The Production Design of Lynch, Malick & Anderson

An interview with Jack Fisk

Jack Fisk

Jack Fisk is a production designer perhaps best known for his work with David Lynch, Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson. Fisk agreed to share rare sketches and photographs with Trevor Hogg, who interviewed him back in 2012. Their conversation reveals some interesting insights into Fisk's working processes, and into what it's like to collaborate with some of Hollywood's most revered filmmakers.

On David Lynch

David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999)

Jack Fisk appears as Man in the Planet in Eraserhead (1977)

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001)

From Trevor Hogg (Flickering Myth):

“David [Lynch], I have known since 9th grade, and he is a complete original in a world of his own design – as much a painter and furniture maker as a filmmaker. I know that David cannot stop creating and if he is not making a film, he is painting, drawing, printmaking, making furniture, composing music, or writing. To work with David you need to embrace his style, but he is a kind and fun to be around.” A break in the routine was to make a movie with Lynch which was grounded more in reality. “It was fun to watch David take a real story like the one of Alvin Straight and make it his own. I think he was able to draw from his real life to find quirky original moments for Alvin and the film. Working together on The Straight Story [1999] was fun as David would often paint and build on the sets; he loves to work.”

[...]

“It seems that it was completely by accident that I became a production designer, but now after 40 years in film I see how everything I learned and experienced before working in film has helped me be a better film designer,” says Jack Fisk. “I moved to Los Angeles with David Lynch who came to attend the first classes at the American Film Institute. Having seen an impressive show of James Rosenquist’s paintings at the Met in New York, I was looking for work as a billboard painter. There were no jobs available painting billboards, but I learned of a small biker film hiring assistants and signed on to that for $100 a week. I remember on my first day I was holding traffic on Topanga Blvd about a quarter of a mile from filming. I became curious about filmmaking and met a network of young people working on non-union films around Hollywood; that’s how I first started working on films. On each film following I worked to get closer to the action and began working in what became the Art Department. At that time there were few film schools, however, we worked for Roger and Gene Corman and learned a lot about making films.”

[...]

I am very familiar with David’s style as I have been around him since we shared a painting studio in high school. I work with David by designing in the ‘style of’ Lynch. It can be fun and refreshing to work in someone’s style, especially a style as unique as David’s. [Read More]

On Terrence Malick

Fisk's photographs of set construction for Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

Fisk's photographs of set construction for Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

Fisk's photographs of set construction for Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998)

A still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (2011)

A still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (2011)

From Trevor Hogg (Flickering Myth):

Terry Malick and I have been working together for 40 years, since his first feature Badlands, and we have developed a style together. The minimal style first started because we had tight budgets and I started choosing dressing carefully because we could only afford a few things. This led me to an appreciation of painters like Edward Hopper who has a great economy to his images and to minimalist artists. Now, having worked with Terry so long we can communicate pretty well as we have many reference points in our history together.”

[...]

When we finally found the location for Days of Heaven [1978], I learned that because the Hutterite farmers were going to harvest the wheat in 6 weeks I would only have four weeks to design, build and dress the house and buildings around it. We were too young to know it couldn’t be done! We did it with some great carpenters, design shortcuts and a lot of luck. I hired a lot of young Hutterite boys to work every Sunday after church to help in construction. Other challenges that come to me are: the ships in The New World [2005], the airplanes and landing craft in The Thin Red Line [1998], the whole film Phantom of the Paradise [1974] was a challenge, and the fires in Badlands [1973] and Days of Heaven. Building a village in Guadalcanal with native women was a fun challenge; they are hard workers, but the men chewed betel nut and watched.”

[...]

For Terrence Malick, Jack Fisk has always been his production designer of choice. “His films are made today with his select crew, which he describes as like a jazz band, or fingers of the same hand. Of course he is the only one with the music; we all contribute the best we can.” As for what has led Malick to make three films in two years, the resident of Charlottesville, Virginia remarks, “Two things have propelled Terry into making so many films in the past few years. First he has found an enjoyable way, for him, to make films, with a crew that is in synch with his new methods. Secondly, I think Terry has ideas that he wants to put into film and doesn’t know how much time he will have to do it. He works constantly. I asked him why he didn’t take a day or week off once in a while and Terry answered, ‘I took fifteen years off.’” [Read More]

On Paul Thomas Anderson

Jack Fisk's draft design for the oil derrick in Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007)

A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007)

A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007)

A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012)

From Trevor Hogg (Flickering Myth):

“I search to find the challenges in each film I do,” reveals Fisk. “As much as designing settings solving problems is an important part of the job of a production designer. Sometimes it’s the miniscule budget and sometime it is the scope of the film. Each challenge has a solution and finding it is one of the fun parts of film design. I remember PTA [Paul Thomas Anderson] asking me how I was going to build the derrick in There Will Be Blood [2007] and me replying, ‘I have no idea.’ He seemed to like the honesty of my answer but I needed to figure it out. My solution was to build it real just like they would have in 1916. I found plans for an 1896 wooden derrick at the oil museum in Taft, California which I purchased for $3. I added a staircase and put it on the side of a hill, but it was the 1896 derrick.

[...]

After working on There Will Be Blood for about two months, Paul asked me one day, ‘Why are you picking all of the colours?’ I gave him a new Benjamin Moore paint swatch book and said, ‘Okay, you pick ’em.’ I watched him carry that colour book around for a few days. When finally he came up and handed me back the swatch book, Paul said, ‘You pick ’em.’ When Paul called me to work on There Will Be Blood we started an interesting creative journey; his first design related comment on that film was, ‘Let’s not have any signs.’ I liked that idea; it fit well with my minimal approach and the design evolved from that. We didn’t look for easy solutions choosing to shoot in West Texas because it was so inhospitable and rough. We worked to keep it real but a stylized real eliminating all the clutter of the actual world. Paul shared his writing research so our sources for the visuals of the film were the same.

[...]

“The strength of the design of There Will Be Blood is that every part of it was designed and constructed. We rented a 50,000 acre ranch in West Texas and created our world there. Paul and I would walk around dreaming and designing where we would put the church, the town, and the derrick. It is easier to design everything and can make for a more cohesive film.” In regards to the visual research he conducts, Fisk remarks, “I usually try to find photographs and writings of the subject and the time period when researching a film. Much like a detective I approach writing skeptically taking in account the human factor. I love to see period drawings, paintings, photographs and documentary films, if they exist. I usually avoid looking at commercial films for research. I don’t want to be confused by other designers and directors take on a story. By the time we start building the sets I have a feeling for the time and place; I have left the research, and work on instinct and gut feelings.”[Read More]

Jack Fisk has also spoken to the Paul Thomas Anderson site, Cigarettes & Red Vines, on his experience of working on The Master [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• Comparing Terrence Malick and Andrew Wyeth
• How Terrence Malick Constructed To The Wonder
• David Lynch: Behind the Scenes of Eraserhead
• Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique

How Terrence Malick Constructed To The Wonder

On Malick's filmmaking process

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

A still from Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2012)

From Bilge Ebiri (Vulture):

Terrence Malick’s films have always been divisive, and To the Wonder, which hit theaters and video on demand last weekend, is proving more divisive than most. (Our own David Edelstein, for one, was not a fan.) The film is a lyrical, moody tale about a couple (played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko) who find themselves increasingly alienated from each other when they move from Paris to Oklahoma, where the man reconnects romantically with a woman from his past (Rachel McAdams). Built out of fragmentary moments, glimpses of memories, and occasionally even visions, overlaid with quietly ruminating voice-over, the film has struck some as a particularly Malick-y Terrence Malick film.

But regardless of the opinion on any of his individual works, there remains a fascination and curiosity about Malick’s filmmaking process, which has in recent years become even more distinct and unorthodox. Over the course of his career, Malick has put together a team of creative allies — including cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, production designer Jack Fisk, costume designer Jacqui West, and first assistant cameraman Erik Brown — who have been able to embrace a very organic style of filmmaking, one that’s often improvisatory in a way most filmmakers try to avoid. “When we sat down at first to discuss this film,” says producer Nicolas Gonda, “we didn’t talk about a script, but rather a way of working.”

While Lubezki himself notes, in this recent American Cinematographer interview, that he did insist on seeing a script, the producers and the actors were content to work mostly from Malick’s treatment and his own descriptions of the story. Malick wrote voraciously throughout preproduction, filming, and postproduction. Usually these pages consisted simply of characters’ internal thoughts. “At first, Terrence just told me the story,” says Kurylenko, who plays Marina. “Once we started shooting, I’d get ten or fifteen pages every morning describing the mood of my character.” Different actors would get different pages, each describing their own internal thoughts. “You never really walk through a scene with Terry. He wants everything to be spontaneous, without you having any time to overthink it.”

Nowhere in To the Wonder was this approach more evident than in the film’s early scenes in Paris and the island of Mont Saint-Michel (whose nickname, “le merveille,” French for “the wonder,” gives the film its title), off the northwest coast of France. Working in France with a reduced crew of about eight people and a shoot schedule of just a couple of days, Malick’s style was quicker and more impulsive than ever. Ever since they first worked together on 2005’s The New World, he and Lubezki have put together a set of unwritten “rules” that allow them to shoot quickly and freely; among them is the fact that they almost exclusively use natural or available light. They also often shoot handheld or with a Steadicam. (Lubezki was unable to accompany the crew to France, so he gave instructions to cameraman and Steadicam operator Joerg Widmer for these scenes.) “At this point, watching [Lubezski], Joerg, and Terry, it’s actually kind of funny, because even their body language is the same now,” says producer Sarah Green, whose collaboration with Malick also dates back to The New World. “They’re like a band that’s been playing together for years. The camera has to move and the focus puller has to adjust without Terry necessarily having to tell them what to frame — but they know what he will respond to.”

[...]

Although many of the actors never saw a script for To the Wonder, there was still a lot of dialogue shot for the film — much of it taken off Malick’s daily pages for the cast. “We wouldn’t have to read the lines literally,” Kurylenko says. “Terry leaves you free to say the lines or to not say them.” This, too, is a style of working the director has perfected over the years: He gives his actors dialogue to get them thinking about certain things, but then shoots the scene in a variety of ways, doing some takes without the dialogue or cutting it out in post. There were numerous arguments full of shouting and wounding dialogue filmed between Neil and Marina in the film’s Oklahoma scenes, most of which only exist in spectral fashion in the finished work — seen as glimpses and fragments. “The scenes in Oklahoma were incredibly dark,” Kurylenko says. “A lot darker than what was in the final film.” In editing, however, Malick discovered that such dialogue often had the effect of making the characters seem small, whereas he was going for something more elemental, almost mythic. In casting, producer Sarah Green recalls that Malick looked for actors who “really could stand in for the male and female of the species — who seemed iconic in that way.”

As prompts for the actors, Malick shared representative works of art and literature. For Affleck, he suggested Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. (Affleck read Martin Heidegger on his own, having known that Malick had translated one of the German philosopher’s works as a grad student.) For Kurylenko, he also recommended Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — specifically, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. “Those books were, in a way, his script,” she says. But he did more than give the actors the books; he suggested ways to approach the texts and characters to focus on. So, for example, he recommended that Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna. “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

In fact, Malick will use existing works of art and literature as touch-points with virtually all of his cast and crew. “It enables them to have a common vernacular on set that’s not about technique, but emotion — a shared memory,” Gonda says. For example, with the producers, the director often referenced paintings. With camera operator Widmer, who is also an accomplished musician, the references were often musical. With his editing team, Malick often passed out books such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. But he would also reference other films: Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, with its heavy and unique use of voice-over, was a constant reference point. (At one point, the score for Truffaut’s film was used as part of a temp soundtrack.) Malick is also a huge fan of Jean-Luc Godard and often referenced Godard films such as Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, and Vivre Sa Vie, for their elliptical narrative and editing styles. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy
• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick
• Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven
• Terrence Malick: act of creation
• Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique

Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy

A new title from Bloomsbury

A still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (2011)

Edited by Thomas Deane Tucker, Stuart Kendall, Bloomsbury publishes a new collection of essays entitled Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy:

Terrence Malick's four feature films have been celebrated by critics and adored as instant classics among film aficionados, but the body of critical literature devoted to them has remained surprisingly small in comparison to Malick's stature in the world of contemporary film.

Each of the essays in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy is grounded in film studies, philosophical inquiry, and the emerging field of scholarship that combines the two disciplines. Malick's films are also open to other angles, notably phenomenological, deconstructive, and Deleuzian approaches to film, all of which are evidenced in this collection.

Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy engages with Malick's body of work in distinct and independently significant ways: by looking at the tradition within which Malick works, the creative orientation of the filmmaker, and by discussing the ways in which criticism can illuminate these remarkable films. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick
• Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven
• Terrence Malick: act of creation
• Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique
• David Lynch on Ideas, Cinema and Billy Wilder

Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique

From the Los Angeles Review of Books

Paul Thomas Anderson

From Greg Gerke (Los Angeles Review of Books):

The bounty of responses to Paul Thomas Anderson and his films speak to his artistry. After David Lynch and Terrence Malick, he is the star of the American narrative cinema and is certainly leagues more commercial than those two old souls, now name brands. Because he is a contemporary, I confess a competition. It is one-sided, but not drooling. What I have made in the past five years may pale to what The Master is. Many pages and many words that don’t cohere into one principled mountain risk the dyspepsia that graces the internet, our mutual multi-glutinous mouthpiece. Our mediums are different, our means are different, one doesn’t know the other exists — it sounds like many crush relationships, but it is the basis for more than thwarted love or genuine repulsion.

Critics carry the stain of envy into the thoughts they print, especially those emboldened enough to critique without having ever made the art that can exasperate them. E. M. Cioran, the crotchety Romanian, master of despair and champion of the unsuccessful writer and artist said, “To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.” The plexiglass irony complicating the situation is that Anderson works in the vein I presupposed would fill my life full when I was 20. He didn’t go to film school; for a few years, I did. I left it with only two years completed, in addition to numerous Bergman-enamored screenplays that would never see production. He put in time as a production assistant, while I moved across the country to his coast to find tai chi, tofu, and women who didn’t believe in underwear. Later, I farmed my way across Europe, while Anderson simply realized what Kubrick and John Cassavetes counseled — if one wanted to make a film, one had to go out, get money any way one could, and make a film. Hard Eight, his first, came out in 1996. Two years later, I sat in a meadow at 8,000 feet in Arizona and told myself, by pressing the words into a notebook, that I would be a writer, not a film director. The Rilkean moments of beginning to see were starting to accumulate. I began to make fictions and characters who would not be seen speaking, but whose monologues and dialogues would have to cut the internal ear of the audience.

Anderson kept pushing himself and after Magnolia came a great shift in his world-view and probably his life situation, though I will only call the shift aging. It’s not when sadness entered — babies were born — but when his age squeezed out the adolescent endeared of pre–Cape Fear Scorsese, an overreliance on the steadicam, and such Lite-Brite touches as having Georges Bizet’s famous aria in Carmen become the ending pivot of a scene between a cop and his love interest in Magnolia. In 2005 he served as the insurance director for A Prairie Home Companion because of Robert Altman’s health and age and began to birth his own style: quiet, measured, and magnifying. It is with his last two features (There Will Be Blood and The Master) that Anderson has answered Ingmar Bergman’s call for a young filmmaker to have something to say, announcing this with the first shot of the former, as he fades in to an intricately aligned long shot of three cracked mountains, accompanied by the swelling strings on the soundtrack. Images and sound more and more speak for dialogue, sound manipulation spurs mystery, and his editing produces images often offset and unexpected, if not unique in their rhythms — most triumphantly in the cutaways when Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell remembers Iris and then tries to visit her in the end, as both scenes begin on slight roving movement (an Anderson signature) toward her parent’s house, from left to right in the former scene, with an old blue car in the foreground, and from right to left in the latter, with the same car a little closer to the camera (and in slow motion), so for a moment the audience sees Quell through its windows. In these scenes the alterations of distance, speed, and longitudinal movement bring us into the moody mind of Quell when he pursues one of the few humans he has a genuine bashful feeling for. Yet it is mostly the mugs of Daniel Day-Lewis, Phoenix, and Philip Seymour-Hoffman that tailor the line, paint, swirl, and swish of his mise-en-scène. [Read More]

