list different things that happened to me. "August 13, 1983: saw an amazing medieval fortress and church on an island off the coast of Normandy. Ate trout on the bone for the first time ever. Slept well." This would be an accurate portrayal of what actually happened. And it would also miss everything that is of any importance. Because what happened to me at Mont St-Michel, and what happened to me that entire summer I spent with my aunt in Paris and traveling around Europe, was that I was continually shocked and astounded by experiencing the world in new and surprising and destabilizing ways. I was opened up. My heart softened. I'm not sure exactly why it happened for me that summer, probably, a number of forces and accidents in my life all came together at once, the way those things happen. I was a pretty cynical eleven-year-old kid. But wandering around Europe with my aunt knocked that out of me, for a time. Later, of course, it came back, the coldness, the hardness. And then I had to fight it off again. All of life, in a sense, has been like that for me. Learning various ways to protect myself from the empty deadness and disappointment of the world … and then realizing that it is the self-protection, the putting-on-armor, that contributes to that very sense of deadness. In fact, when I'm opened up, when I'm snapped in two and knocked on my ass by the otherwise insignificant beauty of the world, that's when life seems more like a mystical hovering than like a flat and dead list of events and … I don't know, mute causality. [End Page 56] I see Malick's films over the last few years as an attempt to put that specific way of being-in-the-world, the Mont St-Michel way of being-in-the-world, into a film. Whether this is successful or not is another question. But I will say it is an incredibly bold and moving thing to try to do. Crazy perhaps. Parts of Tree of Life probably fail exactly because they try too hard in this area. And many of the scenes in most of his recent movies, with all the fucking muslin floating in the breeze and people wandering around meaningfully on the beach … they probably aren't the right images for the feeling he's trying to get. Maybe he already got it back in Days of Heaven with some of those late evening shots, the magic hour out in the fields. Maybe everything else is just piling on. But I think he wants to try, at least. (Is there anything more to life—or to art?) I think he wants to remind me, on film, what it felt like to be eleven years old and wandering around at the top of Mont St-Michel, utterly astounded and utterly convinced, finally, that something in my heart has been right all along. That life is not simply a cruel trick, and that throwing...

Generation Jones and Contemporary US Fiction

1. The Summer of 1979 If Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) had a soundtrack, it would include punk and new wave pioneers like Patti Smith, as well as popular rock groups like Bachman–Turner Overdrive. That’s what’s playing in the background during their college years, when the main characters, Patty and Walter Berglund, and their friend Richard meet. Hanging out during the summer of 1979, they talk about Three Mile Island and the Iranian Revolution, type on an IBM Selectric, go to the opening of Days of Heaven, and watch Fantasy Island on TV. As with most novels, these details bolster the realism of the book, but they also define a distinctive generational sensibility. Patty was born in 1958, Walter and Richard a year or two before that (Freedom 535). They would typically be considered Baby Boomers yet have little in common with the Woodstock generation. They represent the generation after those who came of age in the sixties, but before Generation X, one that the cultural commentator and marketing consultant Jonathan Pontell has named “Generation Jones.” The Baby Boom is typically defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, according with the spike in births after World War II. (Of course, there is some debate about dates; the popular generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe, in Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069 (1992), recalibrate the years to include 1943–1960, followed by Generation X, born from 1961 to 1981.) In contrast, Pontell argues that the conventional segment covers too long a span: shared characteristics rather than demographic *Jeffrey J. Williams is professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and his most recent book is How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University (2014). This essay complements his account of contemporary US fiction in “The Rise of the Academic Novel” (ALH 24.3 [2012]) and “The Plutocratic Imagination” (Dissent [2013]).

American Pastorals : horizons et origines imaginaires dans Days of Heaven, Heaven’s Gate et Matewan

Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) and John Sayles’ Matewan (1987) differ greatly in their cinematographic and aesthetic projects. Yet all share a similar calling into question of the pastoral ideal as the cradle of the American cultural and political imagination. Operating on vastly different scales and production contexts, the three movies nonetheless converge towards a rehabilitation of the American pastoral imagination in the disenchanted context of the late 1970s or the triumphant materialism of the Reagan years. What this article examines is how these films reappropriate the pastoral mode as a means of reevaluating an artistic, historic and generic heritage, while challenging narrative and aesthetic practices, ultimately investigating and investing new forms of artistic and political involvements.

Days of Heaven. (1978). Directed and Written by Terrence Malick

Days of Heaven. (1978). Directed and Written by Terrence Malick

Double Up on Heaven

This paper describes a scenario in which a person in his afterlife will with probability 1 spend twice as many days in Heaven as in Hell, but, even though Heaven is as good as Hell is bad, his expected utility for any given day in that afterlife is negative.

