TIFF BELL Lightbox presents - Terence Malick

New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick

June 4 – June 15, 2011

TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto

“[Malick’s] films are neither literary nor theatrical, in the sense of foregrounding dialogue, event, or character,

but are instead principally cinematic, movies that suggest narrative, emotion, and idea through image

and sound.” — Chris Wisniewski, Reverse Shot

“Terrence Malick makes us believe in magic when we know it doesn’t exist.”

— David Thomson, The Guardian

One of the most revered of American filmmakers, Terrence Malick was the odd man out of the New American Cinema generation that included such figures as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson. While the “film brats” fixed primarily on youth, energy and the jagged rhythms of urban life, Terrence Malick’s cinema was a pastoral palette, elusive, mysterious and possessed of a remarkably unsentimental kind of nostalgia.

Growing up in Texas, Terrence Malick spent many youthful summers as a farmhand prior to entering Harvard to obtain a degree in philosophy, and it is this encounter between lushly tangible physicality and heady, mystical rumination that has come to define his cinema, revealing the tensions between the natural environment and the transient human presences that pass through it. It’s little wonder that his films are so often compared to poetry: even as his eternally wondering characters air their thoughts via voiceover, the films create meaning more through the rhythm, pacing and duration of shots than through the solidity of words.

Running from June 4 to June 17, the complete retrospective launches with Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick’s acclaimed directorial debut based on the true story of serial killer Charles Starkweather. Other highlights include Academy Award® winning Days of Heaven (1978) and his highly anticipated new film, The Tree of Life (2011), winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival this past weekend. Starring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, it opens on Friday, June 17 at TIFF Bell Lightbox, following its Toronto release on Friday, June 10.

New World: The Films of Terrence Malick

Badlands (1973)

Saturday, June 4 at 5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, June 7 at 9:00 p.m.

Tuesday, June 14 at 9:30 p.m.

“It would hardly be an exaggeration to call the first half of Badlands a revelation . . . Terrence Malick’s eye, narrative sense, and handling of affectless violence are all recognizably Godardian, but they flourish in a context that evokes the fifties world of Nicholas Ray.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Malick’s acclaimed directorial debut was based on the true story of serial killer Charles Starkweather, which also served as the inspiration for the title track on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. (The Boss also copped the title of Malick’s film for his 1978 single). In late-fifties South Dakota, dim and dreamy fifteen-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek) falls for twenty-five-year-old garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen), a James Dean lookalike with a disaffectedly psychopathic streak. When Holly’s father (Warren Oates) takes exception to her new beau, Kit kills him (with Holly’s mute complicity) and the two star-crossed lovers nonchalantly take off on a brutal robbery and murder spree, ending in a desert stand-off with an army of state troopers.

Days of Heaven (1978)

Saturday, June 4 at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 11 at 5:00 p.m.

Wednesday, June 15 at 9:00 p.m.

Malick creates “a film that hovers just beyond our grasp—mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly,

a masterpiece.” — Dave Kehr

“Days of Heaven is above all one of the most beautiful films ever made.”

—Roger Ebert

Set in WWI-era Chicago, it stars Richard Gere as a manual labourer who flees from the steel mills with his little sister Linda (Linda Manz, who also serves as the film’s narrator) and lover Abby (Brooke Adams) in tow after killing his foreman. Landing in Texas, the three find employment as seasonal workers with a rich, fatally ill gentleman farmer (Sam Shepard). When the farmer takes a shine to Abby—who is posing as Bill’s sister—Bill, discovering that the farmer has but little time to live, convinces her to marry the farmer in expectation of a postmortem payout. Malick’s legendary second feature (and his last for two decades) places this delicate love triangle against the majestic, goldenhued expanses of the Texas Panhandle—played by the Alberta prairies, and gorgeously rendered by renowned cinematographers Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Sunday, June 5 at 3:30 p.m.

Wednesday, June 8 at 6:30 p.m.

Monday, June 13 at 3:30 p.m.

“As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached, Malick’s study of men in battle [is akin to] Stephen Crane’s

The Red Badge of Courage—an exercise in 19th-century transcendentalism, weirdly serene

in the face of horror.” –J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

After two decades of silence, Malick returned in a big way with this star-studded, epically produced adaptation of James Jones’ great WWII novel. Malick renders the battle for the island of Guadalcanal as an Emersonian reflection on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature—exploring the line between life and death, being and non-being. Bringing his reflections to vivid life through a once-in-a-lifetime cast—including Nick Nolte as an obsessed, rough-hewn colonel, Sean Penn as a seen-it-all sergeant, Elias Koteas as an empathetic lieutenant, Jim Caviezel as a dreamily philosophical Thoreau in fatigues and such other familiar faces as Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly, John Travolta and George Clooney—Malick creates one of the most mysterious and evocative of all American war films

The New World (2005)

Sunday, June 5 at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, June 12 at 7:30 p.m.

“Scene for radiant scene, shot for nary a wasted shot, The New World is the most artfully sculpted film in American cinema this year.” —Aaron Hillis, Premiere

“What to say in the face of Terrence Malick’s The New World? Perhaps we should stop referring to it as a film first,

and call it what it is: an essential work of American art.”

—Jeff Reichert, Reverse Shot

Rapturously received on its release, Malick’s poetic and elliptical follow-up to The Thin Red Line returns to another crucible in American history: the arrival of the Jamestown Expedition in 1607 Virginia, and its fateful meeting with the native inhabitants of the “New World.” Travelling upriver to trade with the local tribes, renegade Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) is captured and almost executed by the natives, but his life is saved by the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas (beguiling newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher). Living with the tribe for months and learning to admire their way of life, Smith is eventually seized by wanderlust and leaves Pocahontas at the ragged outpost of Jamestown, where her romance with gentle local farmer John Rolfe (Christian Bale) introduces her to a new world of her own: the palaces, cathedrals and cultured gardens of England, as mysterious and magical to her eyes as the unspoiled wilderness of her homeland

The Tree of Life (2011)

Starring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, Terrence Malick’s highly anticipated new film opens on Friday, June 17 at TIFF Bell Lightbox, following its Toronto release on Friday, June 10. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this past weekend.