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DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978, PG, 95 mins) is one of the most beautiful and unusual American films of the 1970s (Image AA). And there is a rare chance to see it on the biggish screen at Dulwich Picture Gallery on Monday 19th July at 19.45 - booking information at GalleryFilm http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats_on/friends_events_booking_details.aspx).
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978, PG, 95 mins) is one of the most beautiful and unusual American films of the 1970s (Image AA). And there is a rare chance to see it on the biggish screen at Dulwich Picture Gallery on Monday 19th July at 19.45 - booking information at GalleryFilm http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats_on/friends_events_booking_details.aspx).
It is screened alongside the Gallery's summer exhibition, The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art (http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/exhibitions/coming_soon/the_wyeth_family.aspx)
A choice reflecting the common idea that Days of Heaven is "strongly inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s paintings". That's true but the influence should not be exaggerated. It is more accurate, and more enlightening, to see Andrew Wyeth and Days of Heaven's Director, Terrence Malick as swimming within the same, broad US cultural movements and reflecting a common heritage. The specific influence of Wyeth on Days of Heaven is undeniable, best seen in the many shots of the ranch house on a hill reflecting Wyeth's best known painting, Christina's World (1948) (Images A and B).
But it is more interesting to see from a wider perspective how Wyeth and Malick share an important socio-cultural position. Both men straddle the artificial division between 'High Art' and 'popular / commercial' culture. Wyeth merits display in such an august institution as the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Yet his work has been dismissed by some as "sentimental", "mere illustration", "emotional", "formulaic stuff". Wyeth was known as the "Painter of the People," because of his work's popularity with the public.
This divided reaction mirrors the fallacious division of cinema into two rigidly separate realms, the worthy one of the "arthouse" and the despised one of the "popcorn multiplex". Malick's films are fascinating in how they challenge the snobbish assumption that all American cinema belongs in the latter category. Like all his films, Days of Heaven is a Hollywood film, featuring Hollywood stars, and made via the Hollywood system, albeit an off-centre strand. Producer Bert Schneider was also a cross-over figure. Co-creator of plastic TV pop group The Monkees. But then an avid supporter of the New Hollywood via Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and, later, Days of Heaven.
At times Days of Heaven looks and feels like a Western, structured narratively as it is around two common themes of that genre, the parallel battles of man (sic) versus nature, and civilisation versus man's (sic) lower, passionate nature. A battle for "order" on both levels.
The "art" v "popcorn" fallacy rests heavily on another myth, that of the "auteur" as solo filmmaker, responsible alone for a film's entire artistic and literary content.
Malick is often claimed as a rare example of a Hollywood auteur. Not surprisingly given the signature trademarks which run through his films. All of which are present in Days of Heaven: strong visual narrative; shot almost entirely outdoors; use of minimal electric lighting; characters often backlit and filmed towards late afternoon / early evening; much on the spot improvisation; use of almost disembodied voiceover to drive narrative. The result is a series of films often described as 'hypnotic' or 'transcendental'. A long way from standard Hollywood fare.
Malick is often claimed as a rare example of a Hollywood auteur. Not surprisingly given the signature trademarks which run through his films. All of which are present in Days of Heaven: strong visual narrative; shot almost entirely outdoors; use of minimal electric lighting; characters often backlit and filmed towards late afternoon / early evening; much on the spot improvisation; use of almost disembodied voiceover to drive narrative. The result is a series of films often described as 'hypnotic' or 'transcendental'. A long way from standard Hollywood fare.
Malick's auteur persona reflects how unusual he is as a Hollywood filmmaker. He studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, then taught at M.I.T. Since his first feature, Badlands in 1973, he has made a total of just 5 features in 37 years. Compared to the 31 films directed by that undisputed Hollywood auteur, Clint Eastwood in a similar period. In between films Malick has continued to teach. Clearly a man not driven by standard Hollywood motivations of fame, wealth or ego.
On the other hand, Malick is in some ways a quintessential American. Born in the spirit of E Pluribus Unum into a family of middle-eastern (Assyrian) background. Brought up as a farm boy in Oklahoma and Texas, neither known as hotbeds of High Art. Established in his Ivy League career the lure of Hollywood drew him from the East Coast via the not unusual route of journalism then scriptwriting.
Like Wyeth, Malick has been criticised from two directions. To hardline arthouse fundamentalists his films are "superficial" and "sentimental", not distinct enough from mainstream Hollywood. While users' comments on IMDB by members of the multiplex demographic who have stumbled on his work via DVD rentals frequently include the words "boring" and "pretentious".
