come anticipate the masterpiece that will be terrence malick's TREE OF LIFE.

morbs otm

this post from the forum i linked above gets at some of the problems i had with the movie - especially the comment about 'constant wide-angled voluptuousness' - ive been finding malick's idea of cinematic 'beauty' to be increasingly fatuous, the cinema needs remarkable images but it takes more than photographing something prettily to hit the mark. he used to have the ability, days of heaven contains images i'll never forget, but when i think of tree of life or the new world it's all just indistinct steadicam goop, a natgeo special with some big stars wandering around.

I do, however, think your argument for this particular film has a lot to do with the fact that most of the movie is comprised of immediate, obvious, and emotionally/intellectually comforting words, images, and music. Several critics have used the term "kitsch" to describe it, and I strongly concur. The argument that "one must experience and appreciate this work emotionally rather than critically" is one that is regularly adopted by adherents of kitsch to explain why, say, Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkaide must be appreciated. "Don't think about it, just enjoy it!" So much of this movie was immediately recognizable, it could've come straight out of any corporate "green energy" commercial (happy people dancing in sprinklers in manicured lawns), New Age posters with "cosmic" visuals and flying orcas (no orcas in this film, but Mrs. O'Brien does waft aloft), and any high-tech nature/space imagery since Cosmos.

Milan Kundera offered a famous definition of kitsch: "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see the children running in the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass! It is the second tear which makes kitsch kitsch." It's also the operative context for this entire film. Yes, one can take the images at face value and bask in their warmth and recognizability, and perhaps even draw a powerful emotional experience from it. But that doesn't make it great art; it doesn't challenge or stretch or enlarge our understanding of ourselves or the world we live in.

For me, the film lacked a crucial sense of awe. For all its nonlinear construction and unexpected juxtapositions, it always had a feeling of familiarity and obviousness. The sense of uncanny symmetry or unusual beauty we associate with Kubrick or Tarkovsky (or even earlier Malick works) simply wasn't there; it all seemed demonstrative, reaching for effect. (What does it say about a film that the only way it creates suspense is to tease us with children playing with deadly objects?) The handheld camerawork even grows monotonous with its constant wide-angled voluptuousness; there's little sense of shaping or modulating the visual information; it lacks any dynamics. Even the cosmic imagery, with its billowing vapors and fluids (inspired by the much more profound work of Jordan Belson) lacked a sense of mystery--its organization seemed strangely literal; as if we should be surprised or moved to contemplation by gazing at a meteor slowly receding towards the earth after the film depicts the age of dinosaurs; as if every oceanic documentary in recent memory hasn't equated hundreds of glowing jellyfish to stars in the universe.

It seems to me that most people who love the film love the idea of the film, its ambitions and trappings, rather than its execution. Evangelicals seem especially prone to celebrate its laudable intentions, and leave it at that. Maybe the eternal perspective is actually new and paradigm-shifting for some, the idea that individuals are wrapped up in a cosmic story. As a middle class father with a troubled midwestern upbringing who has a profound love of nature and a taste for mysticism, I am definitely Malick's ideal viewer. But maybe I'm too close to the material? I wanted to lose myself in the film and its imagination, but it always felt naive and preening, imploring me to join it rather than fascinating or compelling me.

well, i kind of disagree with that.

I think it's a bit of taking on the proponents of the film rather than the film itself to say that we're "supposed" to be transported by it, or the whole "dont think, just see how beautiful it is."

I think this approach ignores the hints of discord in the movie, and particularly how those hints of discord, how they are hidden and discovered as a process of growing up, are an explicit subject of the movie. How parents fighting can be so hugely disturbing, or when the mother shields her children from the man having a seizure.

Secondly, i think the movie, for better or for worse (I can see both sides), simply DEMANDS to be interpreted. I get impatient with the "pretty pictures" or "national geographic" comments because i think the editing and structure of the movie are so obviously very careful and deliberate and interlocking. This is a common problem with criticism of Malick. I find his movies the very opposite of vacuous pretty pictures, and if anything they are images overdetermined with meaning and context. Honestly, I think it's just being a poor watcher of movies to think the images are simply aiming to be pretty.

And as far as kitsch goes, well i just think that term is maybe not so helpful, laden as it is with a lot of (Bourdieu-ian) stuff i'd rather leave behind.

