June 12, 2013--Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898-1948) had a profound effect on how cinematic montage is constructed, viewed and interpreted. In his joint “A Statement (on Sound),” written with contemporaries V.I. Pudovkin, G.V. Alexandrov and Dziga Vertov, Eisenstein wrote that:
At present, the film, working with visual images, has a powerful effect on a person and has rightfully taken one of the first places among the arts. It is known that the basic (and only) means that has brought the cinema to such a powerfully effective strength is MONTAGE. The affirmation of montage, as the chief means of effect, has become the indisputable axiom on which the worldwide culture of the cinema has been built.
As Greg M. Smith writes in the Quarterly Film and Video Review:
Sergei Eisenstein has had a seminal influence on both film theory and film production. He combined the roles of filmmaker, theoretician, and teacher to a degree matched by few others, and he saw these multiple activities as being deeply intertwined and complementary. Films provided a laboratory for him to experiment with his ideas, and he used the results of these experiments to alter his theoretical conceptions. Although his theories incorporate a remarkably eclectic blend of materials, they are rarely too far removed from practical application. Eisenstein balanced aesthetic theory and filmmaking practice in his teaching at Soviet film academies, and by combining aesthetic prescriptions in his writings with internationally acclaimed films (such as the landmark Battleship Potemkin), he modeled a complex understanding of the cinema that has been of seminal importance to many international film movements, including Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and the modernist avant-garde.
Spurred on by the Russian Constructivist movement of the 1920s, Eisenstein used comparisons of cinema to both Eastern and Western art history and literature to position cinema as a modern and disjunctive art form, “creating a model of cinema based on a variety of conflicts, tensions, and oppositions, not continuity. He sought to engage an active spectator by coordinating all the elements of filmmaking into a highly effective and aggressive whole” (Smith). He sought to do these things primarily through a use of what would become known generically as Soviet montage, referring to the mode in “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” as one of the two “basic elements” (the other being the shot) and “the nerve of” cinema (Eisenstein 106).
In Eisenstein’s own “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” writing as an afterword to N. Kaufman’s Japanese Cinema pamphlet in 1929, he begins by suggesting:
There is, for example, no such thing as a cinema without cinematography. And yet the author of the pamphlet preceding this essay has contrived to write a book about the cinema of a country that has no cinematography. About the cinema of a country that has, in its culture, an infinite number of cinematographic traits, strewn everywhere with the sole exception of – its cinema. (Eisenstein 90).
Eisenstein goes on to state that “Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage” (Eisenstein 90) and that while “the Japanese cinema is excellently equipped with corporations, actors, and stories,” (Eisenstein 90) it nevertheless is “completely unaware of montage” (Eisenstein 90).
Sweeping racial generalizations aside, one need only look at the earlier work of Yasujirô Ozu (The Only Son) or even something post-Eisenstein like Tokyo Story (1953) to realize in extremely general terms the point Eisenstein is attempting to make. Japanese cinema has, at the point of Eisenstein’s writing, largely consisted of long, static shots presented in a linear, straightforward manner in scenes lacking any discernible instrascene structure.
Yet Eisenstein goes on to discuss (at some length) Chinese hieroglyphs. “From separate hieroglyphs has been fused – the ideogram” (Eisenstein 91), he writes, utilizing the concept to suggest that “By the combination of two “depictables” is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable” (Eisenstein 91). He goes on to construct a series of hieroglyphic imagery to make his point and exclaims:
But this is–montage! Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content – into intellectual contexts and series. This is a means and method inevitable in any cinematographic moment. And, in a condensed and purified form, the starting point for the “intellectual cinema.” For a cinema seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts. (Eisenstein 91)
As Greg M. Smith notes, “In one of his most famous categorizations, Sergei Eisenstein creates a hierarchy of cinematic means from the simplest physiological stimuli (in “metric montage”) to a primitive emotional appeal (“rhythmic montage”) to the pinnacle of cinematic achievement: intellectual montage,” with “one type of montage form[ing] the basis for the next higher form” (Smith). He goes on to write: “One can only rise to the heights of intellectual montage by standing on the shoulders of emotion, rhythm, and meter. Thus emotion is a helpful tool fully congruent with a cinematic appeal to humanity’s highest faculties (the cognitive)” (Smith).
Rather than appeal to an audience’s sense of vision and the ability to show a heightened sense of how things were by enhancing that vision via the camera and editing, as his contemporary and occasional rival Dziga Vertov did, Eisenstein sought to appeal to an audience’s thought process, driving them to connect seemingly disparate images into an idea constructed out of their interpretation of those images. Yet it seems it was not so much Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s idea of montage which differed, so much as the form in which they felt it appropriate – Eisenstein sticking with narrative cinema depicting Russian history and ideas, with Vertov choosing to create expressionist documentaries such as his seminal Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
In the introduction to his book Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, Steven Rybin identifies the following dynamic: “In film studies the two most widely debated ontological constructions are often opposed to one another: Eisensteinian montage (sometimes broadly referred to as “formalism”) and Bazinian realism” (Rybin xxvi) and goes on to suggest that:
“In terms of Malick’s work, both Bazinian and Eisensteinian ontological constructs (and other concepts) inform our encounters with his films not so much as determinative frameworks but rather as creatively enabling ideas. Their concepts are possibilities that be wielded in any number of rich ways relative to the spatial textures and temporal rhythms of Malick’s images and sounds” (Rybin xxviii).
The book goes on to suggest, in a sense, that Eisenstein’s ideas of “intellectual montage” have been applied most liberally in the recent cinema of writer-director Terrence Malick. After making four films in 38 years: murderous lovers on the run drama Badlands (1973), love triangle melodrama Days of Heaven (1978), Guadalcanal Battle war epic The Thin Red Line (1998), and live-action retelling of the story of Pocahontas The New World (2005), Malick went on to make two of the most ambitious and experimental “narrative” films of recent years. The first was existential family drama The Tree of Life (2011), and the next was the melancholy portrait of a decomposing relationship To the Wonder (2012).
If Badlands and Days of Heaven showed more or less realistic yet beautifully-made depictions of real world subjects – a Bonnie & Clyde-esque road movie/killer on the run narrative and a Texas-set lush, panoramic take on film noir themes, respectively – Malick began making his shifts away from typical narrative cinema upon his return after a twenty year absence with The Thin Red Line. A war film seemingly like no other, Malick employed dozens of big name actors not to tell a story of Guadalcanal or even to tell the story of war, but rather to give an impression of the experience of war. Utilizing multi-strand voiceover narration and gorgeous cinematography which renders the Australian locations (standing in for the Solomon Islands setting of the World War II-based story) in lush, stunning detail and color. Malick used somewhat similar tactics in his revisionism of the story of Pocahontas’ first contact with colonial settlers, The New World.
Yet in The Tree of Life and especially his latest film To the Wonder, the suddenly nigh-on prolific Malick seems to be reaching for something deeper than a narrative. By constructing his “narratives” out of a non-linear juxtaposition of images and sounds, he pays homage to the influence of Eisensteinian montage. However, he transcends it through his utilization of music such as Wagner and overlaying voice-over recorded in hushed, almost reverent tones, as well as the swirling camera movements, poses of actors and his unique love of nature, and in so doing Malick has forged a nearly entirely sensory experience of “intellectual cinema,” directing his audience to form ideas about the themes he’s presenting, rather than a story or its characters, through the images and sounds he’s constructed to evoke that idea and elicit a response.
In a sense, this seems to be the cinematic ideal that Eisenstein strived for in films like Strike (1925) and October (1928) – films which construct ideas out of the juxtaposition of images. This kind of audience-filmmaker symbiosis, a give-and-take of ideas being constructed in the minds of the audience from the presentation of the filmmaker’s images in the context he creates through their juxtaposition, further seems to be what Malick is getting at – either consciously or unconsciously.
