Overview

Despite overwhelming acclaim for his work, director Terrence Malick remains an under-examined figure of an era of filmmaking that also produced such notables as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven remain benchmarks of American cinema, while his recent The Thin Red Line returned him to the pantheon of American directors. In this new study, authors James Morrison and Thomas Schur examine each of his films in detail, drawing on extensive archival research to construct a portrait of his working methods as a director as well as the thematic, aesthetic, and cultural components of his work. Moreover, aside from tracing the development of Malick's filmmaking from its beginnings to the present, the book compares his finished pictures to their original shooting scripts, and so provides a unique means of exploring the nature of his working methods and the ways in which they influence the final products. Revealing the ways in which these films connect to and depart from evolving traditions of the last 30 years, The Films of Terrence Malick provides a comprehensive and penetrating study as well as an informative and adventurous work of film criticism.

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9780275972479

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Reviews

The authors make a compelling case that Malick's impersonal style blends irony and romanticism, an approach that recognizes the hard truth that American mythologies embrace positive and negative aspects of the culture and, therefore, cannot be so readily dispensed with as those rebel directors may have wished. Morrison and Schur provide lucid and thoughtful readings of Malick's films, situating them within a startlingly diverse array of influences, from philosophy (Heidegger and Cavell), literature (Lawrence and Cather), and visual art (Wyeth, Hine, and Murnau). In brilliant commentary on topics ranging from Malick's use of stars to his (dis)interest in causality to his treatment of male beauty, the authors develop what will surely prove to be the definitive analysis of Malick's work to date. -Maria Pramaggiore Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies North Carolina State University

Author Information

JAMES MORRISON teaches literature and film at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of Passport to Hollywood, a critical study, and Broken Fever, a memoir. He is currently completing a study of mass culture and the sublime in Hollywood movies, has published several short stories, and is at work on a novel. THOMAS SCHUR received his bachelor's degree in film at North Carolina State University, and now studies film in the M.F.A. program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he also teaches filmmaking and film studies. He has made several short films and videos, and is currently at work on a sequence of films inspired by the stylistic model of haiku poetry.

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