The movies in this series were made by an artist, creating films within his particular historical moment and for an adult audience. Please research these well-documented films if you are concerned about their content.
For more information, contact Associate Curator, Terra Warren at twarren@artmuseumgr.org
About the Film
After the acclaimed release of his debut feature Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick gave us Days of Heaven (1978): a sweeping drama centered around a fraught romantic triangle that develops between a wealthy landowner and two itinerant farm workers. Featuring transcendent Oscar-winning cinematography primarily shot by Néstor Almendros (who was losing his vision during production), Malick renders the landscape of his 1916 Texas Panhandle setting with a scope that takes on biblical dimensions, encompassing the rural space as both a resource to be exploited and a backdrop of American love and labor. Days of Heaven marks the arrival of the Malick we would come to know through his later work, where elliptical editing, poetic voiceover narration, and a magisterial visual approach evolved into a singular cinematic language that charted his path away from the conventions of Hollywood storytelling towards new territory for cinematic expression and inquiry. After this film, he would disappear from the film world for twenty years before reemerging with his sprawling war epic The Thin Red Line (1998).
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