Terrence Malick on Badlands

Badlands (Directed by Terrence Malick)

The son of an oil company executive, Terrence Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He went to Harvard and later to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study Philosophy but failed to complete his thesis – his topic proving unacceptable to his tutor, Gilbert Ryle. 

Summer jobs took him from the wheat harvests in America and Canada, to working in oilfields and driving a cement mixer in a railyard, to journalistic endeavours for Life, Newsweek and The New Yorker. 

In 1967 he was sent on assignment to Bolivia to observe the trial of French intellectual Regis Debray who had fought alongside Che Guevera. Guevara was himself killed the day after Malick’s arrival. 

In 1968 Malick was appointed a lecturer in philosophy at MIT but abandoned teaching within a year. He explained: ‘I was not a good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else’.

Terrence Malick's lyrical directorial debut is based on the true tale of Charles Starkweather, a young James Dean obsessive who fled through the Midwest on a murderous rampage with his teenage girlfriend. Avoiding both the cliches of pulp crime story or the French New Wave’s romantic take on Bonnie and Clyde, Malick offers something unique: an eloquent fable about the cross over between crime, romance, and myth-making in contemporary America, and is noticeable for its inventive use of colour, editing, and voice-over. 

Martin Sheen, who plays Kit/Starkweather, considered Badlands as the finest screenplay he had ever read. "It is still," he states. "It was hypnotic. It rendered you defenceless. It was a period piece, yet it was timeless. It was unmistakably American; it captured the essence of the people, of the culture, in an instantly recognisable manner." Sissy Spacek starred as Holly, a baton-twirling high school student who takes off with Kit after he murders her father (Warren Oates). 

The film's disjointed emotional impact is nearly completely due to Holly, whose dull, matter of fact, narration runs counter to the film's theme, characterised by a discrepancy between what we see and what we hear. Badlands remains one of the most extraordinary debuts in American film

In a rare interview in 1975 for Sight and Sound magazine, Malick explained how he turned to making movies and the influences behind his first feature film, the semi-factual Badlands, which starred Martin Sheen as the serial-killer Kit Carruthers and Sissy Spacek as his girlfriend, Holly.

‘I’d always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else. I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at the AFI; I made a short called Lanton Mills. I found the AFI very helpful; it’s a marvellous place. My wife was going to law school and I was working for a time as a rewrite man – two days on Drive, He Said, five weeks on the predecessor to Dirty Harry at a time when Brando was going to do it with Irving Kershner directing. Then we all got fired by Warners; the project went to Clint Eastwood. I rewrote Pocket Money and Deadhead Miles. I got this work because of a phenomenal agent, Mike Medavoy.

‘At the end of my second year here, I began work on Badlands. I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot. To my surprise, they didn’t pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith. I raised about half the money and Edward Pressman (the executive producer) the other half. We started in July of 1972. 


‘The critics talked about influences on the picture and in most cases referred to films I had never seen. My influences were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn – all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I didn’t actually think about those books before I did the script, but it’s obvious to me now. Nancy Drew, the children’s story child detective – I did think about her. 


‘There is some humour in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly’s mis-estimation of her audience, of what they will be interested in or ready to believe. (She seems at time to think of her narration as like what you get in audio-visual courses in high school.) When they’re crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what’s going on between Kit and herself, or anything of what we’d like and have to know, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience, this way. 


‘She’s a typical Southern girl in her desire to help, to give hard fact; not to dwell upon herself, which to her would be unseemly, but always to keep in mind the needs of others. She wants to come off in the best possible light, but she’s scrupulous enough to take responsibility where in any way she might have contributed.’

(Interviewer) 
I suggest to Malick that the film has been criticised for patronising Holly and her milieu.

‘That’s foolishness. I grew up around people like Kit and Holly. I see no gulf between them and myself. One of the things the actors and I used to talk about was never stepping outside the characters and winking at the audience, never getting off the hook. If you keep your hands off the characters you open yourself to charges like that; at least you have no defence against them. What I find patronising is people not leaving the characters alone, stacking the deck for them, not respecting their integrity, their difference. 


