#3 Days of Heaven

Films can be like a dream, or a poem, or a memory, or in the case of Terrence Malick's masterpiece "Days of Heaven", all three. When it comes to the past, we can't define it in reality, it becomes distant and elusive. We hold on to the past perhaps with an image or a feeling. We rely on our senses to remind us of a time, something we feel, or hear, or taste can bring us back to a time in our life we remember fondly or not.

As I was watching "Days of Heaven", I couldn't help but think of a feeling and images of my past, which may be strange considering what the film is about. As Roger Ebert has said, "it doesn't matter what the film is about, but how it's about it." "Days of Heaven" is about love, betrayal, and jealousy, but mostly it's about a time and a place. The time is the early 1900s and the place is a prairie farm, a drifter from Chicago brings his little sister and his lover to a farm and are hired on during the harvest season. The owner of this farm is a wealthy landowner who is given a year to live. The drifter and his lover pretend they are brother and sister so no one would ask questions, but the landowner becomes interested in her, and soon they decide to con him in order to stay on his land. What's the harm considering he's dying.

As you watch "Days of Heaven", you can sense another film that could've been made, one that probably would've been more linear and more melodramatic. As it is revealed in the criterion DVD, Terrence Malick spent over two years editing the film and probably finding its voice within that time. Because of that, the film doesn't follow the standard format of a Hollywood movie, it's lyrical rather than literal, it concerns itself with emotion rather than storyline, for me it even touches something more deeper.

As I was watching the movie unfold, it brought me back to a time in my own life, Malick has made a film that works like a poem, and it's that poem that reminded me of my own past. Sometimes it was the way an image presented itself as if coming from a dream, any kind of dream, sometimes it was the way Brooke Adams (who plays the woman) was photographed, and sometimes it was in the way Ennio Morricone's score brought me into the world. Whatever it was and whenever it happened, I was filled with a sense of nostalgia for the past.

It's a strange mix of being caught up with what is being shown on screen, and what it makes you feel. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear, but I believe what I'm trying to get at is the reason why I feel film is the greatest of all artforms. We are asked to live within these characters, these images, this music, this poem, and by doing that it awakens something that can be very private and very personal within us. When I watch films, it is the ones that I feel personally connected with that I remember, these are the special ones I find myself watching over and over again, I'm trying to reconnect with that feeling it once gave me. Perhaps films themselves work as sort of a memory, we remember them more as a feeling than a series of images, they bring us back to a time and place that we can't forget, which is why we return to the ones we love the most.