How else to explain the famous (or infamous?) structure of Malick’s The Tree of Life. Here is a film that is ostensibly about a small family in Texas in the 1950s and the raising of their troubled young son Jack and his brothers by a loving, caring, nurturing earth mother (Jessica Chastain) and a domineering, tough, bitter father (Brad Pitt). That would, theoretically, be enough for at least one “traditional” narrative film. However, Malick goes one step further and seems to flash forward and back in time to a structural engineer for NASA (Sean Penn) who, it is implied, may be Jack, all grown up. Malick one-ups himself again by including voice-overs, asking the “Big Questions” about God, man and the meaning of life juxtaposed with imagery of the birth of the cosmos evidently created by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull “with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be,” (Hart) rather than the modern go-to studio-mandated form of CGI; which gives the film something of a “natural” ‘aura’ and thus goes back to the Kracauer/Benjamin discussion from early in the term – but that’s something for another time.
Having seen the film again recently, I find that, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), another film which seems to construct ideas to be interpreted from the juxtaposition of images in a non-linear way, if there is a true structure to The Tree of Life, it is buried under the seemingly random whims of the filmmaker. Malick’s use of voice-over, however, lends itself to a gleaning of the ideas he may have about the themes he’s presenting and interpreting through his juxtaposition of images. Anderson’s film, for good or for ill, lacks such a conduit into the mind of the filmmaker.
If The Tree of Life is elusive and endlessly debatable at best, and frustrating at worst, To the Wonder is even more so on both counts, but lacking the “reach” for higher consciousness to which the former film seemed to aspire. In the film, Ben Affleck is a man who has fallen in love with a woman (Olga Kurylenko) in France, and the film opens with them walking a cold, rain-swept beach outside the Mont St. Michel (nicknamed “the Wonder”), a Cathedral on the rocky French coast. If you require that your film tell a story, this one concerns this couple’s transcendental relationship in France being transported to Oklahoma where they begin to resent one another and where the Affleck character reconnects with and falls for an old high school flame (Rachel McAdams) while his priest (Javier Bardem) feels betrayed and forsaken by the love of his own life – Jesus Christ.
Yet Malick is not interested in telling a story, for as Rybin writes, “In Malick, the image is not strictly a vehicle for the comprehension of narrative” (xxi, xxii). Indeed, I’m not certain that his characters are characters so much as the physical embodiments of ideas, just as his construction of images is an Eisensteinian representation of ideas when juxtaposed. Furthermore, Rybin goes on to state that, “If anything, Malick’s narratives and themes – particularly evident in the frustrations of his characters to attain the goals they set out to achieve, when these goals are even clear, and in their (not always successful) attempts to inscribe a meaningful relationship to the world through their voice-over narration – attest to the impossibility of mastering our world” (Rybin xxii).
Although unusually positive (3.5 out of 4 stars) considering the cool reception to the film (42% currently on Rotten Tomatoes), Roger Ebert’s review of To the Wonder is nevertheless typically representative of its elusive qualities, stating that “Nothing is punched up for dramatic effect,” and “As the film opened, I wondered if I missed something,” nevertheless conceding that, “As it continued, I realized many films could miss a great deal” (Ebert).
Malick’s film is elusive precisely because of his reliance on a kind of modern Eisensteinian montage, with the actors not so much playing characters as preening and posing before the camera (as they sometimes did in The Tree of Life) to create some kind of transcendental image of what it means to be in and out of love. Take, for example, a shot in To the Wonder in which Affleck and Kurylenko walk on separate floors (one upstairs, the other downstairs) of their Oklahoma home. Although the shot has no clear narrative motivation, it is a dynamic visual representation of their disconnect – that they are drifting further and further apart. In Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles did the same thing with a ridiculously long dinner table and the gradual spacing apart of himself and his character’s wife over time. Here, Malick doesn’t require dialogue to get across what he’s trying to say about this relationship.
Just as The Tree of Life asked the “Big Questions” about the meaning of existence in an allegorical and relative sense (birth of the Cosmos v. a small town family’s life), To the Wonder seems to be reaching for questions about the nature of love found and lost and its ultimate implications on a grand human scale. But this may be meeting Malick more than halfway.