Find Paul Thomas Anderson on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• The Master: Official Trailer (2012) [HD]
• There Will Be Blood

Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven

A rare interview with the American filmmaker

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978)

A rare interview with American filmmaker Terrence Malick, conducted on 11 May 1979. The following extract is taken from the excellent terrencemalick.org:

It was in Austin, Texas that I had the idea for Days of Heaven. I found myself alone for a summer in the town I had left when I was a high school student. There were those green, undulating hills, and the very beautiful Colorado river. The place is inspired. It is inspiring, and there the film came to me all together.

I had not liked working at harvest time, I have a very good memory of it, of wheat, and the comings and goings in the fields, and of all the people I met. They were mostly petty criminals who were on their way to Phoenix, Arizona or Las Vegas for the rest of the year.

Like those of the film, these were not people of the soil, but urban dwellers who had abandoned their city, their factories. Rather than criminals, it would be fairer to say they lived on the margins of crime, fed by elusive hopes. At the time of the film, those who worked the seasons hated their jobs and the farmers did not trust them. They could not touch the machinery: if something was breaking, they had to signal by raising their hat on a stick. To distinguish themselves, they were always putting on their best clothes. I had noticed that myself when I was a teenager. To the farmers they were bringing - and this is still true - a piece of their homeland and of new horizons. And farmers sat down to listen - charmed - to hear the story of these workers. Already the farmers were almost nothing more than businessmen and they felt nostalgia for those days of yesteryear where they were themselves caretakers of their earthly riches. Workers and farmers were embodying people whose hopes were being destroyed, some more than others, by opulence or poverty. All were full of desires, dreams, and appetites, which I hope permeates the film. For these people, happiness comes and goes, they are fleeting moments. Why? They don't know, just as they don't know how to achieve happiness. If they see before them another season, another harvest, they feel unable to build a life.

Though this is familiar to a European, it may seem puzzling for Americans. Americans feel entitled to happiness, and once they manage to find it, they feel as if they own it. If they are deprived of it, they feel cheated. If they feel it has been taken away from them, they imagine they have been done wrong. This guilt I have felt from everyone I've known. It's a bit like a Dylan song: they have held the world in their hands and let it slip through their fingers.

As for the title, it is a feeling that a place exists that is within reach and where we will be safe. It is a place where a house will not rest on the sand, where you will not become crazier by fighting again and again against the impossible. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Terrence Malick's Tree of Life: Official Trailer (HD)
• Terrence Malick: act of creation
• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick

Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh

First publication from the Contra Mundum Press

Gilgamesh, translated by Stuart Kendall

Contra Mundum Press is announcing that their first publication, Gilgamesh, should be entering online databases by the end of this month. The text was translated by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). 'Announcing the inaugural publication of Contra Mundum Press, a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, Gilgamesh. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.'

Critical Responses

As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical—as it has for several decades now—each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall’s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.

