The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Terrence Malick · a film · 1978 · about 94 minutes
Mode
Rural melodrama told at a distance; love triangle, harvest pastoral and Biblical plague held under a child’s narration
Mythos
Genesis: the man who passes his woman off as his sister before a lord of the land, the plague of locusts, the fire of judgment, the garden and the expulsion; the cycle of sowing, harvest and burning
Phase
From a Chicago steel mill west by train to a wheat farm on the Texas Panhandle about 1916: one harvest, a winter in the house, a second harvest ended by locusts and fire, a flight by river, and a coda on a railway line; remembered by the girl
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 94 minutes; photography by Néstor Almendros, with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, by natural and twilight light; music by Ennio Morricone, with the Aquarium from Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals as its main theme; dialogue sparse and often half heard, the girl’s narration throughout
Register
From the fire and noise of a steel mill to two girls walking a railway line in the morning; a flat, offhand child’s voice over wheat at sunset and a field burning at night
Scale
Three migrants, a farmer and one year of a wheat farm, against the turning of the seasons
Governing Proposition
A labourer who has killed a foreman in a Chicago steel mill goes west by train with the woman he loves, whom he passes off as his sister, and a young girl, to work the harvest on a great wheat farm in the Texas Panhandle. The farmer who owns it is dying, and courts the woman, and the labourer urges her to marry him. The wager of the film is that a story of a scheme, a jealousy and a killing can be told at a distance, set below the turning season and remembered in the voice of a child who saw it sideways, and that the distance is the knowledge: human schemes are small against the year, and the land is indifferent to them.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens in a Chicago steel mill, in fire and noise. Bill, a labourer, played by Richard Gere, quarrels with a foreman and kills him with a blow. The prologue is cut so fast that it is almost a title: the blow, the flight, and then a train going west across open country, carrying Bill, Abby, the woman he loves, played by Brooke Adams, and Linda, a young girl, played by Linda Manz. The fire of the mill is the first image of a fire the film will return to at its end, and the train is the first of the means by which these people are always in transit, never at home.
Linda tells it. Her voice comes in over the train and the fields, flat and offhand, with a Bronx sound in it, and it does not explain. It wanders from the action to talk of the devil and of the fire at the end of the world, which she has heard preached; it comments on what we see obliquely, or not at all. At one point it observes that people are part angel and part devil, and moves on. On the way west Bill passes Abby off as his sister. The lie is the first hinge of the plot, and it will make every embrace between the two in the open fields a danger. The film is told by the one person in it who sees least of what is happening, and that is its instrument.
Days of Heaven was written and directed by Terrence Malick, his second feature after Badlands, and produced by Bert and Harold Schneider for Paramount. It was made in 1976, in southern Alberta standing in for the Texas Panhandle of about 1916, and photographed by Néstor Almendros, with additional photography by Haskell Wexler. The music is by Ennio Morricone, and the main theme is the “Aquarium” from Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. The production ran over schedule and the editing, credited to Billy Weber, ran long; the film was released in the United States in September 1978, at about ninety-four minutes. The opening fixes the method. The people will be small in the frame, the dramatic scenes will be cut away from, and the time will go to the season, the labour and the light.
Movement II
The farm is a sea of wheat on a flat plain, and in the middle of it, alone against the sky, stands the owner’s house. The labourers come by the trainload, and the film shows them bent in rows, the threshing machines working at dusk with the light behind them, the gangs paid and sent away. A preacher blesses the harvest in the field. The farmer, played by Sam Shepard, is never named, and he watches from his porch. The paradise of the farm is made by people who will not stay in it. The film shows this once, plainly, and then leaves it to the images.
The second hinge is planted here. Bill overhears a doctor examining the farmer and telling him that he has perhaps a year. The farmer begins to court Abby, and Bill urges her to accept him: marry the dying man, and the three of them will be free of the fields. The marriage becomes a wager on a death. The scene of the urging is played at a distance and in few words, and the film does not stop to enter the minds of the man who proposes the scheme or the woman who agrees to it. That refusal is the film’s choice. It is also the film’s cost, and it will be paid in every scene where the triangle needs its people to be more than figures in a field.
