The Tree of Life

Watch the trailer for The Tree of Life below.

Here’s what we know about Terrence Malick.

1. He doesn’t give interviews, or appear in public and refuses to be photographed, or at least have his photograph used for promotional purposes. Except this one where he wears a big hat.

2. He’s a philosopher. He wrote a book about Heidegger, taught at MIT and spent some time teaching in France. His films have become increasingly ambitious with the years and more self-consciously ‘philosophical’, culminating in The Tree of Life, which takes on nothing less than Life, the Universe and Everything as its subject matter. Add to this the kudos given to an artist who is also something else. Like John Updike working as a doctor in a hospital as well as being a novelist of international repute.

3. He hasn’t made many films. Only five in almost 40 years: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011). A work rate that makes Stanley Kubrick look like Woody Allen means each film appears loaded with expectation as an event. It also adds to the mystique of a man who could probably be making a film a year, but who deliberately chooses his subjects with care and then spends time polishing and fiddling.

However, each of these points is complicated. Why?

1. The nature of being a recluse these days is defined by an intrusive busy-body media and a promotional sausage-making machine that churns out sound-bites and waffle-snacks. Malick’s reticence is now effectively more voluble than Quentin Tarantino’s mouth, standing as a little pocket of stubborn silence in contrast to the twittering overload of the blogosphere. Shutting up has become the new way of saying something, the way not being on Facebook says much more than being on Facebook.

2. The philosopher tag combines with the recluse label in giving Malick an otherworldly feel. It is a kind of back-handed compliment that promotes to dismiss. Ultimately, Malick is as much a historian as he is a philosopher. All of his films have been period pieces and three of them are based on true events: Badlands is a true crime flick, The Thin Red Line is based on the battle of Guadalcanal and The New World is an interrogation of the foundational myths of European America.

3. Although it is indisputable that his output has been limited, each film has resolutely carved its place into cinema history. There are filmmakers who have made more films, certainly, but there aren’t many who have created more masterpieces.

Taken together, Malick’s films create a remarkably consistent universe. A river runs through all his films. There is always a birdcage. A fire burns in every one of his films, usually burning down a house, usually deliberately ignited. Life is lived outside and houses are often foreign environments, to be invaded. The intrusion into somebody else’s house happens in every film.

If the furniture of his cinematic universe is consistent, so is his way of viewing it. In fact, Malick’s style is so recognisable as to veer occasionally towards becoming his own cliché, especially in his later films: the magic hour photography, the use of music and the dislocation of image from sound, often dropping the sound out of scenes that look noisy; the use of voice-over rather than dialogue.

Initially, the voice-over was an ironic counterpoint. Sissy Spacek’s massively unreliable narrator provided a disingenuous commentary to the inarticulate violence and loquacious double-speak of Martin Sheen’s Kit. In Days of Heaven, the commentary luxuriates in its own meandering irrelevance, giving the film some of its most memorable lines: ‘he wasn’t a bad man: you give him a flower and he’d keep it forever’. The Thin Red Line is an oratorio of questions, anxiety and uncertainty. The voice-over in The New World and The Tree of Life triumphs as a mixture of meditation, introspection and prayer – whispered, sighing, internal mutterings – almost entirely does away with the traditional dialogue-rich scene.

Despite diverse subject matter (juvenile crime, poverty, war, colonisation and grief), Malick’s films share some big themes. The loss of innocence is often cited as a central concern in all the films, but innocence is a sticky topic. In Badlands, Holly’s innocence facilitates Kit’s violence, who is in his own way untouched and innocent of the pain he causes. Days of Heaven begins with the protagonist Bill (Richard Gere) launching a possibly fatal attack against his foreman. The paradise of the opening of The Thin Red Line is a truant paradise, preceded by the lurking crocodile and one that, we later learn, exists only via an act of wilful deafness and blindness. John Smith begins The New World in chains and the indigenous peoples are warlike and intent on murdering him.