Like Eisenstein before him, Malick seems to be more interested in the kind of “intellectual montage” the former viewed as “cinema’s highest goal,” designed to give way to an interpretation by the audience of the ideas he has in mind. Nevertheless, Greg M. Smith states that, “In later writings, however, Eisenstein seems to reverse himself and argue that the highest goal the cinema can achieve is ecstasy and pathos, emotional goals not intellectual ones.” For what it’s worth, I feel that Malick achieves that, in a sense, as well.
By transcending “traditional” narrative forms in his presentation of his ideas of love, God, heaven, the meaning of life, the birth of the Cosmos, the creation of humanity, etc., Malick is, in effect, striving to achieve a state of ecstasy and pathos with his audience (which may, nevertheless, be dwindling as a result of his “experiments”). The engaged viewer will, through the dynamic use of gorgeous images, the right music and “meaningful” voice-over narration snippets, understand what Malick may be getting at with his non-linear feature-length narrative montages. The disengaged viewer will fail to understand what he’s driving at and write the films off as a waste of time.
Without Sergei Eisenstein’s willingness to construct images to evoke ideas rather than tell straightforward narrative stories, Malick’s career might not have the resonance it does today. With Eisenstein as a frame of reference, the deeper meaning and methods behind Malick’s madness begins to come into focus.
Annotated Bibliography
Ebert, Roger. To the Wonder. Review: RogerEbert.com. 6 April 2013. . 12 June 2013.
Ebert’s response to the film, though unusually positive given the film’s reception, comes across as more thoughtful than most. Nevertheless, he manages to illuminate the very things that most critics took issue with in the film. A noteworthy source of rare critical response.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram (From Film Form).” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press: New York, 1985. 90-91.
In which Eisenstein first defines his conception of Soviet montage in relation to other, older forms of narrative storytelling. Explains where he’s coming from, and how the concept of Soviet montage came into view. An indispensable source.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press: New York, 1985. 103-106.
In which Eisenstein espouses his belief in montage as “the nerve of cinema.” Another window into how he felt and thought about the form at the time of his work and writing.
Eisenstein, Sergei, V.I. Pudovkin, G.V. Alexandrov and Dziga Vertov. “A Statement (on Sound).” 1928. . 12 June 2013. Web.
A further vintage espousing of the “montage is king” philosophy of Soviets like Eisenstein.
Hart, Hugh. “Video: Tree of Life Visualizes the Cosmos Without CGI.” Wired Magazine. 17 June 2011. . 12 June 2013.
A way of clarifying how Malick achieves his “birth of the Cosmos” sequences in The Tree of Life. Just a factual source.
Rotten Tomatoes. To the Wonder. . 13 June 2013.
Another critical response format. A good statistic, if nothing more.
Rybin, Steven. Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD., 2012. xxi-ii, xxvi-xxviii.
A book on philosophy as an indispensable way to read Terrence Malick’s films. An invaluable affirmation of my belief that Terrence Malick is influenced if not wholly beholden to Eisensteinian montage. This helps solidify my argument that Malick is an Eisensteinian influenced filmmaker.
Smith, Greg M. “Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein’s Writings.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Oct-Nov 2004. . 12 June 2013. Web. 303-315.
A solid analysis of Eisenstein’s theory of montage and its place in film history. An invaluable short-hand for the theory at work in this paper.
To the Wonder. Dir. Terrence Malick. Perf. Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem. . Magnolia Pictures: 2012. Amazon Instant Video, Streaming.
Terrence Malick’s most recent, elusive film. Strong but not his best work. Invaluable.
Tree of Life, The. Dir. Terrence Malick. Perf. Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain. 20th Century Fox: 2011. DVD.
Terrence Malick’s much-criticized previous work. Strong and among his best work, yet further and further from the narrative structures of his earlier films. Invaluable.
Note: This was originally written as a final essay for Amy Borden’s Spring 2013 Film Theory course at Portland State, under the title Eisensteinian montage – A Revolution: Departing from Narrative Fluidity in the latter-day work of Terrence Malick.
At present, the film, working with visual images, has a powerful effect on a person and has rightfully taken one of the first places among the arts. It is known that the basic (and only) means that has brought the cinema to such a powerfully effective strength is MONTAGE. The affirmation of montage, as the chief means of effect, has become the indisputable axiom on which the worldwide culture of the cinema has been built.
As Greg M. Smith writes in the Quarterly Film and Video Review:
Sergei Eisenstein has had a seminal influence on both film theory and film production. He combined the roles of filmmaker, theoretician, and teacher to a degree matched by few others, and he saw these multiple activities as being deeply intertwined and complementary. Films provided a laboratory for him to experiment with his ideas, and he used the results of these experiments to alter his theoretical conceptions. Although his theories incorporate a remarkably eclectic blend of materials, they are rarely too far removed from practical application. Eisenstein balanced aesthetic theory and filmmaking practice in his teaching at Soviet film academies, and by combining aesthetic prescriptions in his writings with internationally acclaimed films (such as the landmark Battleship Potemkin), he modeled a complex understanding of the cinema that has been of seminal importance to many international film movements, including Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and the modernist avant-garde.
Spurred on by the Russian Constructivist movement of the 1920s, Eisenstein used comparisons of cinema to both Eastern and Western art history and literature to position cinema as a modern and disjunctive art form, “creating a model of cinema based on a variety of conflicts, tensions, and oppositions, not continuity. He sought to engage an active spectator by coordinating all the elements of filmmaking into a highly effective and aggressive whole” (Smith). He sought to do these things primarily through a use of what would become known generically as Soviet montage, referring to the mode in “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” as one of the two “basic elements” (the other being the shot) and “the nerve of” cinema (Eisenstein 106).
In Eisenstein’s own “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” writing as an afterword to N. Kaufman’s Japanese Cinema pamphlet in 1929, he begins by suggesting:
There is, for example, no such thing as a cinema without cinematography. And yet the author of the pamphlet preceding this essay has contrived to write a book about the cinema of a country that has no cinematography. About the cinema of a country that has, in its culture, an infinite number of cinematographic traits, strewn everywhere with the sole exception of – its cinema. (Eisenstein 90).
Eisenstein goes on to state that “Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage” (Eisenstein 90) and that while “the Japanese cinema is excellently equipped with corporations, actors, and stories,” (Eisenstein 90) it nevertheless is “completely unaware of montage” (Eisenstein 90).
Sweeping racial generalizations aside, one need only look at the earlier work of Yasujirô Ozu (The Only Son) or even something post-Eisenstein like Tokyo Story (1953) to realize in extremely general terms the point Eisenstein is attempting to make. Japanese cinema has, at the point of Eisenstein’s writing, largely consisted of long, static shots presented in a linear, straightforward manner in scenes lacking any discernible instrascene structure.
Yet Eisenstein goes on to discuss (at some length) Chinese hieroglyphs. “From separate hieroglyphs has been fused – the ideogram” (Eisenstein 91), he writes, utilizing the concept to suggest that “By the combination of two “depictables” is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable” (Eisenstein 91). He goes on to construct a series of hieroglyphic imagery to make his point and exclaims:
But this is–montage! Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content – into intellectual contexts and series. This is a means and method inevitable in any cinematographic moment. And, in a condensed and purified form, the starting point for the “intellectual cinema.” For a cinema seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts. (Eisenstein 91)
As Greg M. Smith notes, “In one of his most famous categorizations, Sergei Eisenstein creates a hierarchy of cinematic means from the simplest physiological stimuli (in “metric montage”) to a primitive emotional appeal (“rhythmic montage”) to the pinnacle of cinematic achievement: intellectual montage,” with “one type of montage form[ing] the basis for the next higher form” (Smith). He goes on to write: “One can only rise to the heights of intellectual montage by standing on the shoulders of emotion, rhythm, and meter. Thus emotion is a helpful tool fully congruent with a cinematic appeal to humanity’s highest faculties (the cognitive)” (Smith).
