TERRENCE MALICK: PARADISE LOST
Enigmatic, transcendent and wholly singular, no one directs like Terrence Malick. In the 1970s, when his New Hollywood colleagues leaned into the urban and the gritty, Malick went full pastoral, invoking the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and examining humankind’s place within nature. His unparalleled success in the 1970s, which garnered him a veritable carte blanche, as well as a blank cheque, resulted in a notorious two-decades long abdication, only to have him re-emerge in the late 1990s in top form. PARADISE LOST focuses on four Malick masterworks, each set within the hinterlands of rapture and melancholy, the profound and the profane, Heaven and Hell.
“THE NEW WORLD doesn't have fans, just fanatics... It is a bottomless movie, almost unspeakably beautiful and formally harmonious... Its cultural hinterland is made up not just of other movies, but of Buddhism, ethnography and naturalism, Wagner, Mozart... and a helping of Heidegger and Kant. It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined” (John Patterson, The Guardian)
Misunderstood and underappreciated at the time of its release, Terrence Malick continued his theme of Paradise Lost with his most ambitious project to date—The NEW WORLD. Embracing an embryonic dawn of “American History,” Malick portrays the British exploitation of the Tsenacommacah (the Virginias) in the early 17th century, while keeping the film’s focus on the perspective of the Algonquin-speaking Powhatan tribe, including Matoaka (Q'orianka Kilcher), aka “Pocahontas.” Featuring powerhouse performances from Wes Studi as the Paramount Chief Opechancanough, Colin Farrell as the mutinous John Smith, Christopher Plummer as Captain Newport, and Christian Bale as Jamestown settler John Rolfe, no one performance in THE NEW WORLD is more staggering than Kilcher’s as “Pocahontas” in her film debut.
While THE NEW WORLD delivers an interpretation of a very specific time in history, Malick creates a work that is utterly timeless—impossibly incorporating James Horner’s captivating score with the work of Wagner. And taking artistic liberties with the life of “Pocahontas,” yet striving for accuracy with its production design, language, historical clothing and weaponry.
Having topped Time Out and The San Francisco Chronicle’s best of the decade top ten lists, THE NEW WORLD only grows in critical estimation, twenty years after its meagre release. Presented how it was meant to be seen, in its Director’s Cut supervised by Malick, it can only be truly experienced on the big screen. (ALICIA FLETCHER)
Format: 4K Extended Cut courtesy of Warner Bros.
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