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Back to 17 ...

I started writing film scripts at the age of 17 in Maracay, the city where I grew up. The screenplays were written for a film group we created, and who worked in the Super-8 format. Of course, at that age you can write only bad scripts, fools, but we wanted to take the sky by assault, or, at least, the movie theaters.

Fortunately, our city had an Athenaeum, with its own cinema dedicated to artistic and experimental movies, where we could see absolutely everything: Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Wajda, Tarkovsky, Woody Allen, Bergman, Kubrick, Coppola. To see blockbusters with pop corn and Coca Cola (Shark, Earthquake, i.e.), there were several other cinemas, so that we had not lack of any kind of movies.

Not being able to take the commercial cinemas by assault because the Super-8 format was a booby trap designed for provincials kids like us, we settled for trying to take by assault the Maracay Athenaeum experimental cinema with our grotesque short films.

And our friends in the cinema were so generous that they allowed us to project them for an audience accustomed to seeing Fellini 8½, Andrei Rubliov, The Seventh Seal, Manhattan, The Man of Marble or Kagemusha.

I have never met in my life a public as cultured and demanding as the one in that cinema of the Maracay Athenaeum. They turned to shit our films and scripts , and I'll thank them for the rest of my life.

Had it not been for them, I would have believed myself a true filmmaker, and my stupid scripts could have been filmed the screen, to the ruin of the producers (in this case the State) and mine.

If it were not for them, I would not have studied philosophy. Yes, because I studied philosophy to not write more stupid scripts. And thanks to them, to my beloved audience in Maracay, thanks to the friends who read my scripts with ferocity and mocked me fondly with a beer in between, I tell you: I would have really believed that my scripts were good, and it would not have landed to the reality that they were a hazing, fruit of the arrogance and ambition of a small town boy without training.

Among professional philosophers

So I studied philosophy with the Jesuits in the UCAB in Caracas, which also did not guarantee that I would become a good scriptwriter, but at least I was aware that I was not, and I tried to remedy it with the means available to me, a lot of movies, many series, many books, lots of music, dedication and patience.

40 years after starting that adventure as a screenwriter, that journey of the hero that is my life, and that in general is the life of any of us, I wonder when reviewing Terrence Malick's cinematography: Can you philosophize in the cinema, through the cinema, with the cinema? Can a philosopher-filmmaker use images as a language to issue messages of philosophical rank?

Let's see if I explain myself better: there are philosophers who have talked about cinema, like Gilles Deleuzein The Motion Image, and also in The Time Image. But it is the analysis of a philosopher from the outside, and its value is questionable. The filmmakers do not care what Deleuze says, but he has the right to try to impress his fellow philosophers (who have never written a one-minute script), with the sternness that his essays manage to decipher all the magic and the fascination that images in movement and with sound have generated for more than 100 years.

On the other hand, there are filmmakers who have inspired or propped up their work on philosophical bases very conscious and explicit in their reflections: let's say, Einsenstein, in his classic book Notes of a Director, makes it clear that he understands cinema as a tool to educate to the people, and he cites Aristotle as his reference, without forgetting Marx, since we must not forget that in 1919 Lenin's government commissioned him the film program of the revolution.

Here there is no incongruity: Marx was totally Aristotelian, and Einsenstein fulfilled the commission with ideological purity and, what is more important for us, with a colossal work that laid the foundations of film montage as we know it today. If you want to make movies, write scripts, or just be a film critic, you have to see all Einsentein's work.

Let's go back to the case in question. What does not happen frequently is that a filmmaker philosophizes through images. That his montage, his aesthetics, his visual dramaturgy (I owe this term to the brilliant Andrei Tarkovsky), produce enlightenment and reflections with rank and philosophical degree.

It could happen with Ingmar Bergman, a theater man with a very elevated sense of aesthetic and reflection, that one could see an existential treatise the kind of Sartre or a Kierkegaard books when we see "Persona."

It can happen with some scenes of Tarkovsky, for example, the house that burns in The Sacrifice or the dream sequences of The Mirror, that a recondite knowledge, of philosophical but ineffable degree, impossible to translate into words, enlighten us. It is a subject that would really be worth investigating, but I leave it to the theoretical philosophers, I now write comedies and dramas, not essays (this is an exception).

A take of The Sacrifice by Andrei Tarkovsky

The philosopher Malick

Terrence Malick is the third case, the most infrequent and fortunate: he is a philosopher and also a filmmaker.