Commonalities in Wyeth and Malick are seen via other influences on Days of Heaven. Beyond Christina's World, the famous house in the film is almost an exact copy of Edward Hopper's The House by the Railroad (1925) (Images C and D). And also reflects Hopper's American Landscape (1920) (Image E).
The word "landscape" provides an important clue for our discussion. Much of Wyeth's work features people in a landscape. His landscapes often appear empty, even bleak. Malick's first four films (the fifth is currently in post-production) all feature individuals in conflict in and with their landscape.
In the significantly titled Badlands (1973) two young lovers go on a killing spree, pursued by law officers. Eventually they build for themselves an artificial environment of tree houses and underground hides. Days of Heaven (1978) features, as we have seen, human v human and human v nature conflicts on the wide open plains of Texas. In the Thin Red Line (1998), US soldiers in World War 2 must scale a steep mountain against the withering fire of entrenched Japanese soldiers, protected only by deep but fatally thin grass. In the New World (2005) English colonists in 1607 battle with the alien environment and alien peoples of what is now Virginia. native princess Pocahontas marries one of them and must in turn face the equally alien urban landscape of Jacobean England - the New World of the title. The content of Tree of Life, currently being edited and scheduled for release in November 2010, has been kept vigorously secret. But we know it is set in the Midwest of the 1950s, and rumours claim it is "an inter-generational rights of passage drama in the style of John Steinbeck".
Morrison and Schur sum up parallels in Wyeth and Malick thus, "these works share a concern over the effects of modernity on the relationship bet humans and their environment . . . the ways in which industrial culture . . . may be seen to displace humans from their sense of connection with nature". (The films of Terrence Malick, by James Morrison, Thomas Schur)
These mutual 20th Century concerns have a long history which goes to the heart of American culture. And indeed to that overlap between "popular" and "High" culture.
Well into the 19th Century both American intellectuals and nationalists bemoaned the lack of a genuinely domestic culture. It was argued that across all art forms the US was still effectively an offshoot of Europe in general and England in particular.
A genuinely vernacular American culture is often said to have begun in literature, it's hallmarks important to this discussion. Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels (Last of the Mohicans et al), begun in 1823, and Melville's Moby Dick of 1851 are regarded as important landmarks. These have in common men (sic) battling against nature or each other outdoors in land- and seascapes. They also share a sort of simplicity.
That word is used here not to mean intellectually vacant or simplistic. But that this trend reflects the cultural tradition of the US North East for religious, spiritual and cultural simplicity, as the word is used by Quakers. An overt and self-conscious attempt to get away from the Old World of Europe with its fustiness, tradition, and class hierarchies. It's rococo and baroque. The woodland battles of Leatherstocking can be seen in this light as the antithesis of the drawing rooms and psychological interiority of the likes of Jane Austen.
Around the same time another literary and philosophical tradition emerges, Transcendentalism, characterised in literature by Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) and the poetry and essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both reflected similar themes of simplicity and nature. Andrew Wyeth's father N.C. Wyeth was very influenced by the Transcendentalists.
In the 1840s, American expansion westwards took off with the later to be traditional Hollywood wagon trains of settlers heading across the Plains. Simple people battling with and in new landscapes. With them went artists who visually idealised both the landscape and the noble settlers, often backlit, Malick-style, by the setting sun. Famous examples are Leutze's 1851 Westward the Course of Empire Takes it's Way (Image F) and Bierstadt's 1867 Emigrants Crossing the Plains (Image G). Judged by the values of High Art these classics of 19th century Western art now appear cliched, populist, even embarrassingly politically incorrect.
In their footsteps followed the more artistically worthy Frederic Remington (1861 to 1909) (Image H) and Charles M Russell (1864 to 1926) (Image J). The work of both can be seen to be less sentimental, less "corny" than Leutze's and Bierstadt's. Yet both feature heavily the themes of cowboys, horses, Indians, soldiers - men (sic) battling in and with landscapes. Their paintings could easily serve as storyboarding for Western movies. And both men's lives overlapped with the beginning of that genre, 1903's silent The Great Train Robbery.
The Western artists were followed, though not literally, by the popular literary fraternity. Western adventures became a common theme in the explosion of ‘dime novels’, the U.S. equivalent of the British ‘penny dreadful’. Churned out factory-style by hacks who had never been West of the Appalachians these represented the undeniably ‘low’ end of American literarture.