Jerome Rothenberg

This new translation of the Gilgamesh tale ventures outside the straitjackets that have often constrained the text, understanding its complicated transmission-history in the Sumerian and East Semitic languages of the ancient Near East and the way it evades modern ideas of ‘epic’ and ‘fiction’ often foisted upon it. In sharp, imagistic prose, Kendall shows how Gilgamesh’s story is not just an instructive yarn but a concerted act of ontological investigation. A needed provisioning of a much-discussed but little understood work

Nicholas Birns, Eugene Lang College, the New School

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Contra Mundum Press

A new publishing venture

Announcing the launch of a new publisher: Contra Mundum Press. Their first publication, due in October 2011, will be Gilgamesh in a new translation by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). Their next publication, due in December 2011, will be Paul Bishop’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama, translated into English for the first time (link via Superfluities Redux):

Contra Mundum Press is a new publishing venture dedicated to the value and the indispensable importance of the individual voice. Through the publication of new texts by distinctive contemporary thinkers from all fields of the life of the mind as well as out-of-print titles from innovators of the past, Contra Mundum Press has been organized to demonstrate that the foundation of thought, and of the freedom and the efficacy of thinking, is not in the mash-up of the mob or the eviscerated diversion of social media but in the personal vision, and in the courage required to create it and to put it forth. [Read More]

contramundum.net

Forthcoming Titles

• Gilgamesh. Translated with an introduction by Stuart Kendall 
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Greek Music Drama. Translated with an introduction by Paul Bishop 
• W. J. Bate, Negative Capability: On the Intuitive Approach in Keats 
• Richard Foreman, Plays with Films: Zomboid!, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, and Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land. Introduction by George Hunka. 
• Georg Trakl, Poems. Translated by Mark Daniel Cohen
• Louis Auguste Blanqui, Eternity for the Stars. Translated with an introduction by Frank Chouraqui

Contact

Contra Mundum Press
P.O. Box 1326
New York, NY
10276

Email: info (at) contramundum.net

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Terrence Malick: act of creation

On Malick's artistic output to date

A still from Terrence Malick's new film, Tree of Life (2011)

With the UK release of Tree of Life opening next week on general release, Michael Newton discusses Terrence Malick's critically-acclaimed body of work [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Tree of Life: Official Trailer (HD)
• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick's Tree of Life: Official Trailer (HD)

Winner of the 2011 Palme D'Or

The beautiful high-definition trailer for Terrence Malick's new film, Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. Notably, it picked up the Palme D'Or at this year's Cannes film festival.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven (1978)

Literature:

Thomas Bernhard: Phillip Lopate reviews new translation of Bernhard's My Prizes: An Accounting
Samuel Beckett: This week's Odds and Ends at the Debts and Legacies website
Samuel Beckett: Ludovic Janvier's poem, 'With Sam' translated by Raymond Federman in the Evergreen Review
Paul Auster: An interview in The Telegraph
The Art of Penguin Books' Science Fiction
Leo Tolstoy: On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian novelist's death, The Independent meets with some of his descendants
Leo Tolstoy: The Guardian visits Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana estate, where War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written
Leo Tolstoy: Rowan Williams on Leo Tolstoy
The Case for Books: On the rise of electronic literature, and Robert Darnton's critical study
Patti Smith wins National Book Award
Angela Morgan Cutler: New novel, The Letter, explores themes of violence, language and identity
10 Contemporary Books that Challenged White, Male Literary Dominance
Joyce Carol Oates on J. D. Salinger
Ron Silliman's Blog: One of the best regularly-updated literary blogs on the web
Cardiff Book History: A regularly-updated resource

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: In a television interview, Riz Khan asks the critical theorist whether we are living in the end times
Maurice Blanchot and Simone Weil's notion of sacred language

Theatre:

William Shakespeare: Graduate Conference in Florence, April 2011
William Shakespeare: Medieval Shakespeare: The Cultural Politics of Periodisation, March 2011

Film

Terrence Malick: Tim Dirks reviews Malick's Days of Heaven
Taxi Driver: Photographer Steve Schapiro discusses working on the set of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese: Scorsese's Public Speaking, an HBO documentary on New York writer Fran Lebowitz
William S. Burroughs: New York Times reviews new documentary, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within
William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin: Documentary, 'Destroy All Rational Thought'

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Critchley on Nature in Terrence Malick

Simon Critchley discusses one of the pervasive themes in the director's work

From an essay on American war film The Thin Red Line, Simon Critchley's explores themes of nature in  the work of filmmaker Terrence Malick:

Why do I claim that calm is the key to Malick's art? To try and tease this out, I would like to turn to the theme of nature, whose massive presence is the constant backdrop to Malick's movies. If calm in the face of mortality is the frame for the human drama of The Thin Red Line, then nature is the frame for this frame, a power that at times completely overshadows the human drama.

