I recently saw Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life, and it struck a chord. Dialogue is sparse, but the film is incredibly rich with imagery. In fact, the very long sections of just montage are some of the most powerful. Although they seem quite abstract, they still seem to clearly convey Mallick’s positioning on faith and Christianity without the use of words. I found the images and pacing to be incredibly powerful. People were so angry when they left the theater — lots of talk about Christian propaganda. I was inspired by the amount of interpretation and and conversation that came out of watching a film with very little dialogue. Mallick used content he had filmed over the past 20 years to create the montages in this film. He was drawing from his personal archive to create new content from that content. I suppose [with this review] I’m drawing from my own canon, but not from my own archive (I haven’t made all of the footage that will appear in this film).
Tree of Life was absolutely beautiful, and while there was a story that unfolded, the feeling was always most striking. I’ve been wondering how I can include this idea in my film. How do you create a narrative but also create and convey emotion that?
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