I didn’t know what to make of it, really, but images from the film-a steam engine, backed by clouds, clanking across a spare bridge a line of people bearing torches in the dark to drive locusts from their wheat fields-stayed with me for years. I had never seen so simply beautiful a film-had not known that a film could be so beautiful. So I was well prepared, in late 1978, to see a new movie called Days of Heaven, by a director named Terrence Malick whose only previous film, Badlands, had appeared five years earlier and created something of a stir. I did not believe this tale, but later discovered that it was true. An older friend of mine who moved in Birmingham’s arty circles listened to me wax ecstatic about the class and then asked if I knew that Fawal had been an assistant director of Lawrence of Arabia. More important, I took a course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on film in the sound era, taught by an astonishingly knowledgeable man named Abe Fawal, who chose films less for their fame than for what they could show us about the technical development of the medium. Local colleges and universities all had regular film series with cheap or free admission. Though this was long before the coming of VHS tapes and Blockbuster, and though I lived in Birmingham, Alabama, my learned nerdiness wasn’t as dramatic an achievement as one might think. In 1978, the year I turned twenty, I was a film buff-a cinephile, a cinéaste. I was a friend of a friend, an eye from outside, and by Texas standards, I was just up the road. That is how I ended up being invited to his editing room. Malick was born in Illinois, spent some of his youth in Oklahoma, studied at Harvard and then Oxford, but has for some years now lived in Austin, Texas. Which does not stop us from occasionally inviting him to do so. Malick remembers St. Alban’s fondly, and can name the other choristers, but is disinclined to disturb those memories by making a return visit. The church sat on blank land then now it’s framed by trees. They stand in their neat ranks in the black-and-white photograph, alongside pictures of the then-new church and its first rector, testifying to a quickly-receding past. In the mid-1950s Malick’s father, Emil, was the organist at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, and his son Terry sang with the other young choristers. But unlike most people here or anywhere else, I attend a church that has a photograph of a very young Terrence Malick on a wall in the basement. I live in Waco, Texas, and like many people in Waco, Texas I go to church. But my attachment stems not only from getting a sneak peek at a work in progress it also involves the strangeness of experiencing in private a work of art that’s made and meant for public attention. I would say more, but the nondisclosure agreement I signed before entering that room prevents me from doing so I have said this much in order to declare a personal interest in this film. I had just watched a rough cut of Terrence Malick’s new movie A Hidden Life, and Malick-he was the one who, in his soft Texas accent, had asked me to arm myself with patience-and his editors wanted to know what I thought. After I did all that I returned to the room, where several people waited for me. I needed to pee, but more than that I needed to compose myself, to wash my face, to take some deep breaths. I was told that if I tapped the space bar of the computer keyboard and then turned to the television, I would see what I came to see.Īpproximately four hours later I emerged from the room and asked for the location of the toilet. There were office chairs of various descriptions and a low battered sofa. A few books stood on a shelf, a few more lay on the floor. I saw a desk on which sat three computer monitors and, against another wall, a large television. I entered a corner room on the second floor of a nondescript suburban office building, with blinds closed to keep out the Texas summer’s light and the heat that rose from the parking lot. A voice next to me murmured “Arm yourself with patience,” and then the door was opened.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |