Days of Heaven

This is the second time I’ve shown Terrence Malick’s masterpiece for the Clark, this time for the Cinematic Landscape film series, tying in with the current small but intriguing exhibition of George Inness in the Berkshires. (The last time was in 35mm at Images for the “Epics of the Soil” series, in conjunction with the Millet exhibition in 1999.) It holds up every time on the big screen, confirming Nestor Almendros’ Oscar for cinematography. And Malick’s legend holds up too, from bursting on the scene with Badlands and following up with Heaven, then the twenty years silence till his next film, The Thin Red Line, and now seven years after that, The New World, apparently a retelling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, with a star-filled cast led by Colin Farrell, now in post-production and eagerly anticipated. Epic in its visualizations of farming on the Great Plains in the Texas Panhandle leading up to World War I, Days of Heaven is brilliantly narrated but sparsely dramatized, more like a Greek drama or a silent film than a conventional movie, though Richard Gere, Brooke Allen, and Sam Shepard cast plenty of star power, even in continuous silhouette or swapping tight closeups with locusts or worms. (1978, dvd@cai, n.) *9*