knives wrote: Wed Jan 21, 2026 3:57 pm
A further element of this is the accuracy of experience. We talked about this in the Shakespeare thread, but period accurate casting wouldn’t have a period accurate audience reaction because an all male cast was something audiences naturally adjusted for at the time whereas nowadays it would have a Brechtian function.
That reminds me of watching Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida in the cinema and being very conscious of how unusual it looked—despite black-and-white Academy ratio being the near-universal cinema format for the entire first half of the twentieth century, and the fact that I wouldn't remotely think that anything made back then looked unusual.
(It's like Borges' Pierre Menard story, in which a twentieth-century Frenchman takes it upon himself to write a novel that's textually identical to Don Quixote in every way, but also utterly different, because... well, for starters, why is a Frenchman writing in early seventeenth-century Spanish?)
Going back to language if an artist’s goal is audience comprehension then it makes more sense to have the characters even in modern set stories speak in the audience’s language because accuracy is not the point. For example, I adore the East German westerns which are spoken in German because the makers assumed that only Germans would be interested in these films. The movies would make no sense to their popular audience in English even though that would be more accurate.
Absolutely. Shakespeare didn't write Othello or The Taming of the Shrew in Italian, and it's the use of language rather than the (usually second-hand) story that really matters.
Although East German fairytale films are arguably more accurate than many Western adaptations of the same stories, if only because the Brothers Grimm originals were also in German. And even if the Grimms weren't the source, it may well have been in French, so the English version will be a translation regardless.
I rewatched this over the weekend and holy crap. Blew me away. Part of me wants to say I don't understand all the negative responses in this thread but that's not really true because I've seen this once before, back in like 2020 (on my iPad, like an idiot!), and I thought it was the least of Malick's films – too repetitive, too didactic, too simple.
This viewing (on an actual television lol) couldn't have felt more different. I feel like Noiretirc a couple pages back - just effusive admiration for everything it manages to do. I don't know about favorite or best or greatest or whatever, but I think this might be Malick's most masterful film - the one where he takes all the techniques he's been honing all through his career and deploys them with the greatest level of precision and focus.
One thing I see few people really mention is the sheer level of artificiality that these extreme wide-angle lenses lend to the images they capture. There are some deeper shots that look pretty natural, but anything closeup is heavily distorted - and I think Malick even amps up the distortion at times to capture a really strange and nightmarish image, almost Laura-Dern-crazy-clown-face-from-Inland-Empire stuff. But the question is why? Why shoot everything in such a distorting lens? And why is this so rarely discussed as, like, a deliberately alienating effect? A postmodern, Godardian thing. There's this tendency, in my experience, for so many, even those who really love Malick's films, to think of his work as this breathlessly earnest stuff, just a guy with a camera striving toward the divine or whatever, and that's certainly there in spades, but I see so much less about the ironies and contradictions that are shot through all his films.
Like here we begin with the false earthly paradise that Malick explores in so many of his films - the idyll in the mountains (in this case) that turned out not to be the serene, eternal, perfect home the main characters thought it was. Even way up there in the mountains they can't escape the pull of darkness and death. Fine enough, but then at the very end, Franz dead, his wife Fanni says to him in voiceover that she'll meet him... in the mountains. She describes how they'll plant the fields and grow gardens and stuff - all while we're literally seeing the fields they've already planted, the gardens they've already grown, here in the mountain idyll that proved to be so illusory. The supposed heavenly paradise where she plans to meet her husband again in the afterlife is framed in almost the exact same words and images as the false earthly paradise. That is a fascinating tension to me. Does it mean we can't trust in that heavenly paradise after all? Or just that we can only conceive of it in our limited human terms that, here on earth, lead us so astray? Either way, there's a touch of dissonance here, an undermining of the perfect heavenly reunion anticipated at the film's end (even it's not meant to completely undermine it).
Or we see it too in how seriously Malick seems to take the counterarguments to Franz's refusal to take the Hitler oath. Even his wife says he could be a medic in a hospital, and his hands would be clean. You do have your mindless, shouting Nazis, of course, but most of the people who really sit with and try to engage with Franz (the priest, the lawyer, the judge) seem like earnest, ordinary people trying to make the best of a complicated and fraught situation. They genuinely want the best (as they see it) for Franz, and some of their arguments hold a lot of water. The one that struck me the most was from a man who visited Franz at the first prison, I think (not sure who exactly he was supposed to be, just a guy in a suit). You think your hands are clean? he says to Franz. "You shine their boots. You fill their sandbags." There is no escape from the corrupt systems all around us, he seems to be saying - no escape except death. And what I find particularly fascinating about this passage is the light it throws upon Franz’s wife Fanni. Who does she sell her harvest to? Who does she pay taxes to? She may be shunned by the community in the town of Radegund, but she is still a part of the Nazi machine, as much as Franz is in prison shining their shoes. Does that make her a spiritual failure? That she isn’t able to live up to the level of sacrifice that Franz commits himself to? There are no real answers here.
I also find this emphasis on the corruption of the material world kind of loops back to the distorted lenses that are used to capture everything, which almost at times lends this air of, like, world-denying Gnosticism to the proceedings - the idea that this illusory, distorting material plane is so hopelessly corrupted by evil we have no choice but to withdraw, to give up on this fallen realm of the demiurge and pursue the true light of the one real God. I don't think that's the ultimate point Malick is making. I don't think total withdrawal from material reality is a solution most people, even most Christians, would find very satisfying. But it's an example of the genuine weight Malick affords these contradictions. Franz's sacrifice is many things - a noble, holy act; a futile gesture of defiance; a selfish withdrawal that brings needless pain upon a needlessly torn apart family. The beauty and power of the film is that it lets all these things sit, lets them breathe. I thought it was didactic my first time through but I was clearly not paying attention. One of Malick's great strengths as a filmmaker is his openness to just presenting things, without any ultimate comment. They're presented deeply and passionately, it seems at first, but always from the point of view of a particular character, and there's always a moment when we pull away and we see how small and limited that character's understanding of everything is - even Franz Jagerstatter's, hopelessly, humanly limited. Malick lets all these characters and images and ideas wrestle on this fleeting earthly stage, and then he pulls back and we get a tiny glimpse of the divine, the eternal, the Oversoul, whatever it is that stands beyond the power of human language to capture, and we see how tragic and pointless and beautiful all that wrestling was.
I'm sure I could go on and on, but I've already written a damn essay here. I guess I'll just close by saying it's a tremendous film and maybe Malick's best. It's a film with a huge heart and a huge mind. The execution scene is harrowing (despite hardly being a scene at all). And the performances of the two leads are fantastic.
