Europe takes on The New World (Transcript) Originally broadcast January 20, 2006
Milos Stehlik
Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary
Terrence Malick is a confirmed maverick. He sprang onto the world stage in 1973 with Badlands, his subversive story of two outlaws which starred Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. In the next thirty years, he made only two more films: Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Now comes Malick’s fourth feature in as so many decades: New World.
Visually, it is one of the most beautiful films you will ever see. The lush forests of Virginia where Pocahontas and her family encounter John Smith and the British adventurers/settlers—the tall grasses, the color of the earth and sky are ravishing, almost three-dimensional. Sections of the film were shot on 65 mm, for what the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, called the “hyper-realized” moments. Original plans were to shoot the entire film in 65 mm, but the technical difficulties were insurmountable, and there aren’t many theatres which can show the format.
It’s the stuff of elementary school textbooks and Disney cartoons: the arrival of the British to Jamestown, which became the first English settlement in North America. In The New World, Pocahontas, played by fourteen-year-old newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher, falls for adventurer Colin Farrell, and ultimately has to decide between her lover and her people. The film ends, two and a half hours later, just as what would become the Native American genocide begins.
Malick, who is nothing short of a visionary, is also kind of an impractical Rousseau in elevating his naïf conception to a philosophical extreme. The film is beautiful and visually sensual, a paean to unspoiled nature and to civilization protected from the decrepit, derelict, and evil Europeans. It is paradise which the Europeans are destined to destroy. Unfortunately, to tell the story, Malick’s medium uses as instruments the constructs of that same corrupt European civilization. It is a narrative told in the language of the colonialist. The British ships arrive in the Jamestown bay. The Native Americans watch in amazement as the music swells up: it’s Wagner!
In some ways, the very beauty of New World works against it and turns Malick’s reach for authenticity to kitsch. The “naturals,” as the Native Americans are called, are fetishized into a people who are exotic and lurid, possessed of a wisdom we obviously don’t and can’t get. They are on display for us on celluloid just as once, 400 years ago, they were objectified as strange by the British.
The real Pocahontas was eleven and Captain John Smith thirty when they met. After Smith’s departure from Jamestown, Pocahontas was anglicized, married a kind widower (played in the film by Christian Bale), and died around the age of twenty in England from pneumonia or tuberculosis.
It is an epic tragedy which has many repercussions and implications. But the style—the very grandeur and scale of it—leaves most of these in the dust. The tragic history simply can’t be reimagined as a fantasy—this is Malick’s fundamental mistake. It needs to be analyzed, thought about, deconstructed. It most certainly can’t be reimagined using the conventional means that are a part of Malick’s cinematic palette: Mozart, Wagner, Colin Farrell, or Christian Bale, no matter how beautiful or good they are.
Who should make a film like The New World? Well, a Native American filmmaker, for one, for whom the legacy of Jamestown might still resonate differently than for the immigrant offsprings of Hollywood. Or someone who can impart an intellectual rigor, perhaps Jean-Luc Godard or Harun Farocki. The German filmmaker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, most famous for his films Confesions of Winifred Wagner and Hitler—A Film From Germany, once harbored similar “noble savage” fantasies about Native Americans. Syberberg’s fantasies were expressed in The Night, a film which was essentially a six hour monologue delivered by the astonishing actress Edith Mathes. Here Syberberg’s fantasies about the lost virgin spirit of Native Americans were filtered through the brilliant, riveting performance of Edith Mathes—nothing else was on the screen but her image and her voice. We could think about the issues instead of being seduced by the beautiful landscapes.
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.
Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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