Rather than appeal to an audience’s sense of vision and the ability to show a heightened sense of how things were by enhancing that vision via the camera and editing, as his contemporary and occasional rival Dziga Vertov did, Eisenstein sought to appeal to an audience’s thought process, driving them to connect seemingly disparate images into an idea constructed out of their interpretation of those images. Yet it seems it was not so much Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s idea of montage which differed, so much as the form in which they felt it appropriate – Eisenstein sticking with narrative cinema depicting Russian history and ideas, with Vertov choosing to create expressionist documentaries such as his seminal Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
In the introduction to his book Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, Steven Rybin identifies the following dynamic: “In film studies the two most widely debated ontological constructions are often opposed to one another: Eisensteinian montage (sometimes broadly referred to as “formalism”) and Bazinian realism” (Rybin xxvi) and goes on to suggest that:
“In terms of Malick’s work, both Bazinian and Eisensteinian ontological constructs (and other concepts) inform our encounters with his films not so much as determinative frameworks but rather as creatively enabling ideas. Their concepts are possibilities that be wielded in any number of rich ways relative to the spatial textures and temporal rhythms of Malick’s images and sounds” (Rybin xxviii).
The book goes on to suggest, in a sense, that Eisenstein’s ideas of “intellectual montage” have been applied most liberally in the recent cinema of writer-director Terrence Malick. After making four films in 38 years: murderous lovers on the run drama Badlands (1973), love triangle melodrama Days of Heaven (1978), Guadalcanal Battle war epic The Thin Red Line (1998), and live-action retelling of the story of Pocahontas The New World (2005), Malick went on to make two of the most ambitious and experimental “narrative” films of recent years. The first was existential family drama The Tree of Life (2011), and the next was the melancholy portrait of a decomposing relationship To the Wonder (2012).
If Badlands and Days of Heaven showed more or less realistic yet beautifully-made depictions of real world subjects – a Bonnie & Clyde-esque road movie/killer on the run narrative and a Texas-set lush, panoramic take on film noir themes, respectively – Malick began making his shifts away from typical narrative cinema upon his return after a twenty year absence with The Thin Red Line. A war film seemingly like no other, Malick employed dozens of big name actors not to tell a story of Guadalcanal or even to tell the story of war, but rather to give an impression of the experience of war. Utilizing multi-strand voiceover narration and gorgeous cinematography which renders the Australian locations (standing in for the Solomon Islands setting of the World War II-based story) in lush, stunning detail and color. Malick used somewhat similar tactics in his revisionism of the story of Pocahontas’ first contact with colonial settlers, The New World.
Yet in The Tree of Life and especially his latest film To the Wonder, the suddenly nigh-on prolific Malick seems to be reaching for something deeper than a narrative. By constructing his “narratives” out of a non-linear juxtaposition of images and sounds, he pays homage to the influence of Eisensteinian montage. However, he transcends it through his utilization of music such as Wagner and overlaying voice-over recorded in hushed, almost reverent tones, as well as the swirling camera movements, poses of actors and his unique love of nature, and in so doing Malick has forged a nearly entirely sensory experience of “intellectual cinema,” directing his audience to form ideas about the themes he’s presenting, rather than a story or its characters, through the images and sounds he’s constructed to evoke that idea and elicit a response.
In a sense, this seems to be the cinematic ideal that Eisenstein strived for in films like Strike (1925) and October (1928) – films which construct ideas out of the juxtaposition of images. This kind of audience-filmmaker symbiosis, a give-and-take of ideas being constructed in the minds of the audience from the presentation of the filmmaker’s images in the context he creates through their juxtaposition, further seems to be what Malick is getting at – either consciously or unconsciously.
