Join the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Grand Rapids Film Society for a screening of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011). Runtime: 2h 18m
6 pm Social hour
7 pm Movie start time
This event is free to the public. Registration is required. The movies will be shown with subtitles for accessibility.
Please note: Movie screenings take place in GRAM’s auditorium. While folding chairs are provided (and a few couches), we encourage guests to bring pillows, cushions, or blankets for a more comfortable viewing experience.
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
Terrence Malick’s vast, unfurling magnum opus, The Tree of Life (2011), is no less than a palatial meditation on memory and the nature of life itself, oscillating between the intimate and the cosmic. Set against a quiet suburb in 1950s Texas, the film traces the childhood of Jack O’Brien, his nostalgic reckoning of his parents, and their role in his upbringing: his mother, an emblem of grace, and his father, stern and remote. Through Jack’s recollections, Malick renders the mundane rhythms of family life with a religious attentiveness.
Sweeping between the primordial birth of the universe and the ethereal lenses of childhood memories, The Tree of Life collapses the infinite and the minute — the metaphysical and the personal — in a majestic film that many consider his masterpiece. “Help each other,” commands Malick in an elegiac and whispered prayer, arriving at us through montages of dappled light and tender touch. “Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.”
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