Terrence Malick

The philosopher who went to the light

Malick is the rare filmmaker who arrived at cinema from an actual seminar room, and it never left him. He read philosophy at Harvard, took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford's Magdalen College, and published a translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as "The Essence of Reasons" before he ever called action. That biography is usually offered as trivia; I think it is the whole key. Every Malick film is a phenomenological experiment — what does a landscape know that its people don't? — dressed as a period drama. The voice-over murmuring against the image, the sun caught through wheat, the plot dissolving into weather: these are not mannerisms but a working method for asking metaphysical questions in a medium built for plot.

Ottawa to the twenty-year silence

Born in Ottawa, Illinois on November 30, 1943, he took a route to the camera no film school could design: journalism for Newsweek, The New Yorker and Life, a stint teaching philosophy at MIT, then an M.F.A. from the AFI Conservatory. Badlands (1973) announced him fully formed; Days of Heaven (1978) won the Best Director prize at Cannes and an Academy Award for its cinematography, and then Malick simply vanished for two decades, decamping to Paris while a generation of admirers waited. The return, The Thin Red Line (1998), took the Golden Bear at Berlin and drew seven Oscar nominations. The Tree of Life (2011) won the Palme d'Or. He has been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and across three Academy Award nominations has never won — a statistic that says more about the Academy than about him. Having released two features in his first decade, he then released a flurry — To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups, Song to Song, A Hidden Life — as if making up for the silence.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Malick #53 among all directors, composite 12.90 across six films — a modest aggregate for a name this canonical, and the reason is the shape of his curve. The Tree of Life leads at #46 (4.26), the Malick film our sources place highest. The Thin Red Line follows at #99 (3.46), then the drop is steep: Days of Heaven at #245 (2.45), Badlands at #438 (1.87), The New World (2006) at #1939, and To the Wonder stranded at #4891 (0.20). What fascinates me is the citation count against the score. The Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven each appear on ten of our source lists — the widest reach of any Malick film — yet The Tree of Life, cited only eight times, outscores them both. Breadth of mention is not the same as intensity of regard, and the composite keeps them apart: Malick is a director whom everyone lists and only The Tree of Life makes everyone kneel.

Where to start

Badlands for the debut that needed no revising; Days of Heaven for the most beautiful film in the set and the one that earned the silence; then The Tree of Life for the full cosmological swing, where the method finally matches its ambition.