Some audiences misunderstand what Malick wants to express. Just because a director has studied philosophy, it should not be assumed that the director will teach you philosophy in his works. Some people found before watching the movie has a profound ultimate proposition, they will naturally find answers deliberately watching the process, and then confused the audio-visual stream of consciousness technique of expression and language movie incoherent narrative arbitrary, the conclusion that the The conclusion that the form is far greater than the content ignores the purest beauty in the film.
What Malick wants the audience to feel is actually very simple, that is, the purest beauty, which is not only a gorgeous picture, but also an indescribable human emotion. I'm not saying that it only shows beauty without a theme. The theme of this film is the journey of "mother" and "me" in the long river. "Mother" represents nature and "I" represents human beings, but Malick is not trying to correct You preach, he's just expressing his emotions. Malick tried to use beautiful pictures, beautiful music, and perceptual narration to describe the feelings he had when thinking about the relationship between man, nature and time. His descriptions were not objective and rational, but intuitive and perceptual. The human audience can directly feel his expression. It is a pure feeling rather than an answer . If it can arouse the audience's thinking, it is also what the director is willing to see.
If you've seen Malick's feature films, you'll know that there are few lines in his films, but a lot of narration. His narration is not to narrate or advance the plot. For example, when you read a poem, you don't need to go to To reconstruct a complete logical event, it is important to experience the emotions and emotions in the verses. Watching Malick's films should also be done in this way, and his narration is also poetic. (The subtitle group is very important)
Malick is a very controversial director. The main reason for the controversy is that he is too imaginative and lacks substantial content when shooting feature films, but there is no controversy about the picture. Even the audience who opposes Malick cannot deny that he is extremely gorgeous. Beautiful picture. His images have the ability to turn corruption into magic. Once some plain things appear in his images, they immediately show a beauty that cannot be ignored. I don’t want to discuss Malick’s professional skills such as audio-visual language, etc. I just want to explain that the reason why Malick’s works can be picturesque in every frame is because this is what he cares about the most . To maintain the aesthetic mood of the picture, it is inevitable to sacrifice the story of the film. So if you don't feel this beauty, you're missing out on the most precious gift that Malick has brought.
It must be mentioned that there are some pictures of human society in this film that seem to be taken by mobile phones. These rough pictures obviously do not conform to the director's style. I guess the reason why the director did this is that due to the obvious difference between human beings after being highly socialized and the natural world, there is an insurmountable generation gap between "me" and "mother", so the picture quality and format are used to compare the two A clear distinction was made. At the same time, let the audience ignore the beauty of the picture temporarily and pay more attention to the expression of humanistic materials when facing the narrow-frame human beings.
One point I came across while browsing the reviews for this film was that Malick's style was more suited to documentaries than dramas. I can't agree with this point of view at all, but I think Malick's drama is better. Malick's documentary has a broad perspective, describing human beings and nature. The feature film has a specific perspective on human individuals. Compared with shooting the beauty of nature, I think shooting human individuals can better show Malick's talent. If you are familiar with an actor, you will It's possible to compare how different the same actor is in Malick's film and in other films. There are no professional actors in Malick’s documentaries, but the feature films have gathered a large number of high-value professional actors. Some people think that Malick’s filming is not good at telling stories and wasting such a luxurious cast, but they have not thought about why big-name actors are willing to What about working with Malik? Because actors all understand that working with Malick can achieve the peak of their appearance and temperament , this is the same reason that ordinary people are willing to go to professional studios to take personal portraits.
Aside from the gorgeous pictures that Malick is good at, he expresses various complex and incomprehensible emotions in human nature in the drama, which leads people to think about love and emptiness. Everyone experiences a variety of emotions. There is no such thing as whether you can understand it or not. What you see is what you see. Human emotions cannot be completely explained by a single logic. It is also the style of Malick. He does not rely on stories to bring out emotions, but tries to put aside the constraints of the plot and directly use simple images to tell emotions . Take "To Wonderland" as an example, he does not use a love story to explain love, but uses the various emotional states of people who fall in love to directly talk about love itself. If you just focus on the storyline of the movie when you watch the movie, you will feel inexplicable, even deceived, and angry after watching it. That's why people say Malick movies are incomprehensible, stream-of-consciousness. In fact, there are also appropriate ways to watch movies. Just like when watching a horror movie, you don’t care how many laughs the movie has. When watching a blockbuster with special effects of Marvel, you don’t need to use a dialectical eye to examine the deep philosophy of the movie, so watch it. When it comes to a Malick movie, you don't have to struggle with the integrity of the story. As long as this very simple change is made, instead of deliberately clarifying the plot of the story, but focusing on feeling the emotions, and with the perfect picture of Malik, beautiful music, and poetic narration, you will definitely find another kind of movie. possible.
Maybe other people may make a documentary like Malick, but Malick-style dramas are really only made by Malick.
Forgive me for being a Malick, for bringing the topic to a feature film, let's go back to this documentary. It is undoubtedly a blessing for the audience to have a director who is so dedicated to the expression of beauty. One of the meanings of movies is that we can see a world that we have never seen before, not to mention this world is still so beautiful. Then why do we have to worry about whether the film has made clear the ultimate proposition? I believe the director wants us to feel that beauty with our hearts, and not everyone feels the same, and this journey doesn’t need a standard answer. We just need to feel the direct expression of the director, see this pure beauty, and simply experience Terrence Malick.
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