How else to explain the famous (or infamous?) structure of Malick’s The Tree of Life. Here is a film that is ostensibly about a small family in Texas in the 1950s and the raising of their troubled young son Jack and his brothers by a loving, caring, nurturing earth mother (Jessica Chastain) and a domineering, tough, bitter father (Brad Pitt). That would, theoretically, be enough for at least one “traditional” narrative film. However, Malick goes one step further and seems to flash forward and back in time to a structural engineer for NASA (Sean Penn) who, it is implied, may be Jack, all grown up. Malick one-ups himself again by including voice-overs, asking the “Big Questions” about God, man and the meaning of life juxtaposed with imagery of the birth of the cosmos evidently created by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull “with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be,” (Hart) rather than the modern go-to studio-mandated form of CGI; which gives the film something of a “natural” ‘aura’ and thus goes back to the Kracauer/Benjamin discussion from early in the term – but that’s something for another time.
Having seen the film again recently, I find that, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), another film which seems to construct ideas to be interpreted from the juxtaposition of images in a non-linear way, if there is a true structure to The Tree of Life, it is buried under the seemingly random whims of the filmmaker. Malick’s use of voice-over, however, lends itself to a gleaning of the ideas he may have about the themes he’s presenting and interpreting through his juxtaposition of images. Anderson’s film, for good or for ill, lacks such a conduit into the mind of the filmmaker.
If The Tree of Life is elusive and endlessly debatable at best, and frustrating at worst, To the Wonder is even more so on both counts, but lacking the “reach” for higher consciousness to which the former film seemed to aspire. In the film, Ben Affleck is a man who has fallen in love with a woman (Olga Kurylenko) in France, and the film opens with them walking a cold, rain-swept beach outside the Mont St. Michel (nicknamed “the Wonder”), a Cathedral on the rocky French coast. If you require that your film tell a story, this one concerns this couple’s transcendental relationship in France being transported to Oklahoma where they begin to resent one another and where the Affleck character reconnects with and falls for an old high school flame (Rachel McAdams) while his priest (Javier Bardem) feels betrayed and forsaken by the love of his own life – Jesus Christ.
Yet Malick is not interested in telling a story, for as Rybin writes, “In Malick, the image is not strictly a vehicle for the comprehension of narrative” (xxi, xxii). Indeed, I’m not certain that his characters are characters so much as the physical embodiments of ideas, just as his construction of images is an Eisensteinian representation of ideas when juxtaposed. Furthermore, Rybin goes on to state that, “If anything, Malick’s narratives and themes – particularly evident in the frustrations of his characters to attain the goals they set out to achieve, when these goals are even clear, and in their (not always successful) attempts to inscribe a meaningful relationship to the world through their voice-over narration – attest to the impossibility of mastering our world” (Rybin xxii).
Although unusually positive (3.5 out of 4 stars) considering the cool reception to the film (42% currently on Rotten Tomatoes), Roger Ebert’s review of To the Wonder is nevertheless typically representative of its elusive qualities, stating that “Nothing is punched up for dramatic effect,” and “As the film opened, I wondered if I missed something,” nevertheless conceding that, “As it continued, I realized many films could miss a great deal” (Ebert).
Malick’s film is elusive precisely because of his reliance on a kind of modern Eisensteinian montage, with the actors not so much playing characters as preening and posing before the camera (as they sometimes did in The Tree of Life) to create some kind of transcendental image of what it means to be in and out of love. Take, for example, a shot in To the Wonder in which Affleck and Kurylenko walk on separate floors (one upstairs, the other downstairs) of their Oklahoma home. Although the shot has no clear narrative motivation, it is a dynamic visual representation of their disconnect – that they are drifting further and further apart. In Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles did the same thing with a ridiculously long dinner table and the gradual spacing apart of himself and his character’s wife over time. Here, Malick doesn’t require dialogue to get across what he’s trying to say about this relationship.
Just as The Tree of Life asked the “Big Questions” about the meaning of existence in an allegorical and relative sense (birth of the Cosmos v. a small town family’s life), To the Wonder seems to be reaching for questions about the nature of love found and lost and its ultimate implications on a grand human scale. But this may be meeting Malick more than halfway.
Like Eisenstein before him, Malick seems to be more interested in the kind of “intellectual montage” the former viewed as “cinema’s highest goal,” designed to give way to an interpretation by the audience of the ideas he has in mind. Nevertheless, Greg M. Smith states that, “In later writings, however, Eisenstein seems to reverse himself and argue that the highest goal the cinema can achieve is ecstasy and pathos, emotional goals not intellectual ones.” For what it’s worth, I feel that Malick achieves that, in a sense, as well.
By transcending “traditional” narrative forms in his presentation of his ideas of love, God, heaven, the meaning of life, the birth of the Cosmos, the creation of humanity, etc., Malick is, in effect, striving to achieve a state of ecstasy and pathos with his audience (which may, nevertheless, be dwindling as a result of his “experiments”). The engaged viewer will, through the dynamic use of gorgeous images, the right music and “meaningful” voice-over narration snippets, understand what Malick may be getting at with his non-linear feature-length narrative montages. The disengaged viewer will fail to understand what he’s driving at and write the films off as a waste of time.
Without Sergei Eisenstein’s willingness to construct images to evoke ideas rather than tell straightforward narrative stories, Malick’s career might not have the resonance it does today. With Eisenstein as a frame of reference, the deeper meaning and methods behind Malick’s madness begins to come into focus.
Annotated Bibliography
Ebert, Roger. To the Wonder. Review: RogerEbert.com. 6 April 2013. . 12 June 2013.
Ebert’s response to the film, though unusually positive given the film’s reception, comes across as more thoughtful than most. Nevertheless, he manages to illuminate the very things that most critics took issue with in the film. A noteworthy source of rare critical response.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram (From Film Form).” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press: New York, 1985. 90-91.
In which Eisenstein first defines his conception of Soviet montage in relation to other, older forms of narrative storytelling. Explains where he’s coming from, and how the concept of Soviet montage came into view. An indispensable source.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen. Oxford University Press: New York, 1985. 103-106.
In which Eisenstein espouses his belief in montage as “the nerve of cinema.” Another window into how he felt and thought about the form at the time of his work and writing.
Eisenstein, Sergei, V.I. Pudovkin, G.V. Alexandrov and Dziga Vertov. “A Statement (on Sound).” 1928. . 12 June 2013. Web.
A further vintage espousing of the “montage is king” philosophy of Soviets like Eisenstein.
Hart, Hugh. “Video: Tree of Life Visualizes the Cosmos Without CGI.” Wired Magazine. 17 June 2011. . 12 June 2013.
A way of clarifying how Malick achieves his “birth of the Cosmos” sequences in The Tree of Life. Just a factual source.
Rotten Tomatoes. To the Wonder. . 13 June 2013.
Another critical response format. A good statistic, if nothing more.
Rybin, Steven. Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD., 2012. xxi-ii, xxvi-xxviii.
A book on philosophy as an indispensable way to read Terrence Malick’s films. An invaluable affirmation of my belief that Terrence Malick is influenced if not wholly beholden to Eisensteinian montage. This helps solidify my argument that Malick is an Eisensteinian influenced filmmaker.
Smith, Greg M. “Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein’s Writings.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Oct-Nov 2004. . 12 June 2013. Web. 303-315.
A solid analysis of Eisenstein’s theory of montage and its place in film history. An invaluable short-hand for the theory at work in this paper.
To the Wonder. Dir. Terrence Malick. Perf. Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem. . Magnolia Pictures: 2012. Amazon Instant Video, Streaming.
Terrence Malick’s most recent, elusive film. Strong but not his best work. Invaluable.
Tree of Life, The. Dir. Terrence Malick. Perf. Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain. 20th Century Fox: 2011. DVD.
Terrence Malick’s much-criticized previous work. Strong and among his best work, yet further and further from the narrative structures of his earlier films. Invaluable.
Note: This was originally written as a final essay for Amy Borden’s Spring 2013 Film Theory course at Portland State, under the title Eisensteinian montage – A Revolution: Departing from Narrative Fluidity in the latter-day work of Terrence Malick.