Stills #1: Days of Heaven (1978)

This great evil — where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you too? Have you passed through this night?

Dialogue from Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

The first Terrence Malick film I ever saw was The Thin Red Line, the second, the The New World; and after I had seen those I was left wishing for there to be more: more swaying grass, more dithering sunlight, more soulful char­ac­ters, more elegiac dialogue. Malick’s films mes­mer­ised me, and it was jarring to wake from the trance.

Up until a week or so ago, Days of Heaven was a film I had heard about but never seen, a mys­ter­ious entry on Malick’s filmo­graphy that I hadn’t been able to find in the local DVD store. But then I found it, and now I have seen it, and I’m glad I did as it is a beau­tiful and inspired me to find fields to pho­to­graph. The still below, the first in what will be an ongoing series of film stills, is from a scene towards the end of the film. Thinking about these films brings a poem by Ezra Pound to mind:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Life does not slip so much as ebb and flow in Malick’s films; and the grass does get shaken, does sway, if only a little.

A still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven

Fields of corn in Days of Heaven.