Days of Heaven

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 1978, 94 min
Section: Treasures from the Film Archives

Synopsis

The year is 1916 and a young steelworker named Billy (Richard Gere) escapes from Chicago with his adolescent sister Linda and girlfriend Abby after a fight in which he killed his foreman. Masquerading as siblings, the trio join up with a group of seasonal workers on a Texas ranch whose owner (Sam Shepard) eventually succumbs to the charms of Billy’s girl. The short-tempered young man views the rancher’s feelings for Abby as an opportunity to escape their hand-to-mouth existence, but his pragmatic decision brings dire consequences. Terrence Malick’s second feature, after which this most mysterious of film directors fell silent for 20 years, is frequently referred to as the motion picture with the most beautiful camerawork in the history of film. Malick and Oscar-winning director of photography Nestor Almendros created bewitchingly beautiful elegiac compositions filmed in the celebrated "magic hours” during and immediately after the setting of the sun. Thanks to a print from Paramount Studios made from a restored negative, we have a chance to appreciate Malik’s efforts to capture "a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection.”

About the director

Terrence Malick (b. 1943, Ottawa, Illinois) worked as a farm hand before studying philosophy at Harvard and Oxford. His Badlands (1973) is among the most highly- regarded debuts in the history of American postwar cinema. Malick earned his cult status not only from his second picture Days of Heaven (1978), but also from the fact that he didn’t shoot another film for 20 years. In the meantime, he occasionally worked as a producer, notoriously refusing an offer to direct The Elephant Man, an opportunity David Lynch took in 1980. Malick returned to direction with the war drama The Thin Red Line (1998), followed in 2005 by a poetic evocation of the Pocahontas legend entitled The New World. Currently, audiences are impatiently awaiting the release of his period drama The Tree of Life.