The Thin Red Line opens with the image of a huge crocodile slowly submerging into a weed-covered pond -- the crocodile who makes a brief return appearance towards the end of the film, when he is shown captured by some men from Charlie company, who prod it abstractedly with a stick. Against images of jungle trees densely wrapped in suffocating vines, we hear the first words of the movie, presumably spoken by Witt,

'What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself, the land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two.' [...]

Obviously, the war in the heart of nature has a double meaning, suggesting both a war internal to nature, and the human war that is being fought out amid such immense natural beauty. These two meanings are brought together later in the film by Colonel Tall, when he is in the process of dismissing Starros from his commission and justifying the brutality of war,

'Look at this jungle, look at those vines, the way they twine around the tress, swallowing everything. Nature is cruel, Starros.'

Images of trees wrapped in vines punctuate The Thin Red Line, together with countless images of birds, in particular owls and parrots. These images are combined with the almost constant presence of natural sounds, of birdsong, of the wind in the Kunai grass, of animals moving in the undergrowth and the sound of water, both waves lapping on the beach and the flowing of the river.

Nature might be viewed as a kind of *fatum* for Malick, an ineluctable power, a warring force that both frames human war but is utterly indifferent to human purposes and intentions. This beautiful indifference of nature can be linked to the depiction of nature elsewhere in Malick's work. For example, Badlands is teeming with natural sounds and images: with birds, dogs, flowing water, the vast flatness of South Dakota, and the badlands of Montana, with its mountains in the distance -- and always remaining in the distance. Days of Heaven is also heavily marked with natural sounds and exquisitely photographed images, with flowing river water, the wind moving in fields of ripening wheat and silhouetted human figures working in vast fields. Nature also possesses here an avenging power, when a plague of locusts descend on the fields and Sam Shepherd sets fire to an entire wheat-crop -- Nature is indeed cruel. [...]

Although it is difficult not to grant that nature is playing a symbolic role for Malick, his is not an animistic conception of nature, of the kind that one finds lamented in Coleridge's 1802 'Dejection: An Ode': 'Oh Lady! We receive but what we give/And in our life alone does nature live'. Rather, in my opinion, nature's indifference to human purposes follows on from a broadly naturalistic conception of nature. Things are not enchanted in Malick's universe, they simply *are*, and we are things too. They are remote from us and continue on regardless of our strivings. This is what is suggested by the Wallace Stevens poem cited in epigraph to this essay. A soldier falls in battle, but his death does not invite pomp or transient glory. Rather, death has an absolute character, which Stevens likens to a moment in autumn when the wind stops. Yet, when the wind stops, above in the high heavens the clouds continue on their course, 'nevertheless,/In their direction'. What is central to Malick, I think, is this 'neverthelessness' of nature, of the fact that human death is absorbed into the relentlessness of nature, the eternal war in nature into which the death of a soldier is indifferently ingested. That's where Witt's spark lies.

There is a calm at the heart of Malick's art, a calmness to his cinematic eye, a calmness that is also communicated by his films, that becomes the mood of his audience. As Charlie company leave Guadalcanal and are taken back to their ship on a landing craft, we hear the final voiceover from Witt, this time from beyond the grave,

'Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things you made, all things shining.' [...]

