Days of Heaven

In 1910, a Chicago steelworker (Richard Gere) accidentally kills his supervisor, and he, his girlfriend (Brooke Adams), and his little sister (Linda Manz) flee to the Texas panhandle, where they find work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer (Sam Shepard). A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire—Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating a timeless American idyll that is also a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labor.

It is clear that it was Days of Heaven, not Badlands, that truly announced his characteristic style and manner of filmmaking. Where his debut was tightly scripted, its successor was, deliberately, a much more loosely structured affair. Malick gave himself the freedom to shoot material not always centered on the lead actors, but also on the land, animals, little spectacles with groups of extras... with the intention of finding the best final form for the whole in postproduction (sound editing being as crucial as picture editing to his work). He has taken this approach to greater and ever more adventurous lengths in his subsequent films. While some industry-minded pundits tut-tut Malick’s preferred shooting method as wasteful and unfocused, it is an entirely valid creative process that aims—as in the cinema of Wong Kar-wai or Jacques Rivette—to discover the film in the course of its material making, rather than in the “abstract” phase of its writing.
Adrian Martin, www.criterion.com

PRODUCTION 1: Lee Kline, Kim Hendrickson, Peter Becker, Jonathan Turell, Fumiko Takagi – The Criterion Collection
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PRODUCTION 2: Andrea Kalas, Michael D’Angelo - Paramount Pictures
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LABORATORY: The Criterion, Collection, NYC, Resillion NYC, Harbor Picture Company NYC

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