Innocence is then something that we feel the loss of without ever having fully understood its presence. The Tree of Life begins with loss and grief. A grown son, a middle child, perhaps as a result of a war, has died. The rest of the film is an attempt to understand life through the lens of absence, loss and death. The fifty-minute symphonic opening abandons narrative in favour of a mapping of the origins of all life from the cosmic to the microscopic and finally to the human scale. This is certainly Malick the philosopher, but it is also Malick the historian going back to primary sources, and Malick the scientist. Theological ideas, such as that of a lost Eden, give the film images to work with, just as the quotation from Job sets an overtly religious tone to the film, but Malick is interested in DNA and evolution as well. In fact, although there is a religious striving throughout the film, God is a presence that can only be felt through a series of absences. There might be prayers in the films, but whether they are answered or not is open to question. In the cosmic vastness, there is a big God-shaped hole, fringed with doubt and questioning.

And yet for all the philosophy, theology, etc., Malick is always grounded. This might seem like an odd claim, when viewing the visual poetry that at times is almost overwhelming, but his films can only get to the spiritual via the intensely physical. The sudden sunshine on a waterfall looks magical, but it is real. The upside down shadows of children playing on wet tarmac might make us think of ghosts, and in a way they are, being the projections of projections of projections, but they are also the shadows of the children. The magic hour is just a certain time of day, albeit a time of day when we feel that something is going, has almost gone, is gone. Just as The Thin Red Line, for all its questions and despair, included a thoroughly delineated combat operation, so The Tree of Life always comes back to a young family in 1950s Texas over which the shadow of a death foretold falls.

Even more than the pyrotechnics of the opening and closing sequence, it is this intimate portrait of an ordinary childhood that achieves moments of sublime cinema. The ordinary is elevated, tinged though it is with the elegiac. Two children trying to touch hands through the glass of the window anticipates a moment of final separation. When the children leap from their bicycles and run into the long grass the camera follows them joyfully. Even here, among the games and the energy of youth, Malick is not going to give us an untroubled innocence though. There is sexual awakening, the heartbreaking realisation of parental fallibility and the banal cruelty of siblings. In a sly self-reference, the first word the baby pronounces is ‘alligator’, reminding us of The Thin Red Line’s very first image: a crocodile slipping under the water. The Tree of Life is Malick’s most magical film, in being his most grounded.

John Bleasdale

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Psycho

Hitchcock once said that when the images of a film and its soundtrack are doing the same thing, one of them must be redundant. In the famous shower scene in Psycho, it is perhaps truer than ever. The superficial impression that image and music are simply ‘mickey mousing’ is a tribute to the effectiveness of the music. For all we see is a raised knife, a woman’s screaming face, blood around the plughole. The knife scarcely moves, and certainly never meets the flesh of Janet Leigh. It is Bernard Herrmann’s music that pierces the skin, plunges the blade and carries out the murder.

By 1960 Herrmann was already an old hand, having started his own chamber orchestra at 20, before working for many years at the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles. The Psycho score was unusual for a horror film at that time in being only for strings, but this approach (with the addition of a little percussion) would provide the blueprint for many of James Bernard’s classic scores for Hammer Horror.

Heard in isolation from the picture, the prelude resembles at times the stringent sonorities of early Schoenberg only with added soaring, plaintive melody and machinic rhythms more akin to the work of Schoenberg’s student, Hans Eisler. Elsewhere, themes recall the sombre menace of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Snooping in Norman Bates’s bedroom, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) spies a copy of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony on the record player, and Herrmann sneaks in a pastiche of the funeral march from the second movement.

Then there is the shower scene. Initially, Hitchcock wanted the scene to play just with sound effects and no music but Herrmann talked him round, creating in the process one of the most famous pieces of film music of all time. Working as a kind of expressionist intensification of Janet Leigh’s scream, it is the aural equivalent of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, and is culturally just as central. The reference to Eroica is apposite; just like Beethoven’s symphony, Herrmann’s score meant that things would never be the same again without sounding thoroughly old-fashioned.

Robert Barry

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Suspiria

Any witches’ covens looking for a cover could do worse than a dance academy. Open the doors of your remote labyrinthine pile and waifs of good family will simply flock to be subjected to severe sado-masochistic discipline. As played by Jessica Harper with an unsurpassed 40-year-old-woman-in-the-body-of-a-14-year-old-girl oddness, Suzy Bannion is the natural prey of the sort of humourlessly leering Teutonic dykes and faded beauties made up to a grotesque parody of their former selves who run such establishments. Horrible as it is, Suzy accepts this situation as her lot: maybe this distracts her from the even more horrible truth.