Secondly, i think the movie, for better or for worse (I can see both sides), simply DEMANDS to be interpreted. I get impatient with the "pretty pictures" or "national geographic" comments because i think the editing and structure of the movie are so obviously very careful and deliberate and interlocking. This is a common problem with criticism of Malick. I find his movies the very opposite of vacuous pretty pictures, and if anything they are images overdetermined with meaning and context. Honestly, I think it's just being a poor watcher of movies to think the images are simply aiming to be pretty.

im not saying thats what hes aiming for, im saying its what hes producing. i agree that his imagery is overdetermined! such that i can't respond to it at all except in the interpretive fashion he demands, which i find oppressive. and since the movie's being praised in many corners for simply being beautiful, what's wrong with examining why a movie that bursts forth with 'beauty' can leave viewers like me so unmoved?

you found the question of kitsch useful earlier in the thread...

i think that's all fair. i find the movie kind of oppressive myself, despite admiring it.

i was thinking about it in the shower just now and i guess im not satisfied with the glibness of my natgeo comment. its just that ive been trying to figure out what it is that makes images in the cinema remarkable - why days of heaven, which i havent seen in about 9 years, sticks in my head but his more recent pictures dont.

i am attracted to the idea in the post i quoted that his imagery has become unmodulated - tree of life and the new world were shot almost entirely with steadicam, and it creates what i consider a monotonous visual sensibility. its not a narrative thing, because there's lots of non-narrative cinema whose imagery is very striking to me. it may be a human thing - the structure of tree of life is so confounding to me, there are scenes that are very moving and authentic but i feel like terry's ambitions end up strangling the simple domestic story i was being drawn into. and i never really managed to find the humanity in the new world (i had a much easier time with TTRL)

i doubt i would be convinced by an argument that malick's shooting style (suddenly veering off to shoot butterflies and birds and shit) means that there is no planning or construction in his movies, but i think people find it easy to take that and use it as an easy way to dismiss, i guess, the interpretive challenge that his pictures pose

and the nature of that interpretive challenge really niggles at me. i do think some people find themselves sort of liking the movie uncritically as an "experience" because they find it unpalatable to publicly not like the movie and be seen as someone who cant handle serious, challenging cinema. and i dont blame them for that reaction, because this movie doesnt have a lens through which to view it that suddenly imbues you with the 'correct' reading of the film (like all art), yet the structure and ambition may make you feel like it's some puzzle that needs to be solved (which i don't believe was malick's intention).

it's pretty antithetical to my sensibility, which i guess is that i need to be enticed a little bit to start digging underneath the text - this movie just hands you a shovel at the outset and tells you to dig for china, but no matter how much i contemplate the movie it never becomes more rewarding to me

and something about that makes me wonder if im cut out for this kind of picture - something about it seems to encourage people to think about it as a litmus test for a certain brand of cinematic ambition, independent of its qualities as a film, and im not sure if that isnt a weird impulse. if you think a hot new comedy sucks, do you then start asking yourself if you don't like comedies?

(i talked about this a little upthread, but the kitsch question is interesting to me precisely because i dont really see much kitschiness in the movie, and i suspect i would like it more if i did!)

(and for all my bitching, this is a movie that i end up thinking about a whole lot, and ive only seen it once. so that must mean something right?)

i may have already posted this but during my rapturous period w/this film i argued that theres s.thing very textual abt it, that i seems to desire to be read rather than seen and that almost despite the intensity and beauty of its images whats really impt is the structure and the editing of the various scenes and images. id like to see the movie again but ive been trying to fit the larger structure of the movie into an idea of thesis/antithesis/synthesis but id probably have to reread hegel/kant to make it work (lol).

im interested in the idea of kitsch that the kundera quote gets at and yr sense of the movie being beautiful but monotonous. many of the images in the movie seem rooted in an idea of beauty that is 'subjective yet universal' which leans them towards kitsch even as the images themselves are 'purposive without purpose'. in order for the images to be universal and communicable they have to be familiar and preconfigured which can limit the ability of these parts of the film to carry the shock of the new or the unexpected. does this make the film bad tho? idk

i just like how the camera slid past everything. there was this way in which it seemed to want to look in a particular way but didn't always necessarily care what it was looking at. many surfaces slipping over each other. i didn't really feel like anything needed to be deciphered, or that it was this enveloping experience. sometimes i'm walking home and the sky is turning pink and reflecting in all the windows and i think, i wish i had a camera, or maybe what's beautiful about this wouldn't translate into a photograph or what would it mean to have this image of this when i can see it now. this film made me think of this kind of situation, the parts where the boys are swimming in the river, and how i feel like i have memories like this but no way to prove it.

this movie just hands you a shovel at the outset and tells you to dig for china, but no matter how much i contemplate the movie it never becomes more rewarding to me

yes, absolutely. though this actually APPEALS to my sensibility, as i've always been drawn to puzzles and explicitly philosophical films. i certainly feel for anyone who has to sit through this movie and doesn't enjoy that a little bit.

however, I almost want to suggest that Malick (who i presume has a sophisticated grasp of theology) has maybe couched the terms for interpreting the movie in deliberately anachronistic and even confrontational hermeneutic terms (I've often felt his movies aren't as gentle in intent as they seem, almost passive-aggressive if you will). these movies don't really countenance or even take regard of the possibility for cynicism. i get the feeling that part of what he's been refining and perfecting (ironically) in the last few movies is an very conscious move away from consciousness, away from a deliberate artfulness or knowingness or sophistication. and all the more interestingly given the lie by the highly formal and constructed nature of his films.

i hope i've expressed that clearly, and i think that's the point at which you can call bullshit or be intrigued by his later films.