But a whole new standard of literature was reached with the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian in 1902. Not only does The Virginian work as serious drama, it explores intelligently the very real social conflicts of the 19th century West. The background to the Virginian lay in the 1892 Johnson County War, a violent confrontation between rich, "big" cattle barons and poor, "small" farmers, mostly recent migrants from Europe and Russia. Which in turn directly spawned the 1980 Heaven's Gate and the 2002 Johnson County War. But the ranchers vs. farmers battle became one of the most common tropes in Western films, feeding into the likes of Shane (1953) and The Big Country (1958).
We are now into the 20th Century and can connect our chain of links to the Wyeth family. Andrew's father, N.C. Wyeth was commissioned in 1904 by the Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a Western story. His teacher and mentor, Howard Pyle " . . . urged Wyeth to go West to acquire direct knowledge, much as Zane Grey had done for his Western novels. In Colorado, he worked as a cowboy alongside the professional "punchers," moving cattle and doing ranch chores. He visited the Navajo in Arizona and gained an understanding of Native American culture. When his money was stolen, he worked as a mail carrier on horseback to gain back needed funds". This was the first of several trips West by Wyeth senior.
Thus we have traced a tradition of vernacular American culture in which painting, literature, landscape and Westward expansion go hand in hand. A tradition in which 'High Art' and popular culture, including illustration, sit together on an undivided continuum. Characterised by simplicity and populism, and by themes which both reflect and entertained "the people". Heavily featuring the outdoors in general and the trans-Missisippi West in particular. All of which provided fertile material for Hollywood movies in general and The Western in particular.
This was the cultural stream into which both Andrew Wyeth (1917) and Terrence Malick (1943) were born, and by which both were heavily influenced. Wyeth was there first, but both drank from the same waters.
And the tradition has continued during their lifetimes. The literary inheritors of the Melville / Fenimore Cooper tradition include Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) and Norman Mailer (1923 to 2001). In painting we may note Harvey Dunn of South Dakota (1884 to 1952), notably his 1950 The Prairie is My Garden (Image K). And California's Maynard Dixon (1875 to 1946), with works like 1942's Open Range (Image L).
After Wister's The Virginian, Western literature continued to evolve in the 20th Century. The novels of the hugely popular Zane Grey are credited with having spawned no less than 110 films. But also inspired a 'wealth' of lesser writers, lampooned via Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins character in the British film noir The Third Man (1949).
The contemporary writer, Cormac McCarthy on the other hand has achieved genuine literary recognition via various awards including the Pulitzer Prize for works in several genres as well as the Western. And for providing starting points for movies such as No Country for Old Men (2007). Another contemporary writer is the prolific Larry McMurtry, whose writing ranges from the more or less conventional cattle drive plot of Lonesome Dove (1989 and 1993) to the screenplay for the artistically acclaimed gay cowboy movie, Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Every artist or author named so far, and all who will be named further on, is a man. Their themes are relentlessly masculine. Their works have often been denounced as patriarchal, sexist. Their content privileges male physical struggle, and tends to reduce women to, at best, secondary and support roles, and at worst, complete absence. More of this later.
It is often said that the art form of the 20th Century has been film. And that film has been THE American art form, the USA's unique and technology-based contribution to the evolution of the creative arts. Since the arrival of sound, cinema has brought togather the literary / theatrical and the visual. And the simple, outdoors tradition of the Western has been at the heart of that fusion.
Two of the greatest names in American cinema, and among the strongest visually, are John Ford (1894 to 1973) and Howard Hawks (1896 to 1977). Both Ford and Hawks were worshipped by the directors of the French New Wave as auteurs and as powerful influences on their own work. Influence often ignored by those who assert that rigid separation between the 'art film' of the elite and and the 'popcorn movie' of the vulgar masses.
Hawks' 1948 Red River and Ford's 1956 The Searchers are celebrated as two of the best American films ever made (Images M and N). Both feature the man who can arguably be designated the absolute antithesis of the arthouse film - Iowa-born son of the Midwest Marion Morrison, stage name: John Wayne. It seems incongruous to use his name in the same sentence as the word 'art' so much does Wayne appear the embodiment of all that is regarded as commercial and vulgar in US popular culture.
Yet Wayne's minimalist acting style, and his mumbling, plain-speaking characters, usually set by Hawks or Ford backlit against a wide-open sky in a vast landscape, represent the themes that link Andrew Wyeth and Terrence Malick - the simple, the strongly visual, the outdoors, people in landscapes much bigger than they are. Ford's famous habit of tearing out many pages of dialogue preferring to "show it rather than say it" worked perfectly for Wayne. And vice versa. Malick often uses his male actors similarly. In Days of Heaven a female voiceover narrates while we watch the less articulate men in action. Wayne continues our theme of the aggressively, conventionally masculine.