‘Holly’s Southernness is essential to taking her right. She isn’t indifferent about her father’s death...
You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she’s not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety. You might well wonder how anyone going through what she does could be at all concerned with proprieties. But she is. And her kind of cliché didn’t begin with pulp magazines, as some critics have suggested. It exists in Nancy Drew and Tom Sawyer. It’s not the mark of a diminished, pulp-fed mind, I’m trying to say, but of the ‘innocent abroad.’ When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public. 


‘Holly is in a way the more important character; at least you get a glimpse of what she’s like. And I liked women characters better than men; they’re more open to things around them, more demonstrative. Kit, on the other hand, is a closed book, not a rare trait in people who have tasted more than their share of bitterness in life. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It inclines you to say deep things. It builds character and is generally healthful. It teaches you lessons you never forget. People who’ve suffered go around in movies with long, thoughtful faces, as though everything had caved in just yesterday. It’s not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense. It’s had this kind of effect on Kit.

‘Kit doesn’t see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe in what’s going on inside him. Death, other people’s feelings, the consequences of his actions – they’re all sort of abstract for him. He thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean – a Rebel without a Cause – when in reality he’s more like an Eisenhower conservative. ‘Consider the minority opinion,’ he says into the rich man’s tape recorder, ‘but try to get along with the majority opinion once it’s accepted.’ He doesn’t really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn’t kill, the only man he sympathises with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It’s not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there. 


‘And there’s something about growing up in the Midwest. There’s no check on you. People imagine it’s the kind of place where your behaviour is under constant observation, where you really have to toe the line. They got that idea from Sinclair Lewis. But people can really get ignored there and fall into bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed.

‘I don’t think he’s a character peculiar to his time. I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children’s books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, ‘Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.’ But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there.’ 


- ‘Beverly Walker: Malick on Badlands’. Sight and Sound, Spring 1975. Copyright Sight and Sound.


Jean-Luc Godard on ‘Contempt’ (Le Mépris)

Contempt (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

The exigencies of making a movie with a comparatively large budget and stars, based on a well-known writer’s novel, limited the experimental-collage side of Godard and forced him to focus on getting across a linear narrative, in the process drawing more psychologically complex, rounded characters. Godardians regard Contempt as an anomaly, the master’s most orthodox movie. The paradox is that it is also his finest. Pierrot le Fou may be more expansive, Breathless and Masculine Feminine more inventive, but in Contempt Godard was able to strike his deepest human chords. 

If the film is a record of disenchantment, it is also a seductive bouquet of enchantments: Bardot’s beauty, primary colors, luxury objects, nature. Contempt marked the first time that Godard went beyond the oddly-beautiful poetry of cities and revealed his romantic, unironic love of landscapes. The cypresses on Prokosch’s estate exquisitely frame Bardot and Piccoli. Capri sits in the Mediterranean, a jewel in a turquoise setting. The last word in the film is Lang’s assistant director (played by Godard himself) calling out, Action! – after which the camera pans to a tranquilly static ocean. The serene classicism of sea and sky refutes the thrashings of men.  

– Phillip Lopate on Contempt, The New York Times, June 22, 1997.

A Cinemascope epic, Jean-Luc Godard's debut into commercial cinema, Contempt (Le Mépris) stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), an arrogant and crude American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as he attempts to fix the script for a new film adaptation of The Odyssey. 

The film is the director's adaptation of a book by Alberto Moravia. The film-within-a-film has been classically reimagined by filmmaker Fritz Lang (who plays himself) and commercially adulterated by philistine producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance). 

There is also an interesting off-screen backstory going on: Bardot’s career struggling under the influence of her husband, Roger Vadim, with Godard interweaving aspects of his own relationship with wife Anna Karina into Bardot's role). Yet Bardot gives one of her best performances, alluring, mysterious, and touching.

