Terrence Malick @ Cinéma du Parc: A wandering, condensed career

With a four decade-old penchant for the dense and philosophical, Terrence Malick has established an impressive reputation in the epic filmmaking tradition of DeMille, Kurosawa and Kubrick. It speaks to the layered quality of Malick’s work, then, that he has only made five films.

Starting on the 24^th of this month at the Cinéma du Parc, all five of those works—including the recent Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life—will be featured up on the big screen once again.

First on the program is the 1978 Days of Heaven, Malick’s second, critically acclaimed feature length that centers on an unconventional marriage in the writer-director’s home state of Texas. Malick’s personal dedication to the Western vista was originally established in the violently brilliant Badlands, the tale of a romantic cross-country killing spree filmed in 1973. For the famously reclusive filmmaker, time and place are always tenuous markers to the larger ruminations on good and evil, life and death, and all things in between.

As an added treat, The Thin Red Line, The New World and Days of Heaven will all be played on old 35 mm reel, maintaining the pure movie look that so serves Malick’s image-driven oeuvre. Replete with ponderous long-shots and voice-overs, these are grand works of cinema in its most classic sense. Yet Malick has more than left his own mark in the history of modern film. 1998’s The Thin Red Line overturned all preconceptions of a ‘war film’ with an absolutely intimidating cast in the beautiful and bloody jungles of WWII Japan. His lush cinematography remains ever the constant as he moved to the founding of America in 2005’s The New World and back into the nostalgic Texan suburbs of his hometown, Waco, with The Tree of Life.

PROGRAM:
DAYS OF HEAVEN (35mm) | JUNE 24 – 30 at 7 p.m.
THE THIN RED LINE (35mm) | JUNE 24 – 30 at 8:45 p.m.
THE NEW WORLD (35mm) | JUNE 25 – 26 at 3 p.m.
BADLANDS (stf) / LA BALADE SAUVAGE | JUNE 25 – 26 at 5:15 p.m.
THE TREE OF LIFE | STARTING JULY 1st