Malick's films are overwhelmingly populated by male characters, who will generally be fighting each other. Casting delivers to us established Hollywood stars who combine hearthrob good looks with traditional masculinity: Martin Sheen (Badlands), Richard Gere and Sam Shepard (Days of Heaven), Sean Penn and George Clooney (The Thin Red Line), Colin Farrell and Christian Bale (The New World), Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life). Female characters are there to be loved, fought over, dragged along, or to narrate. The best known actress in a Malick movie was Badlands' Cissy Spacek from way back in 1973. Since then no Malick film has featured a very well-known actress.
We can finish by pulling together the cultural streams from which both Andrew Wyeth and Terrence Malick appear to have emerged. All can be seen to be part of the evolution of a vernacular American culture characterised by simplicity, the visual, and the landscape. What can be shown literally is privileged over the abstract, ideas, intellectualisation. Malick, despite his artistic auteur persona, fits within the mainstream US traditions of literature, Western art, and film. He also prioritises visualised action over words, and features Western landscapes, masculine themes and images, and conflict between men.
All of which challenges those who come to Wyeth's and Malick's works from the perspective of traditional 'High Culture'. From Manhattan and Boston to London and Paris intellectual elites have their preferences. and prejudices. Film should privilege ideas and words over action. Novels should feature strong characters and complex plots, not physical action. 'Art', cannot by definition be too popular. Andrew Wyeth's huge attendance figures automatically make him suspect in a world in which being part of an elite minority is a qualifying requirement for artistic status; art can only be Art if its' creators, creations and consumers are in some way 'special'.
Above all, 'the artist' should be a million miles away from the cigar-smoking, bullfighting machismo of John Wayne or Ernest Hemingway. Which brings us to another and final psycho-cultural split, the socially constructed separation between male and female, men and women.
In its traditional social role 'art' has stood between and linked the two worlds. Male artists and writers are expected to be sensitive, able to explore the inner world, to understand their female characters. Male homosexuality is far more accepted in the world of high art than in the military or Western settings of Ford, Hemingway or Mailer wherein men are without exception always 'real'.
Andrew Wyeth and Terrence Malick can both also be understood to link the cultural worlds of the masculine and the feminine. In Wyeth's work we see the traditional American outdoors, yet an absence of aggressive, violent masculinity. When his subjects are women, he appears to understand them empathically.
Malick's films overwhelmingly involve men in violent conflict, and yet the the films' overall visual and narrative style is a long way from the standard Hollywood action film. The word "lyrical" is overwhelmingly used to describe his films, which seems to refer to that transcendental, out-of-body quality which results from the combination of music and voiceover with hypnotic cinematography. While we see men behaving badly in his films, they are enveloped by an artistic process that is somehow female, conveyed to us via sound and image. The sound often involving that female narration. Men do. Women notice, feel, examine, talk.
Furthermore his male characters can be divided into two types. On the one hand are those who we see very clearly to be experiencing terror. The young soldiers in The Thin Red Line, Colin Farrell's John Smith in The New World. These characters are complemented by men driven by the calm, gentle version of love, known by the Greeks as 'agape', rather than the murderous, lustful form. Sam Shepard's gentle farmer in Days of Heaven, or Christian Bale's gentle farmer who rescues Pocahontas via marriage in The New World.
On the other hand are the most violent of Malick's men. Those who are driven to violence by passionate emotion or desire: Richard Gere in Days of Heaven. Or by an almost emotionless, even psychopathically calm aggression: Martin Sheen's killer in Badlands, or Nick Nolte's screaming officer in The Thin Red Line, cajoling and threatening his scared young soldiers towards their deaths.
To conclude, when we compare the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and the films of Terrence Malick we are challenged to reconsider elitist assumptions as to a rigid separation between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art, and in parallel, the between ‘art films’ and the commercial cinema.
This is an excerpt from an interview included with John Bailey, the camera operator on the film. The DP was Nestor Almendros and then Haskell Wexler took over to complete production. One of the most stunning looking films in the history of cinema. Large portions of the film were shot outdoors with little or no artificial light in what is called the "magic hour", the period in which sunlight gives way to night. Almendros used 50mm lens with the aperture opened to the maximum (f-1.4 and f-1).
