Visual Analysis – Days of Heaven (1978)
For this screening assignment, I viewed Days of Heaven by director Terrence Malick. This classic film is widely known for it’s excellent cinematography and near-dreamlike aesthetic. Malick achieves this look through what can only be described as masterful manipulation of light and framing. The film’s editing also deserves high regards, as it establishes a constant but somber rhythm throughout the film. The film flows like that of a peaaceful river, with the use of slow camera motions and subtle editing such as dissolves, to keep the rhthym of the film slow, establishing a dream-like “feel”. However, the film is not light on content. Scenes are very short and brisk, an extension of montage style editing, yet the rhthym and pacing are maintained. This rythym accentuates the narrative of the film, as a love triangle forms and ends in turmoil amongst the slow, repetitive lives of old-timey farmers. The editing manages to both display the slow motion of the character’s lives while also constantly showing scenes that are not directly related to the plot whatsoever, therefore fleshing out the subtleties of the film’s “world”. The rhthym of editing only picks up towards the film’s climax, when a swarm of locusts attack the farmer’s crops and he lights his fields aflame in rage. During this portion of the film, the typically smooth and subtle cinematography is gone, replaced by an erratic handheld camera to evoke the chaos of the moment.
A major visual motif in the film is the use of sillhouettes. The cinematography of the film is largely set in exteriors, around the dream-like scene of endless wheat fields, centered by the Farmer’s victorian-era home. This means that for much of the film, Malick and co. utilized the natural light of the sun, yet managed to manipulate it to create the many painting-like images in the film. By utilizing the early morning dawn, and glorious sunsets, the few hours of the day where sunlight enters at angles creating beautiful light dispersions, the filmmakers were able to create the many sillhouette images that dot the film. These sillhouette images rarely contain the film’s main characters, instead focusing on the nameless workers of the Farmer’s land. This draws the viewer away from the characters, and instead toward the vast, empty landscape, which in many ways, is the film’s main character. One of the most beautiful images in the film (below), however, contains an image of the nameless Farmer, along with the landscape and a sillhouette of his workers. This creates an implicit meaning, of the man’s loneliness and anguish (symbolized by the swarm of locusts) brought about by Abby’s betrayal of him. In this case, the sillhouette of the workers does not draw attention to the land, but rather accentuates the character of the Farmer and his role in the image.
Much much more could be said about this film and it’s excellent artistry. But to me, the creative and inventive use of editing and cinematography stuck out to accentuate the film’s narrative. Both serve to draw the viewer into the setting, both in terms of time and place.