Godard was himself dealing with the critical backlash from  his last film, Les Carabiniers, and he was keen to demonstrate that he understood the exigencies of traditional film making. He is aided by Raoul Coutard’s beautiful, smooth camerawork, all glides and pans.

Considered to be Godard's best film by non-specialists, Le Mépris is certainly one of the director's most approachable films and a notable contribution to the genre of films about filmmaking – on the death of cinema and the possibility of its renewal.

The following extract is from a 1963 interview with Jean-Luc Godard on the adaptation of Contempt from the novel by Alberto Moravia.

Moravia’s novel is a nice, vulgar one for a train journey, full of classical, old-fashioned sentiments in spite of the modernity of the situations. But it is with this kind of novel that one can often make the best films.

I have stuck to the main theme, simply altering a few details, on the principle that something filmed is automatically different from something written, and therefore original. There was no need to make it different, to adapt it to the screen. All I had to do was film it as it is: just film what was written, apart from a few details; for if the cinema were not first and foremost film, it wouldn’t exist. Méliès is the greatest, but without Lumière he would have languished in obscurity.

Apart from a few details. For instance, the transformation of the hero who, in passing from book to screen, moves from false adventure to real, from Antonioni inertia to Laramiesque dignity. For instance also, the nationality of the characters: Brigitte Bardot is no longer called Emilia but Camille, and as you will see she trifles nonetheless with Musset. Each of the characters, moreover, speaks his own language which, as in The Quiet American, contributes to the feeling of people lost in a strange country. Here, though, two days only: an afternoon in Rome, a morning in Capri. Rome is the modern world, the West; Capri, the ancient world, nature before civilization and its neuroses. Contempt, in other words, might have been called In Search of Homer, but it means lost time trying to discover the language of Proust beneath that of Moravia, and anyway that isn’t the point.

The point is that these are people who look at each other and judge each other, and then are in turn looked at and judged by the cinema – represented by Fritz Lang, who plays himself, or in effect the conscience of the film, its honesty. (I filmed the scenes of The Odyssey which he was supposed to be directing, but as I play the role of his assistant, Lang will say that these are scenes made by his second unit.)

When I think about it, Contempt seems to me, beyond its psychological study of a woman who despises her husband, the story of castaways of the Western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity who, like the heroes of Verne and Stevenson, one day reach a mysterious deserted island, whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery, of truth that is to say. Whereas the Odyssey of Ulysses was a physical phenomenon, I filmed a spiritual odyssey: the eye of the camera watching these characters in search of Homer replaces that of the gods watching over Ulysses and his companions.

A simple film without mystery, an Aristotelian film, stripped of appearances, Contempt proves in 149 shots that in the cinema as in life there is no secret, nothing to elucidate, merely the need to live – and to make films.

– From an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma, August 1963 (collected in Godard on Godard, edited by Tom Milne, Da Capo Press, 1986) 

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema of Poetry

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinema is deeply embedded in Italian culture: hence the confusion that many British and American critics have felt when confronted with his work. This is not only because many of the important influences on Pasolini (1922-1975)—Pascoli, Gramsci, Rossellini—are little known in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also because Italian culture itself is full of contradictory traits and components, which Pasolini’s films reflect. The most obvious of these contradictions, of course, is that between Catholicism and Marxism, the two commanding ideologies that dominate Italian intellectual life, both of which have left their stamp on Pasolini. The restlessness and eclecticism of Pasolini’s career, which shifted incessantly from one genre to another—painting, poetry, criticism, short stories, novels, feature films, reportage, and the theater—and from one style and subject matter to another, reflect a search for some appeasement of the multiplicity of incompatible contradictions that formed his view of the world and of art.