Finally got around to this. Malick, fuzzy-headed as ever. I pretty much agree w/Soto & Morbs, and with the critique quoted above re: kitsch and the received symbolism of it all. The boy's-eye-view middle section has some fine filmmaking in it, though the characters remain distant as people -- felt a bit like looking through a stranger's family album. But on the grand ambition and spiritual insight front, I just don't think he has much to say. Tarkovsky was mentioned a few places above, and if you stack ToL up against, say, Andrei Rublev -- which is the kind of film it begs comparison to -- I think it seems awfully thin. Malick is a serious artist and all that, but in those ranks, he's a real lightweight.

having lots to say /= profound

I'm thinking quality, not quantity.

Almost walked out because the trailers thought I was the type of person that would be interested in whatever the fuck Tree Of Life is

― mercy mercy me, that beanfield milagro (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, December 11, 2010 6:52 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Eventually saw this and is p much my favorite movie of 2011.

yeah, dinosaurs were cool

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRVOYPgIdHCMxCN8mwtKJDoHkdPoQHWwnJiisfAVG-Sve-0Lmro

ya know it

Whiney otm

smfh @ you all

literally the worst film i've ever sat all the way through

What's the best movie you've walked out on?

i don't tend to walk out of movies :( i am working on this

I didn't think you watched movies, lex

what gave you that impression?

i'm not enough of a film buff to post on the film threads here and i don't see as many as i want to but i watch them!

lex, I get why you don't like this and I can appreciate it, but is it really necessary to chime in with every revive to remind us how much you hated it?

hes only done it twice...

True, my bad, I guess it was every Oscar thread and end of year film thread he popped in to mention that he hated this.

xps I just never see you talk about them

oh i'm quite bad at seeing them at the same time as everyone else and i don't "anticipate" them as such so i tend to revive film threads like a year afterwards when i've finally got round to them

or when i see people praising tree of life and am consequently enraged

just such a weird film to be "enraged" over

Nah, this is sort of a quintessentially love-loathe type movie. Which I love.

"enraged" is a pretty strong emotion. are you sure you didn't mean "irked"?

Not seen it but I'm guessng most of the art house 'moves' would enrage anyone who wasn't used (or simply liked) them: 'static' images, alienated relationships blah blah

Good video for Explosions in the Sky from The Tree of Life's second-unit cinematographer:

http://portable.tv/music/post/the-best-extended-music-videos/7/

So the dinosaurs are the brothers, right

yeah i've thought that in the past. not sure it really "maps" on to it perfectly but it's certainly a depiction of the central relationships which occur over and over.

Ok, and brad pitt is evolutionists

im still coming to terms with the second half of this movie (not sure i ever will) but i think up through the baby section in the middle it's incredible.

Kid stealing the slip scene didn't go exactly the way it did in my childhood, but the gist was the same.

Cant stop thinking about this movie, which is v out of character.

And this is a great thread, tho it crashed my phone three times.

I'm posting this article because it's the best analysis of Tree of Life I've read. Plus, it led me to watch "Melancholia," which is also great...

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/origin-and-extinction-mourning-and-melancholia

Grady and I went to Tree of Life when it first came out on the big screen. I remember saying after the movie "one too many shots of sea-foam, maybe?" Grady's reply was: "NOT ENOUGH shots of sea-foam," which seemed sarcastic but wasn't quite, and he was right. The sea-foam belonged right where it was in the movie... Man, now I want to view it a second time.

I love that the film can support such a smarty pants analysis, even if the essay links it to the less accomplished and less profound style of bullshitery favored by Von Trier.

I finally saw this, and I have to say that even though the 50s childhood stuff was often remarkably well constructed, the whole "process of life" universal stuff felt just like a more banal, religious version of The Fountain, right down to a tree symbolizing endless cycles of life, to images of cell-level biology bleeding into cosmic vistas, to the usage of practical effects instead of CGI. And I'm not saying The Fountain is the perfect movie or anything (it's kind of an admirable mess), but I found it curious that that movie was mostly panned and this movie was bigged up, even though Aronofsky found a more idiosyncratic (both visually and narratively) way of telling his "life endures" cosmic story than Malick did here with his naive imagery.