Nature and the Unmaking of the World: Reading Figures of Nature in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven

Nature and the twentieth-century industrializing of America provide the setting for Malick’s film Days of Heaven (1978). This article offers a figural analysis of images of nature to reveal the moving forward of both human and natural cycles in the film. Through a reading of figures of nature, Days of Heaven reveals a clear figural communality between human and natural cycles of world making and unmaking. Furthermore, it retrospectively illuminates the formation of the world of twentieth-century American industrialization.

Globalization’s bottom: Subtitle and switch in Wang Yu-Lin’s Taiwanese dialect films

Abstract A large number of contemporary Taiwan films deploy, principally, the Taiwanese dialect (Minnan yu or southern Fujianese) in their multilingual presentation of the island. These Taiwanese-speaking films draw consciously and anti-hegemonically from Taiwan’s subculture and folkways in the countryside, distancing themselves from urban, metropolitan conditions. For instance, Wang Yu-Lin’s Seven Days in Heaven (2010) is a black comedy structured on Taoist funeral services, night market bazaars and the mourning of the father. His Flying Dragon, Dancing Phoenix (2012) is Taiwanese go-ah-hi (folk opera) modernized, yet still based on traditional transvestite dramaturgy. Whereas Taiwanese dialect films present the dizzyingly chaotic, syncretic local palimpsest, the circulation into global cinema flattens and simplifies these films into a single rolling line of English subtitle at the bottom of the screen, about to sink into subconsciousness. Such flattening destroys Taiwanese dialect film’s local conditions, in particular multilinguality that constitutes the islander’s very identity, one that switches spontaneously and restlessly among Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakanese, aboriginal languages, Japanese and English, the latter four often in the form of popular Nipponized-sinologized words and phrases. Taiwan becomes the codeword for switch on account of its colonial legacy and multiracial, entrepreneurial reality. Its magic lies in rhetorical sleight of hand, rhetorical in part because the island is so trapped politically. This article proceeds to analyse code-switching on the soundtrack and the accompanied subtitles in Wang’s films.

Spiraling Downward: America in Days of Heaven, In the Valley of Elah, and No Country for Old Men

Abstract Bringing together the DVD reissue of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, and Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, this essay argues that the three films are indictments of the violent history of American militarism.

A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line

In his 1979 foreword to The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell remarks on the curious relationship between Heidegger and cinema (1979, ix-xxv). Cavell is inspired to do so by Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), a film that not only presents us with images of preternatural beauty, but also acknowledges the self-referential character of the cinematic image (Cavell 1979, xiv ff). For Cavell, Malick's films have a formal radiance that suggest something of Heidegger's thinking of the relationship between Being and beings, the radiant self-showing of things in luminous appearance (1979, xv). Days of Heaven does indeed have a metaphysical vision of the world, but 'one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human existence-call it the arena between earth (or days) and heavenquite realized this way on film before' (Cavell 1979, xiv-xv). As Cavell observes, however, the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and Malick's films seems to challenge both philosophers and film-theorists. The film-theorists struggle to show how Heidegger is relevant to the experience of cinema, while the philosophers grapple with the question of cinema and aesthetics, precisely because film puts into question traditional concepts of visual art, as Walter Benjamin showed long ago (Cavell 1979, xvi-xvii). In what follows, I take up Cavell's invitation to think about the relationship between Heidegger and film by considering Malick's 1998 masterpiece, The Thin Red Line. The question I shall explore is whether we should describe The Thin Red Line as 'Heideggerian Cinema'. Along the way I discuss two different approaches to the film: a 'Heideggerian' approach that reads the film as exemplifying Heideggerian themes (Furstenau and MacAvoy 2003); and a 'film as philosophy' approach (Simon Critchley 2005) arguing that, while the film is philosophical, we should refrain from reading it in relation to any particular philosophical framework. In conclusion, I offer some brief remarks about

The Genesis of Days of Heaven

This article suggests that Old Testament stories are the source of much of the plot of Terrence Malick's second film, Days of Heaven (1978); that a transcendent power intervenes in its events; and that Malick has therefore created a religious film.

“Days of Heaven on Earth”: Presbyterian Communion Seasons in Nineteenth–Century Otago

Communion seasons were a distinctive and important part of nineteenth–century Presbyterian culture. This paper examines such occasions in the Presbyterian–dominated colony of Otago, New Zealand. Communion was a significant social event, and its preparatory fast days were holidays for the whole community. As a spiritual event, the communion season induced an experiential and emotive piety, belying common modern perceptions of nineteenth–century Presbyterianism as an ascetic and intellectualised faith. Over the period from the founding of the colony (1848) to the turn of the century, certain rituals of the communion season altered significantly. Some changes occurred in response to new ideologies such as temperance; others reflected a softening of traditional Calvinist theology in favour of a more inclusive religion, Presbyterians being invited to communion rather than having to prove themselves fit to attend. Such changes were not unique to Otago, and practice in the colony reveals a strong continuity with events in Scotland: the Presbyterian communion season proved a remarkably successful import to colonial Otago.