It’s not as if there aren’t enough danger signals right from the off. Indeed, Suspiria almost doesn’t recover from a blistering opening 15 minutes. Horror movies generally take some time to establish a notion of normal life, gradually allowing the supernatural or murderous to infiltrate. Here, it’s all up in about 10 seconds. As the opening credits run, a bland voice-over tells us Suzy is coming to Germany to study dance. The arrival board flashes up, Suzy passes through security, and she is already saucer-eyed. Seconds later, she is soaking in a howling gale as Goblin’s pulsing, hammer dulcimer-led theme kicks in. After an angsty taxi ride, out of the blackest storm there floats towards us a Gothic pile so ruddy it seems to be engorged. So this is the dance school. To make matters worse, as Suzy tries to get in, a deranged girl runs out. By now Goblin are drumming and howling fit to burst, and we follow the raving girl to a friend’s apartment block. It seems a dubious refuge: the bizarre, oddly-luminous panelling of the lobby itself seems murderous. And in a way it is. Knifed and noosed by an unseen assailant, the girl’s still twitching body plunges through the stained-glass lobby ceiling, stopped short of the floor by the tightening noose. As the camera pans down, we see her friend on the floor, her face bisected by a shard of stained glass.

From this point there has to be a retreat into some sort of everyday, but even then it’s a weird one. Suzy’s classmates – hissing, preening, would-be prima ballerinas – are witchy enough in all conscience. But even the more Chalet School moments are undermined by the weirdness of the sets. So oppressive is the academy’s gory facade, Argento struggles to make it look less scary in daylight. Suzy’s digs are brightly lit, and in black and white, marking a welcome release from the tyranny of saturated colour. But even here the wallpaper wants to coils its tendrils round you. Everywhere else is marked by strange geometric panelling, pulsating with light, as if to merge with the stained glass that crops up from time to time. All this is framed by glistening lacquered boards, panels, and art nouveau arabesques. The whole is frequently heavily filtered, with occasionally paradoxical lighting, as one part of a shot is bathed in warning red, another in bilious green, like the ‘before’ segment of an ad for a hangover cure.

Goblin’s theme music matches and amplifies the infested quality of the visuals uncannily. In fact, it seems almost immanent in the very air of the film, rendering conventional distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic sound moot. You find yourself wondering how Suzy can’t hear it, it is so evidently the sound of what is there before you visually. Despite the many quite apparent warning signs hinted at above, Suzy’s first serious realisation that all is not well at the academy comes as she encounters the stares of a whiskery hag and malevolently angelic Midwich cuckoo in Fauntleroy garb halfway down a corridor. A blinding flash from a strange pyramid of metal the hag is polishing physically strikes Suzy, leaving a sort of snowy cloud in its wake. As Suzy staggers on to the end of the corridor, she looks like she’s moving through treacle. Insanely loud, Goblin’s music is the thickness of the air she is moving through.

This scene is sandwiched between Suzy’s two forlorn attempts at actually doing some dancing. The dance studio is one of the few areas of modern décor, clean lines and surfaces, normal daylight and air. Yet, even here there is an odd counterpoint to the rest of the academy. What we see are bodies controlled by music, students prancing to a maddeningly jaunty piano waltz. It’s sinister enough in its way, and it proves too much for Suzy: she spends the rest of the film more or less bed-ridden. The nightmarishness of dance is confirmed in a brief respite from the academy when we follow the freshly-sacked répétiteur to a Bavarian beer hall. Here, in one of the most chilling scenes in the film, we witness – horrors – the synchronized thigh-slapping of group Lederhosen dancing. It is perhaps the pianist’s good fortune that he is blind. Were he not, this would be one of the last things he sees as, on his way home, he is mauled and eaten by his guide dog.

Working out the steps is, on the other hand, how Suzy starts to fight back. Here we enter what you might call the Nancy Drew phase of the story as Suzy, along with classmate Sarah, first figures out that the teachers only pretend to leave the school at night, and then works out their mysterious movements by noting the number and direction of their steps. Following the steps leads Suzy to freedom, and poor Sarah to a tangle with razor wire. But never mind the story: sit back and let the pullulating sound and vision crawl all over you.

Stephen Thomson

Buy Suspiria (Blu-ray) [DVD] [1976] from Amazon

Buy Suspiria [DVD] [1976] from Amazon

Listen to the podcast of the Dario Argento interview + Goblin Q&A led by Alex Fitch at the Supersonic music festival in Birmingham.

Watch the trailer for Suspiria: