Terrence Malick

What is a “personal film”? Is it simply a question of autobiography, a branch of life writing? Or do these so-called personal works transcend autobiography by using the tricks of fiction as a way to obscure—or enhance—the personal nature of the work? And in the end, does it matter? All artists draw from their lives, searching for ways to make sense of their experience: life becomes redeemed—and transformed—by art. For certain types of artist—the confessional poet and the personal essayist, say—the task is unambiguous, though not without ambivalence: the poet and the essayist are at the centre of their work. They know it, and so does the reader, even though the poet and the essayist might employ sleight of hand as much as any creator of fiction. But what about the “personal filmmaker”, who at the outset almost has to claim her vision as “personal”, as if this declaration in itself was a way of vouching for the legitimacy of their work: it’s personal, therefore it must be true. While those filmmakers that do not announce the personal nature of their films—Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life—are subjected to intense speculation anyway, because of their reticence: what are they hiding?

Unlike the poet and the essayist the personal filmmaker rarely works alone. Financial and technical concerns affect aesthetics. Casting choices simultaneously enhance and obscure first-person strategies. So how does the work remain “personal” when so many people, and so many factors, are involved? And how does a critic write about “personal films” knowing that a moment they single out might be “the flash-bomb vitality that one scene, actor, or technician injects across the grain of film” (Manny Farber)?

Getting Personal, a virtual season, sets out to cover the terrain of the “personal film” as practiced by a new generation of filmmakers—Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), Lena Dunham (Creative Non-fiction, Tiny Furniture, Girls); Mia Hansen-Love (Goodbye, First Love) and Joanna Hogg (Unrelated, Archipelago)—while drawing on the work of the “personal film’s” progenitors: Woody Allen’s “novels on film”, John Cassavetes’ psychodramas, and the essay-films of Chris Petit and Agnes Varda. It examines the way literature—particularly the essay—continues to influence movies, though not necessarily because of screen adaptations of books. It asks the questions: why are these filmmakers flourishing now? And what does our appetite for—and response to—works of a personal nature say about us?

—MM

Archipelago

Before I Forget

Content

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Goodbye First Love

Husbands and Wives

Jacquot de Nantes

Keep the Lights On

My Winnipeg

Something in the Air

The Squid and the Whale

Synecdoche, New York

Tiny Furniture

The Tree of Life

Unrelated

Weekend

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life feels as though it has been made with a great sense of freedom. I agree with A.O. Scott’s remark in his NY Times review that “To watch ‘The Tree of Life’ is, in analogous fashion, to participate in its making. And any criticism will therefore have to be provisional.” So provisionally I would say that it’s like a home movie, albeit the most expensive of its kind. (It’s also like a dream.) The camera stays close to the actors—like a dad with his Super 8—but the actors lead the way. Malick’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, understands and anticipates movement with a sure sense of how something might cut together. In that regard, it’s like an improvised dance film. The sense of freedom is so great that it begs the following questions: Was there even a script, and if so, what did it look like? What did the rehearsal / shooting process entail? What constitutes the offer of a role for an actor in a TM film? And for that matter, what constitutes character? I would not be surprised to discover that there were only notes or ideas for scene. For the film is surely process-led. Not that the means of its making should matter—not in the end, anyway: it is what we’re left with that counts. And what we’re left with in this instance, I would say, is a very personal film—autobiographical by all accounts—ostensibly about grief. I found it compelling, and in places very moving. Yes, the birth of creation is in there too, but to me that’s just conjecture, and Malick is free to make it, whereas the grief is palpable.

In Malick’s films people are at the mercy of the elements, mental weather included. In The Tree of Life, a middle-aged man (Penn) remembers his childhood in Waco, Texas in the 1950s. He is still trying to come to terms with death of his younger brother, a death we never see. He looks haunted (and Penn looks suitably ravaged). We gather that Jack is an architect. There are sketches of scenes in, presumably, Jack’s offices, a gleaming, glass-fronted tower in present-day Austin, Texas. And these scenes really are sketches, the closest the film comes to a form of conventional exposition. We see him point to blue-prints and take calls. We see him in an apartment with a woman. But he inhabits neither of these spaces: he is a ghost of his own life. But the soul of the film—if a film can be said to have a soul—exists in Jack’s remembrance of childhood: his domineering but no less loving father (Brad Pitt), his beautiful and graceful mother (Jessica Chastain), and his two brothers. This, to me, is the richest section of the film, and the most moving. And to remember it afterwards, in analogous fashion, is to participate in its protagonist’s consciousness.

Of course, that is only a nominal description of what the film is about, with the emphasis on synopsis, and the chronology ironed out. What it is is another matter. It is common-place for filmmakers to say that films are written three times: at the writing stage, obviously; during shooting; and finally—and perhaps, most importantly—in the editing. I’d guess that Malick found his film during shooting and continued to find it right up until it was locked. (Perhaps for Malick there was a reading stage–a lifetime of reading!) There is barely a conventional scene in it, and you can kiss goodbye to the notion of a three-act structure. With his elliptical style at its most extreme, Malick’s film “flashes by” in a ribbon of images, presumably as a way of putting us inside Jack’s head: “Unless you have loved, your life will flash by”. We move from childhood to adulthood in a cut, and back again. (It is simultaneously fragmented and continuous.) I love the way Malick’s film rustles into being, its sense of immediacy: a girl looking out of a barn window onto a field, the marriage of image and music, the sense of wonder at the world. At its rhapsodic best, it floats free of its baggage—the profundity of its themes, the fame of its stars, the weight of (our) expectation. It held me from beginning to end. Not that I went with everything. The much talked about dinosaurs, for example, left me puzzled. But this was more to do with how they are rendered on screen than any philosophical inquiry on the part of Malick. The CGI seems at odds with a filmmaker who is a natural with natural light and relishes the unplanned and unforeseen.

—MM

GETTING PERSONAL

THE TREE OF LIFE—A Death in the Family