Additionally, you do not have to be a genius to realize that Malick (like almost every filmmaker who aspires to transcendence) is an admirer of Andrei Tarkovsky, so after his successful Bad Lands, he has not hesitated to imitate the Soviet's master's attempts to achieve an aesthetic and philosophical language for the cinema, a visual dramaturgy that achieves the same cathartic and illuminating effect that would produce in us, for example, to read The Confessions of St. Augustine.

A take of The Thin Red Line

Seeing the following works of Malick: The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, To The Wonder or Knight of Cups, we immediately perceive that there is something more, beyond the history, the takes, the cinematography as techné, as technique and skill, a something beneath that speaks to us, not with words, but with a different knowledge, perhaps pure aesthetic, perhaps metalinguistic, meta-philosophical, that we can not reduce to words.

That must be one of the reasons why Malick's films, so strange, so oblique, are acclaimed by critics, are cultured by students and fellow filmmakers, and, what is more amazing, that Hollywood continues to invest in those films you know in advance that you are not going to make any profit at the box office.

How is it done to philosophize in the cinema? I do not know, it's a very complex question, and don't forget that I started studying philosophy to answer that question, and also so that my scripts were not as stupid as 40 years ago.

I do not think it's as obvious as the anecdotes, scripts, stories, and their extra-film, moral, political, and philosophical evaluations in the sense of the written books and the academy.

I think that the moment Tarkovsky or Malick break the linearity of the stories, the internal mechanics of chained and precise cause and effect that is the paradigm of Hollywood, they generate an oblique, alternating narrative from which philosophical sparks emerge.

Beware that breaking the cause-effect linearity of film stories is not enough. Every petulant French filmmaker is capable of doing that, without the talent of his predecessors Chabrol or Jean Luc-Godard, fathers and teachers of the Nouvelle Vague. Come on! And we did it when we filmed in Super-8, but simply because we did not know that logic, we did not know how to handle it and structure it in our scripts! It is a very Latin American ill, ignorance disguised as vanguardism and rupture. Illiterate arrogance.

Let's not lose the thread. It can be narrated in another way, not only through the journey of the hero, the script of 5 turning points by Syd Field the precise internal clockwork mechanics proposed by Bobby McKee or the 15 moments of Black Snyder.

Of course you can, and you run the risk that, with these tools, a little talent, a lot of discipline and a good agent, you end up selling your scripts for a handful of dollars.

But all of us who have written a film script, all of us who have dreamed awake inside the dark room of a cinema, at some point we have aspired to transcendence.

Philosophers are interested in cinema, and from philosophy they approach it, they want to deconstruct it and many times, in a perverse way, they want to regulate it with categories external to the cinema itself.

Some filmmakers want to be philosophers, write naive essays, read two or three books of philosophy, and always try to justify their films with references to categories, content, schools, authors and philosophical books, in the sense of academic philosophy, it is to say, with Sartre, with Kierkegaard (Bergman) or with Aristotle and Marx (Einsenstein).

The third case, that of the true filmmaker philosopher (Malick is a Harvard graduated one), the result can be amazing, as in the films of this peculiar American director.

If you're going to see a Terrence Malick movie, forget about everything I've told you in the 14 posts about The Hero's Journey, or maybe not ... Maybe the Hero's Journey does exist in Malick, but with such subtlety that it can not be translated into words, and even this article is already distorting it, contaminating it, for which it would be good to end it.

I apologize to my readers if this post came out to me cryptic, but I can not avoid it. Last night I finally saw To The Wonder complete, and I could not avoid to relive my two loves, cinema and philosophy.

Watch Malick's films without prejudice, without recipes, without analyzing them, let yourself be carried away by music, by the extraordinary photography of Emmanuel Lubetzky, by the soundtrack, by the delicate movement of the actors, by their eyes, by the light that filter between the trees ... At a given moment, you will receive a flash, an illumination, as when we contemplate one of those pictures in 3D that at first glance look like a lot of spots, but if you fix your gaze as it should be, then it jumps towards you a three-dimensional image that had always been there, waiting for your surrender, your abandonment, to suddenly take by assault your senses, your soul, a bit like this post claims.

There is no other way to write about Malick's cinema. And there is no literary or critical experience that can replace the vision of his works, which you love or hate immediately, without mediation.

And enough for today, let's rest the keyboard, and lets see another Malick movie; Knight of Cups.

Óscar Reyes-Matute
(Samuel Ibn Motot / שמואל אבן מתת)

Videos recommended:
Andrei Tarkovsky, Cinema of the soul

A tribute to Terrence Malick's visual poetry