The director’s rereleased 1978 film revealed some of the authorial signatures that would underscore a film-making career punctuated by a two-decade disappearanceTerrence Malick’s richly achieved early film from 1978 is now rereleased; it is a tragic romance and slo-mo melodrama which appeared five years after his debut, and after which Malick mysteriously vanished from public view until The Thin Red Line came out fully 21 years later to banish his Salingerian reclusive reputation.
Days of Heaven reintroduced to movie audiences his passionate sense of landscape, his unhurried tempo and mastery of calm, although this is in fact an eventful and dramatic film.
It also established his compositional technique which foregrounds the shifts and eddies of mood; it is partly a function of shooting a great deal, shaping the movie in the edit and cutting a lot out.
In years and decades to come, many of his actors would be disconcerted…