Throughout, the sound is half the film: wind in the wheat, the machines, insects, voices heard at a distance across the fields. Morricone’s score is spare and grave, and set against the Saint-Saëns it keeps the whole in a suspended key. The exteriors are made by natural light and at the edge of dark, the interiors lit from windows and lamps, and the fields are photographed as if they were the dramatic scene, as for long stretches they are. Linda’s voice runs on over all of it, interested in other things. The season is given more screen time than the quarrels, and the people are small against it.
Movement III
Abby marries the farmer, and the three move into the house, where Bill is still her brother. A winter of ease follows, the one time in the film when the migrants live inside the fixed thing instead of passing by it. The farmer does not die. The year the doctor gave him runs on, and the wager that brought them into the house stays unspoken among them.
On the roof of the house Abby and the farmer stand together against a darkening sky, and Bill watches from below. Whether Abby has come to love the farmer the film does not say. It is one of the questions it leaves open, and it can leave it open because it shows her from outside, as it shows Bill and the farmer. The farm’s foreman, played by Robert J. Wilke, watches the brother and sister. The lie that let them in has become the danger, and every look across the yard carries it.
A flying circus passes over the farm, biplanes above the fields, and for a while the house has a holiday. When the circus leaves, Bill leaves with it. The episode is charming and loosely held: a holiday from the law that governs the rest of the film, and one of the passages a stricter film would have lost. It is also a hinge, because Bill’s going leaves Abby in the house with the farmer through the turn of the year, and his return at the next harvest brings everything to one point.
Movement IV
Bill comes back at the next harvest, and the three are on the farm together again with the farmer. What the farmer knows by now, and since when, the film leaves open, and the not knowing is part of what it gives on return. The scheme that began as a wager on a death has become love and jealousy, and it is still played out in looks across a yard rather than in words.
Then the locusts come. First a few on a dinner plate at table; then the sky full of them; then the whole household out in the fields beating at them. The plague arrives as it came on Egypt, on the house of a lord of the land who has been told a woman is a man’s sister, as Pharaoh was told by Abram of Sarai. The farm, an Eden with a house in it, has brought judgment on itself. Linda has spoken of the fire at the end of the world, and now the fire comes.
It comes at night. The farmer walks through the burning fields with a lantern, through the fire he has set, while men beat at the flames, and the whole crop goes up in one long movement. It is the film’s summit of dread, and it is made of the same means as its summits of beauty: the field, the light, the sound, people small among them. The fire of the steel mill returns as the fire of the fields, and the harvest, the marriage and the plague turn out to have been one turn of the year.
Movement V
After the fire Bill kills the farmer, and Bill, Abby and Linda flee by river. The law follows as a posse, the only form in which the state appears in the film, and the last movement, flight and pursuit, leans on a genre’s rules that the rest of the film has refused. Bill dies in the river, and his death is seen from beneath the surface of the water. The three who came west by train are driven out of the garden by water and by the law, as the first exiles were driven out of theirs.
The coda is quiet. Abby leaves on a train of soldiers going to war, and history, which the film has kept as a frame, touches it for a moment. Linda runs from a school with a friend, and the two girls walk away along a railway line through empty country in the morning. The train that brought them west takes Abby away, and the girl who told the story is in transit again, on foot. The farmer’s house, the one fixed thing in the film, was the place its law forbade them.
Almendros won the Academy Award for cinematography, the film had other nominations, its score among them, and Malick was named Best Director at Cannes in 1979. He did not release another film until The Thin Red Line in 1998, and the voice over landscape he made here, out of a studio love triangle told by ellipsis and light, went on into his later films and far beyond them. What the film made was a story of a scheme and a killing told from below and far off, by someone who did not grasp it, under the turning year. The gain was the season, the light and the girl’s voice. The cost was the minds of the three people at its centre, and the film paid it.
