“It’s kind of like the ultimate [visual effects] project,” says "Voyage of Time" vfx supervisor Dan Glass,
The post Terrence Malick Prefers Old-School VFX For ‘Voyage of Time,’ Opening Today in IMAX appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
Add a Comment
“It’s kind of like the ultimate [visual effects] project,” says "Voyage of Time" vfx supervisor Dan Glass,
The post Terrence Malick Prefers Old-School VFX For ‘Voyage of Time,’ Opening Today in IMAX appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
Add a Comment
The ever-wonderful Matt Zoller Seitz has written a great feature for Salon.com -- "Directors of the Decade: The Sensualists". Actually, this is one of ten features Seitz is writing for Salon about "Directors of the Decade", but for me this is the group that matters most, because it includes Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, and Wong Kar-Wai, some of my absolute favorites, though I had never thought of them as a group before. Or maybe I have -- I've been thinking a lot recently about why Lynch, Malick, and Mann in particular appeal to me so deeply. (I love some of Wong Kar-Wai's films, too -- 2046, In the Mood for Love, and especially Happy Together, though My Blueberry Nights proved nearly unwatchable and Ashes of Time, in either version, left me cold. Hou Hsiao-hsien I hadn't really thought of in relation to the others, and I'm least familiar with his work, having only seen Flight of the Red Balloon and The Puppetmaster.)
Here's how Seitz defines the group:
The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They're interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first -- perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.Bingo -- if I could sum up the mix of aesthetics and worldview that most appeals to me, that reflects and extends my own take on how it feels to live, I doubt I could come up with a better description than Seitz has. Indeed, it reveals succinctly what I most favor in art. That's not, of course, to say that all other approaches are wrong or don't work or whatever, but that the fastest, surest way I've found toward the pleasures of recognition (of life, of living, of being and time) and the evocation of emotion (without what feels to me to be sentimentality) is via exactly what Seitz describes.
Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character's and the scene's). But they'd rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he's thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies -- not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.
You can tell by watching the sensualists' films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight -- as markers that don't seem like markers when they happen.
The many people who thought the 135-minute theatrical cut of The New World was already too long are probably not lining up to get the new extended cut DVD, but for the passionate minority of us who think The New World is not just a good film, but one of the greatest American films -- for us, the new DVD provides overwhelming bliss.
The movies I care about most are the movies that so capture my imagination that I rarely think about anything else while watching them -- they expand beyond entertainment into a kind of meditation. It's an entirely individual thing, and though I expect most compulsive filmgoers have a list of such films, I doubt any of our lists are too similar.*
When I first wrote about The New World, I began by saying, "I, too, thought The New World suffered because of its length, but unlike the various reviewers who thought it was too long, I felt like most of the problems came from it being far too short for all that director-writer Terrence Malick tried to do with it."
The extended cut is the version I was dreaming of, aching for. It adds only a few new scenes, each of them brief, but instead the additional 37 minutes are scattered into what already existed in the previous DVD version, but with such subtlety and care that it feels like a new film. The effect is powerful because it changes many emphases, and the lengthening makes the story encompass much more than it previously did -- the 135-minute cut basically tells the story of John Smith and Pocahontas's doomed romance; the 172-minute cut tells the story of characters encountering new worlds.
My initial reaction to the earlier version of The New World was that I thought it was unfinished. Subsequent viewings, though, made me think that that first reaction came partly from being annoyed by the people sitting around me in the theatre who were so obviously bored. When I watched the movie again (and again and again...), I got comfortable with its length and editing.
Having seen the extended version now, though, I wonder if I'll be able to return to the first DVD with much pleasure. I'll return to it for intellectual reasons -- interest in thinking about the different choices Malick made -- but the extended cut provided the entrancing and overwhelming experience I had glimpsed when I first saw the film in the theatre.
In TimeOut New York, Matt Zoller Seitz writes insightfully about the new cut (he has been among the movie's most eloquent defenders):
This version foregrounds Smith, Pocahontas, Pocahontas’s second husband, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), and a half dozen subsidiary characters as they are shocked into reconsidering who they are and why they exist. The result is its own splendid thing -- a fresh take on the story drawn from the film’s numerous shots of rivers feeding into oceans, reshaping the land and nourishing the landscape. It is a historical epic that illustrates Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that humankind’s collective past, present and future are encoded in each individual life.This is true, but what I felt on watching the film again is that part of its genius is its richness of meaning, particularly in the new version, because now it is, yes, about individual versus collective identity, but it is also more vividly about cultures that are alien to each other trying to figure out what to make of the strangers, and it is about communication and intention, and it is about destruction and creation, and it is about travel and home, and it is about grasses and water and insects and clouds and windows -- yes, windows, or at least holes, because a motif that is strengthened in the new version is the motif of walls (sometimes ceilings) and the holes in them that people look through, adding another layer of meaning to the movie, a theme of sight and perception.
I think that The New World is a totemic film.
I think it's totemic for the representation of non-mainstream cinema within existing distribution methods (in London it crept onto a number of small screens before disappearing quite quickly, though evidently there were more people at screenings towards the end of its run).
I also think that it's totemic of a willingness to look past the standard means of story-telling that are shoved down our throats by the big cinema chains. If you can watch the New World and realise how beautiful it is then you're not completely lost to the idea of cinema as art.
Nice to see someone carrying a flame for Breakfast on Pluto too.
Thanks for the heads-up! I missed New World when it came out, but I loved Thin Red Line -- and I already had the experience, with Apocalypse Now: Redux, of finding a longer cut of a long slow film more engaging than the shorter.
So I'll keep an eye out for the extended DVD, and not count myself too unlucky I missed the theatrical release.
I'm currently reading Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe so I think it would be interesting to watch The New World as a dual dialogue. I remember the first time I saw a Malick film. It was Days of Heaven. I was in High School and I think we were probably getting a free trial of HBO (this was in the late eighties). I was hypnotized by it. Needless to say if left a huge impression on me.
Matt: I'm with you on this flick -- really loved it.
Jeff Ford
Still haven't seen this, but now that I know about the extended version I definitely will.
Not that I think B.B. Thornton is a filmmaker on the order of Malick, but I had the same reaction (wanting a longer movie) while watching All the Pretty Horses. I think there's a substantial film there that got lost when it was cut.