TBH, I was ready to forgive the movie because the 50s stuff was often so good, there the naivety worked because it was such an effective way of illumating the parts of childhood Malick focused on, but then came the final part of the movie with its religious pamphlet imagery, and that was such a turn-off. Like, after all the criticism of the father's authoritarian ways and downright abusiveness, do we really need to see these corny images of Heaven where he is forgiven and the mother is kissing him?

Also, I get it that the whole movie shouldn't be taken as a straightforward representation of anything, maybe all the images are really just Sean Penn thinkinking about Life and Stuff, but still you have to ask, is this guy's vision of the afterlife so banal and simplistic? After the carefully and often beautifully crafted childhood scenes, if was such a letdown that Malick's (or Penn's) vision of the afterlife was so dull, like screensaver images or something. Compared to this, The Fountain did the whole "triumph of life" thing much better, Daronofsky managed to find more potent and less overdetermined visual euphemisms to convey this theme. (Of course the difference is that The Fountains is not religious and The Tree of Life clearly is, but should embracing religion mean giving up imagination?)

I haven't seen any other Malick movies besides Badlands, so I'm not sure if its his signature style or something, but I have to say the incessant, rapid jump-cuts got really tiresome after a while, the speed of them almost made feel physically ill. I thought the technique worked in the 50s parts of the movie, because it's an effective way of illustrating how childhood memories bleed into each other, becoming a non-chronological amorphous shape of a sort, but I can't for the life of me figure out why the same sort of cutting was applied to the metaphysical stuff? Because, even though some of the images were corny, some of them were also beautiful (and some of them were both), but instead of letting the viewer focus on them and contemplate transcendence or whatever, Malick just bombarded us with them. It felt like he was trying to overprove himself, being like, "Didn't I do a cool shot there? Well, there's more where that came from! And more! And more!". If anyone has some explanation why these parts of the movie were cut that way, I'd be happy to hear it.

I saw an hour of this when it was screened on Film Four recently and was enraged I missed this at the cinema as Thin Red Line is incredibly boring. It looks like I missed the worst parts of it (?)

I think Thin Red Line is a masterpiece. Not boring at all to me, totally/tonally enrapturing.

Per Malick's editing, I'm not sure I was as distracted as you were (xpost) to the cuts, but I do know that at least since Thin Red Line his movies have more or less been made in the editing suite. That is, he has a loose script, but spends just as much time making his actors recite long speeches that won't make it in as impulsively stealing shots of nature that will (tons of Sean Penn were apparently excised from Tree of Life, just as Adrian Brody was more or less erased out of Thin Red Line). Out of the hours and hours of extraneous stuff as well as acting, the movie's themes and whatnot are shaped when he and his team start cutting things together. It's a very impressionistic style, and I can imagine it being frustrating for someone expecting something more linear. In fact, Badlands may be the only Malick to stick to a relatively conservative narrative filmmaking style. It's pretty linear/straight-forward in a way that none of his subsequent films are. Even The New World is a little loopy, and that one (iirc) trades in hyper-realism.

The lack of linearity didn't bother me, just the fact that he didn't let any shot linger for more than 5 seconds, even though some of the shots were quite beautiful and would've been more effective if he'd let them breath. I mean, if this movie is supposed to be a contemplation on life and universe and all, he didn't give us much time to contemplate before moving to the next Significant Image, and the next one, and the next one... The idea of shaping the whole movie in the editing room is cool, but I don't think that justifies the rapid cuts. Surely the shots of nature et al that he'd done were long enough that they would've allowed for a slower pace? The jump cuts felt like a conscious aesthetic choice, not something that was forced by the material he had, so it was baffling to me why he chose to do it that way.

your complaint is similar to dave kehr's, iirc.

not sure it makes sense to say the cutting isn't motivated by the material--the style is exactly the point, even more than the "material," no? Malick's thing is less making Significant Images to be pondered than a rush of images (he'd be a great music video director), a kind of flowing signification, let's say, rather than anything you can put your finger on. im not saying you're supposed to be frustrated, but any sense of Meaning is meant to be fleeting and transitory, i think.

the funny thing is that it's not a "contemplative" movie at all. quite the opposite! The Thin Red Line is contemplative, maybe, which is why it's my favorite of his. The Tree of Life is more immediate and overwhelming.

I mean, if this movie is supposed to be a contemplation on life and universe and all, he didn't give us much time to contemplate before moving to the next Significant Image, and the next one, and the next one.

You could make a case that this is the precise point.

^^^

Okay, fair enough, but what is the point then? What is quick pace suppose to convey? That Heaven is hectic?

No, maybe that you've got one life to live, it goes by fast, and the next thing you know everyone is dead, including you, and even as you juggle a jumble of memories, loves, experiences, mistakes and regrets, you're not one step closer to understanding the way the universe works or why.

OTM.

Tho I think the aesthetic experience is the primary driver, so if someone's not responding to that, I'm not even going to try to convince them otherwise.