Act III · The Twelve
The plot is a few hinges, and every one is planted: the doctor’s examination of the farmer, overheard by Bill, which makes the marriage a wager on a death; the lie that Abby is Bill’s sister, which makes every embrace in the open fields a danger; the foreman’s watching; the locusts, which force the household into one fire. Remove any and the film falls. What gives is the texture between the hinges, most of the running time: the flying circus, the inserts of animals, birds, wheat and water, the passages of harvest work. The season and the labour require some of it. Some is plainly the residue of a film found in the cutting room, bound by narration into a shape it was not shot for, and that holds the axis among the lowest.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. The poor who work a rich man’s harvest see his fortune as a thing to be taken, and the scheme for taking it becomes love, jealousy and murder; the paradise of the farm is made by gangs of labourers who are paid and sent away; the land is indifferent to all of it, and its beauty is no warrant of grace. Through Linda the film shows how a child sees an adult catastrophe: partly, with her own theology of fire and devils, and without self-pity. The image discloses as fully as the story. Held below the gate because the film rests very largely on mood, and its stated meanings are thin beside it: Abby and Bill are seen from outside, and the class disclosure is shown once and left to the images.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is the film’s ordinary condition, reached in both registers. The warm: the wheat moving under wind at sunset; the house alone against the sky; the threshers at dusk, lit from behind; Abby and the farmer on the roof against a darkening sky; the biplanes over the fields. The dreadful: the locusts, a few on a plate and then the whole sky; the fire at night, the farmer walking through it with a lantern while the crop goes up; Bill’s death seen from beneath the river’s surface. The score, set against the Saint-Saëns, holds a grave suspended key, and wind and insects elevate as much as the image. Held from the top because some of the height is beauty that does not change the drama, and repeats its means.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, and it is Genesis. A man passes his woman off as his sister to a rich lord of the land, as Abram passed Sarai before Pharaoh, and the lie brings plague: the locusts come as they came on Egypt, and the fire follows as judgment, the burning Linda has heard preached. The farm is an Eden with a house in it, and the film ends in expulsion, the three driven out by water and the law. The cycle of the seasons frames the plot. The particular stays particular: a steel mill, wages, a dying farmer, a girl with a Bronx voice. Held below the top because the archetype is often evoked through image rather than carried by the people, who lack the interior life to bear it as the people of Chinatown or King Lear bear theirs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the American rural melodrama and its silent forebears, above all Murnau’s City Girl (1930), with its wheat farm, and Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930); the painters of the plains, Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Hopper’s House by the Railroad, echoed in the house; and Malick’s own Badlands, whose uncomprehending girl narrator this film takes up. The turns: a studio love triangle with stars, told by ellipsis, its dramatic scenes cut away from; the sense carried by a child’s oblique narration; exteriors by natural and twilight light against studio habit; the plot set below the season. The stake was large: a Paramount picture by a director with one film behind him, over schedule and long in editing, after which he left the cinema for twenty years. Held below the top because the narrator was Malick’s own proven path, and the silent cinema had already made the plains a subject.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told as drama, played close with the motives spoken, it would be a story of a con gone wrong and a jealous killing. Told as it is, at a distance, the people small in the frame, the dramatic scenes cut away from, the seasons given more time than the quarrels, and the whole remembered by a child who saw it sideways, it knows that human schemes are small against the turning year, and that those living them see little of what is happening. Linda’s narration, wandering off to the devil and the end of the world, is the instrument: the meaning reaches us through someone who does not grasp it. The coda completes the form. Held below the top because the distance costs the knowledge drama gives, of Abby’s and Bill’s minds.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence across forty-eight years. The film returns well, on images that are inexhaustible to the eye and on its open questions: whether Abby comes to love the farmer, what the farmer knows and when, what Linda understands of what she tells, whether the plague and the fire are judgment or weather. The Genesis frame and the class reading have kept critics working, and Malick’s return in 1998 deepened the film’s place in his work, as the hinge between the genre film of Badlands and the later free forms. What holds it at the figure: the people are thin enough that much of the return is to surfaces, and the writing on the film is weighted to its photography and the story of its making, which is study of craft rather than new reading.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1978, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film reorganised what a narrative film could make of light, landscape and voice, and showed that a studio picture could carry its story almost wholly by image, season and an oblique narration. The discount: much of the later reach passed through The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, which made the manner famous, and in its own decade the film was respected more than followed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Almendros’s natural and twilight photography became a standard reference in the teaching of cinematography, and the elliptical voice-over over landscape became a manner, in David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000), Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), and far beyond film, in advertising.