Pasolini’s Marxism itself is far from being a unifying system: in his thought it is but one of many conflicting strands, now surfacing, now submerging. If there is one constant, one invariable, it is Pasolini’s uncritical attachment to the peasantry, an attachment that can be presented in the light of Marxism, but more consistently in the light of a backward- looking romanticism. He took from Gramsci, for example, the emphasis on the potentially revolutionary role of the Italian peasantry and the need,in Italian conditions, for a national-popular movement. Thus was Pasolini able to absorb Marxism partially without permitting it to overwhelm in its totality other aspects of his thought.

When Pasolini started directing films he had already worked on a number of scripts, for directors like Fellini and Bolognini. This was on the strength of his Roman novels, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta. Many of his scripts were set in the same Roman sub-proletarian milieu, and these led directly to his first films as a director, Accattone and Mamma Roma, which should be seen as part of his “Roman” period, including novels and screenplays as well as his work as a director in his own right. It is misleading to divorce Pasolini’s work in the cinema from his other work, particularly his writing: poetry, novels, criticism. Like Robbe-Grillet and Kluge, Pasolini was a writer before he was a director, and his writing continued unabated throughout his career. Theorem, for example, appeared as a book as well as a film.

After Mamma Roma, Pasolini’s next major work was The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which the influence of Rossellini, especially his film Francesco, giullare di Dio, first became prominent. Pasolini’s cinema is clearly in the tradition not only of Rossellini but also of Dreyer and Mizoguchi, in its juxtaposition of natural and supernatural elements, though it lacks the purity and coherence of the work of these masters. In The Gospel, for instance, a traditional Christology, drawn from sacred music and painting, is superimposed on the brusque and literal, Rossellinian treatment of a popular and anecdotal text, and the result is to deliver the film into the hands of the Catholic Church. Yet The Gospel is the film of Pasolini’s that least betrays his drive towards eclecticism and pastiche. In Uccellacci e uccellini, for instance, different levels, styles, and allusions—to Rossellini, Fellini, Lukács, Togliatti, even the Pope—jostle against each other in hopeless confusion.

Despite the lack of any consistent drive, either in form or content, one underlying tendency can be discerned in Pasolini’s career: his emphasis on the need to restore an epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of awe and reverence to the world—a sense, he believed, that the peasantry still sustain, though the bourgeoisie itself has done all in its power to destroy it. 

The following extract is from an interview with Pasolini in Rome in 1968. 

The Gospel According to St Matthew (Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Q: In “The Cinema of Poetry” you mention the importance of making the audience aware of the camera as a criterion of poetic cinema. There has been some confusion as to whether you meant that the cinema is naturally poetry and, if so, first, how has prose cinema—like the aforementioned Gideon of Scotland—managed on the whole to impose itself?; and, second, if the cinema is naturally poetry, in what way does making people aware of the camera determine whether or not it is poetry?

P.P.P.: In my view the cinema is substantially and naturally poetic, for the reasons I have stated: because it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinematic sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream—and not only that but things in themselves, in reality—are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore the cinema, by directly reproducing objects physically, is substantially if paradoxically poetic at the same time. This is one aspect of the problem, let’s say a pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic one. After that we have the cinema as a historical fact, as a means of communication, and as such it too is beginning to develop into different subspecies, like all communications media. Just as literature has a language for prose and a language for poetry, so does the cinema. That’s what I was saying. In this case you must forget that the cinema is naturally poetic because it is a type of poetry, which, I repeat, is pre-historic, amorphous, unnatural. If you see a bit of the most banal western ever made or any old commercial film, if you look at it in a non-conventional way, even a film like that will reveal the dreamlike and poetic quality which exists physically and naturally in the cinema; but this is not the cinema of poetry. The cinema of poetry is the cinema that adopts a particular technique just as a poet adopts a particular technique when he writes verse. If you open a book of poetry, you can see the style immediately, the rhyme-scheme and all that: you see the language as an instrument, or you count the syllables in the verse. The equivalent of what you see in a text of poetry you can also find in a cinematic text, through the stylemes—i.e., through the camera movements and the montage. So to make films is to be a poet.

– An Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini. In After New-Realism, Ed. Bert Cardullo.