Cinema Classics Seminar: Days of Heaven

$30 for BMFI members, $40 for non-members A film that reinvigorates the visual sense with every frame, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) is frequently read as a biblical allegory of sin and repentance set against the backdrop of an early 20th-century American pastoral. And yet the film completely undoes allegory as a moralizing device of fictional narrative and puts it in the service of a remarkable moral inventiveness, voiced by its adolescent narrator, Linda (the astonishing young actress Linda Manz). Though she narrates the events of a tragically knotted love triangle (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard), Malick forces the viewer to see through the pat tragedy to a more complex vision of human relationships. In Malick’s film, word and image are intertwined in a way that makes the cinematic experience feel like something compellingly new, intellectually and emotionally. Malick’s films, from Badlands to Tree of Life and beyond, are benchmarks of cinematic inventiveness. We will look at how the theme and structure of Days of Heaven—and especially Malick’s use of a wide screen format—stretch the framework for thinking about how movies endow us with a unique idiom for self-reflection within the long tradition of narrative story telling.