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one version, no loss, restorations as repair. Presence across forty-eight years has been continuous: repertory, television, home video in each format, a restored edition, and teaching, in cinematography above all. That presence is wide within cinema and narrower beyond it. The film is known to people who love and make films far more than to a general audience, and it has no line in common speech and no image as widely known as the steps in Battleship Potemkin or the shower in Psycho. The surface is set in 1916 and dressed as memory, so little in it reads as 1978; Gere’s styling is the slightest trace. Forty-eight years, and a presence real but not of the widest, hold it at the figure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. The photography is its summit: Almendros’s and Wexler’s exteriors at the edge of dark, interiors lit from windows and lamps, the fields photographed as the dramatic scene. The sound is exact and is half the film: wind in the wheat, the threshing machines, insects, the fire, voices at a distance across fields. Morricone’s score is spare and placed. The editing makes a story of fragments and holds it to ninety-four minutes. Manz’s narration, flat, odd and unteachable, is one of the great voices in American film; Shepard’s farmer is laconic and exact; Adams is good. The costs fall on real shares: Gere’s Bill is thin and petulant where the triangle needs a man of force, the dramatic scenes are underwritten, and in the second half the binding by narration shows its seams.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Chicago steel mill of the prologue, all fire and noise, with Bill’s blow against a foreman; and the coda, two girls walking a railway line through empty country in the morning. One law governs both: the people move through a world of labour and seasons indifferent to them, always in transit, by train, on foot, by water, never at home. The mill’s fire returns as the fire of the fields; the train that brings them takes Abby away with soldiers; the house, the one fixed thing, is the place the law forbids them. Linda’s voice, comic, morbid and offhand, obeys it too. The strain: the flying circus is a holiday from the law, charming and loosely held, and the flight and pursuit lean to a genre’s rules the rest has refused.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held in one structure: labour, in the mill and the harvest gangs, paid and dismissed; class, the migrant poor against the owner of the land; the family, in a false brother and sister, a marriage and a girl with no parents; the natural order, in the season, the wheat, the locusts and the fire; the sacred, in the Genesis frame, the preacher in the field and Linda’s theology of judgment; history, lightly, in 1916 and the soldiers on the train. They are integrated: harvest, marriage and plague are one turn of the year. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is held only in Linda’s voice, and Abby, Bill and the farmer are seen from outside; the state is present only as a posse; history is a frame rather than a force. For ninety-four minutes, the reach is wide.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9 and The Living Form at 8.8. Elevation as the film’s ordinary condition, warm in the wheat at sunset and dreadful in the locusts and the fire; a making in which photography, sound and a child’s flat narration bear weight throughout; and a form, the people small in the frame and the story remembered sideways by a girl, that is the instrument of what the film knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: labour, class, the family, the natural order, the sacred and history turn as one year, but consciousness is held only in Linda’s voice, the state appears only as a posse and history is a frame rather than a force. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.1, where the hinges are planted but much of the texture between them is residue bound by narration, and The Unconcealment at 8.2, a disclosure that can be stated but rests very largely on mood. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.4, where the people are thin enough that much of the return is to surfaces.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on four of five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5; The Unconcealment at 8.2 falls three tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Unconcealment at 8.2 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Days of Heaven as released in the United States in September 1978, about 94 minutes, from the steel mill to the railway line: written and directed by Terrence Malick, produced by Bert and Harold Schneider for Paramount, photographed by Néstor Almendros with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, with music by Ennio Morricone and editing credited to Billy Weber. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One version is in circulation and it is the object; later restorations for home video are repair and bear on survival only. No line of dialogue or narration is quoted: the speech is sparse and often half heard, and Linda’s remark that people are part angel and part devil is given in paraphrase. The running time is the commonly given figure. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the shot and scene counts, the share of dialogue, the share of exteriors and the hours at which they were shot, the length of the editing and any other hands in it, the dates and editions of the restorations, and the film’s standing in registries and critics’ polls, are not given.