In each of his movies, one has the sense of things simply being looked at, just being what they are -- trees, water, birds, dogs, crocodiles, or whatever. Things simply are, and are not moulded to a human purpose. We watch things shining calmly, being as they are, in all the intricate evasions of 'as'. The camera can be pointed at those things to try and capture some grain or affluence of their reality. The closing shot of The Thin Red Line presents the viewer with a coconut fallen onto the beach, against which a little water laps, and out of which has sprouted a long green shoot, connoting life, one imagines. The coconut simply is, it merely lies there remote from us and our intentions. This suggests to me Stevens's final poem, 'The Palm at the End of the Mind', the palm that simply persists regardless of the makings of 'human meaning'. Stevens concludes: 'The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in its branches'. In my fancy at least, I see Malick concurring with this sentiment. [Read the essay]

Simon Critchley, 'Calm: On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line'

Film-Philosophy, vol. 6 no. 48, December 2002

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Simon Critchley: Beckett, Literature, Philosophy
• Simon Critchley on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
• Simon Critchley on Samuel Beckett
• Simon Critchley on the Pursuit of Happiness

Continental Philosophy

'The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility. My personal belief that I’ve tried to argue for in my book Very Little… Almost Nothing—a winning title if ever there was one—is that we have to, in a sense, give up the question of the meaning of life, or at least hear it in a particular way. The formulation that I use in that book is “the acceptance of meaninglessness as the achievement of the everyday or the ordinary.” What I mean by that is that once we’ve accepted that the meaning of life is ours to make, we make meaning. Then we accept that we live in a situation, or, rather, that we inherit a situation of meaninglessness, and out of that meaninglessness we create meaning in relationship to the ordinariness of our common existence. I try to argue for a cultivation of the low, the common and the near—the everyday—as that in relationship to which we can make a meaning out of the meaninglessness of our existence.'

From an interview with Simon Critchley

Some headaches are more persistent than others; there's the dull ache of tiredness, stress and exhaustion, and there's the arbitrary cruelty of the pounding, blinding migraine. On the other hand, there are metaphorical headaches: everyday frustrations, needless complexities and tiresome habit. They can be a kind of headache, too. And just as pervasive. At the moment I seem to be suffering from one such 'metaphorical' headache, and trying to establish some kind of meaning and purpose to my daily routine. And it's trickier than it looks.

I have always been someone satisfied by the simplest things in life. My idea of bliss is sitting on a park bench on a sunny morning, or looking at the way that light reflects through a cafe window. Edward Hopper once said 'Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.' It's a straightforwardly unsentimental sentiment, and one I have always related to. But there are times when even these glorious daily joys aren't enough, or simply aren't around. I live in Wales, a country notorious for its rainfall, and there are times when the grey skies bring doom and gloom with a hint of ennui.

Funnily enough, I've always had similar ways of dealing with these down spells. I usually play jazz and blues music, which perks me up no end, and I try to do something constructive or creative with my time. This certainly helps. In fact, writing this blog has its part to play, too. But there are other routes that I enjoy taking, like contemplating the big questions. Life, Love and Death. You know. The Big Questions. But, and perhaps this is a contradiction, I'm never content with the thoughts that I think, or the answers that I read.

Lately, I've found an interesting - and entertaining - approach by British philosopher Simon Critchley. I suspect that I will be writing about him at some point in the future, so he has already been given his own blog-label inauguration. What he has written on Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, Maurice Blanchot and Terrence Malick is sure to keep me rapt for months.

Critchley is preoccupied with the life and evolution of what it known as Continental Philsophy; that is, developments in European philosophy over the last two hundred years, that have attempted to bridge the gap between epistemology (the theory and study of knowledge) and wisdom (a guide to a happy and fulfilled life).

The idea of balancing a pursuit for knowledge with the pursuit of happiness is too good to resist, so I'm throwing myself in hot pursuit. I'm currently reading Critchley's Continental Philosophy: A very short introduction, and loving every minute of it. Of course, I am aware that the meaning of life is not to be found within its pages, but as always it's the journey that's exciting. And as long as there's a journey, an argument, a complication, then there's enough to keep me happy.