"Troops of nomads swept over the country at harvest time
like a visitation of locusts, reckless you fellows,
handsome, licentious, given to drink, powerful but
inconsistent workmen, quarrelsome and difficult to
manage at all times. They came in the season when
work was plenty and wages high. They dressed well,
in their own peculiar fashion and made much of their
freedom to come and go.

"They told of the city, and sinister and poisonous
jungles seemd in their stories. They were scarred
with battles. They came from the far-away and unknown,
and passed on to the north, mysterious as the flights
of locusts, leaving the people of Sun Prairie quite
as ignorant of their real names as characters as upon
the first day of their coming."

Hamlin Garland, _Boy Life on the Prairie_
(quoted in the preface to the screenplay)


It bothers me that I cannot remmeber the last time I
saw _Days of Heaven_ on the big screen. But any
doubt about its status as one of the greatest films
of all time was immediately swept away in the opening
credits, where black-and-white still photos of migrant
workers of all races seem to capture their souls for
eternity. The Chicago factory scenes segue into
the solemn harvest sequences: clumps of black-clad
hired-hands, straight out of Courbet and Manet
paintings, speaking in Chinese, Polish, and other
strange tongues. They stand every which way in the
pre-dawn wheatfield as the priest intones harvest
psalms, Ennio Morricone's orchestration of Saint-Saens
swelling in the background. In that moment Malick
can truly be said to have crystallized the essence
of our nation, built on the labor of hard-working,
exploited immigrants who nevertheless raised us
to dizzying heights. This sense of timeliness and
timelessness is only underscored by the ending, where
masses of young men hop on trains heading to uncertain,
foreign wars. The recent Criterion edition of
of _Days of Heaven_ emphasizes the film's particular
time frame. Recent events serve to remind us that
1908 is the same as 2017, that art indeed transcends
time, and lives forever.

The reason _Days of Heaven_ is special, even among
films in Malick's exalted ouerve, lies in its
extraordinary fusion of opposites. There is such
tension between the timeless and the emphemeral,
between the personal and the philosophical, between
motion and stillness. The main characters are
archetypes; half of them don't even have names.
They live in such harmony with nature in the most
majestic landscape (Canada substituting for the
Texas Panhandle), yet they are hopelessly trapped
in eternal recurrences. Bountiful harvests give
way to locust plagues as inevitably as the changing
of the seasons, and their days of heaven merely
predict exodus and the coming tragic deaths. I
notice for the first time (after 10 viewings?) that
even the Beethoven minuet in G, played in Linda's
boarding (ballet) school scene at the end, is
already foreshadowed in an earlier scene where
Abby dances to a harpsichord variation in the
Farmer's mansion. As is customary for Malick,
each piece of music eventually connotes the
opposite of its mood and meaning from before.
Everything is pre-determined; what goes up must
come down. Mostly eschewing close-ups, Malick's
film is as emotionally muted as an impressionist
painting; distant and objective, it conveys
supreme indifference to man's fate, which in
a collective sense is already set in stone. Yet
this sense of philosophical impasse is punctured
by the liveliness of the migrant workers --
their sheer joy in existing -- the spontaneity
of the vaudeville players, and most of all,
Linda Manz's improvisational voice-over. All
of Malick's later films can be thought of as
attempts to break out of the _Days of Heaven_
philosophical deadend -- by focusing on the
personal and the particular, by relying on
soulful improvisation of his actors, and by
appealing to a higher, spiritual plane.

I paid particular attention to the movement
of the camera. There is much more motion than
I remembered, but this frenzy does not set
us free; it merely ensnares everyhing in
its vortex. Only in the middle stanza, during
the happy times in the Farmer's mansion, does
Nestor Almendros' lens work slows down. And
in the rare moments the camera stops and stares
the character in the eye, the effect is
extraordinary -- like the transcendental
moments Paul Schrader describes in his book
on Bresson and Ozu. They also recall the
still photos in the beginning of the film.
The end credits also denote stillness, featuring
a plain dark blue, with Morricone's variations
reverberating like ice-water in our veins.
"This girl, she doesn't know where she is going,
whatshe is going to do. Maybe she will meet
up with some character. I hope things
work out for her. She is a good friend of
mine." Linda Manz's final words could
be an epitaph for Marina in _To the Wonder_,
Rick in _Knight of Cups_, and for every
seeker/pilgrim/wanderer that has passed
through Malick's enchanted cinematic
journeys, on the screen or in the audience.

(for A.)

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