Directors and films which possess notable similarities with the work of Terrence Malick?
The Hired Hand (1971)
DIR: Peter Fonda
SCR: Alan Sharp
90 min
Visually The Woman In The Dunes (1962) directed by Hiroshi Teshigaharah, is some what Malick like.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) directed by David Lynch, although thematically dramitacally different, this film is to me one of the most dreamlike experiences one can have watching a film, i also feel this about all of Malicks work.
David Gordon Green
Valhalla Rising is better than any Malik film I have seen, totally out Maliks Malik with the photography.
I am quite fond of the landscape cinematography of Nicolas Roeg. I’m not sure he has the visual or philosophical aesthetic you are looking for but the visuals are quite wonderful.
Aside didn’t Nicolas Roeg’’s Walkabout influence Malik?
I keep on regurgitating this list from site to site:
http://www.last.fm/group/Terrence+Malick/forum/47232/_/430932
The Assassination of Jesse James
George Washington
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Come and See
Walkabout
Picnic At Hanging Rock
There Will Be Blood
Paris, Texas
Rabbit Proof Fence
The Warrior
Dead Man
Gummo
The Spirit of the Beehive
Aguirre; Wrath of God
Killer of Sheep
Sunrise
Silent Light
Elvira Madigan
Just to clarify, I personally see some similarities in the films, they are not supposed to be identical.
Of that^ list I would say these fit:
Paris, Texas
Picnic At Hanging Rock
The Spirit of the Beehive
Silent Light
I want to add Morvern Caller, but not sure.
Malick is my favourite living director too – other films that I’ve been moved by in the same way as his, and feel have enough formal crossover to be put alongside him, include:
Wenders’ Paris, Texas,
Guadagnino’s I am love,
Tarkovsky’s Mirror (+ to an extent Stalker)
Vitteloni Bros’ Padre Padrone.
Carlos Reygadas
Wim Wenders
Nicolas Roeg
early Peter Weir
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Sansho the Bailiff of course.
here from a Malick site:
“The Thin Red Line has much in common with Terrence Malick’s screenplay Sansho the Bailiff based on the film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Thematically and visually, many scenes were either derived or inspired by the film.
There are two prominent voiceovers used in The Thin Red Line that do not appear in the film Sansho the Bailiff, but in Malick’s script.
One is spoken by the father who is exiled as a governor for favoring his people that compris emostly of peasants. His wife is taken away to an island to work in a brothel and his two children are sold into slavery working under the wickedness of Sansho.
The Father is speaking to the peasants shortly before being exiled:
“I never knew this hour might strike, this contented life be ended. Those earthly hopes are gone that once were wings for me! Are you thoughtful and kind? Are you righteous? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? So was I! Do you trust in virtue? Do you imagine your sufferings will be lighter because you praised her name? So did I! You who thrive, whose friends hold you up! For whom life holds no dark sword!”Malick used the highlighted lines, in part, as the voice of the dead Japanese soldier (actually it was actor Elias Koteas who reads the lines).
One other voice over was lifted from the Sansho the Bailiff screenplay. This time the original line was spoken by the son of the governor, Zushio, who has escaped the slave camp and was reinstated as governor by a sympathetic party who recognizes the young man’s noble lineage. The son recognizes what his family had sacrificed:
“The roads multiply ‑‑ there are so many ways I could go wrong. They part not once but ‑‑ endlessly! The worst of it is, I have others who are counting on me. My mother and father! My sister! I’ve come where I can’t go away, or last for long. Sorrow comes over me, greater than any I knew before, in Sansho’s camp. I would be ashamed for them to know what I’ve come to ‑‑ what a ruin! ‑‑ how all their sacrifice, their care, is poured out like water in the sand!” "~~~~~~
When i saw an ad for The New World before it came out i immediately thought of the scene of Anju’s ripples, the way Pocahontas stands in the water, and only then i remembered Malick’s love for the film
The beauty of nature in Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, alongside Malick’s
I’m not sure i agree that Thin Red Line to some extent isn’t about ideas on some level. in fact, i’d argue that it’s the only film of Malick’s that establishes a broad dialectic between nature and man. The others, as far as i’m aware, do not.
the “Malick site” would be my blog, ALL THINGS SHINING I have a lot more surprises coming soon:
http://terrencemalicksdream.blogspot.com/
@Robaldo listed most of what I was thinking.
I thought this was about other directors stealing from Malick, because so many do. He’s also one of my all time favorite directors. My husband and I often watch some (far inferior) film and say, “Somebody saw Badlands,” for example. Previous poster who mentioned David Gordon Green was right on the money. His “Undertow” is Malick-lite. Also look at the “dancing scene” from “Witness”—a complete rip-off of “Badlands.” Malick is sui generis—no point copying him.
the roads of kiarostami
wings of desire
the pear tree
alamar
man of aran
ten canoes
“cache” looks something as a terrence malick looks both cristian berger and michael hanekke were at the top of their talents.
“boarding gate”also looks like a malick film would look(if he stop been who he is)
but really as premiere said in 1999
sees and sounds like nobody else
Shunji Iwai’s body of work is probably most similar to Malick, visually. They both exploit natural light to its extremes, and tend to go for brief, evocative shots, with a lush color palette. But subjectively, Malick is interested in American myth, while Iwai makes a lot of films about children and the process of gaining experience and losing innocence. And whoever mentioned Nicolas Roeg, yes, that’s a good choice.
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Ratcatcher yet. Aspects of that reminded me of Malick.
Rich Uncle Skeleton
At present Terrence Malick is my favourite director. I regard Badlands, Days of Heaven and The New World all as supreme masterpieces and gladly rank all three among my 25 favourite films, whilst The Thin Red Line is also a masterpiece in my opinion.
It’s understandable I want to find more films like those that he makes then, so have made this topic as a request for films that are similar.
I’m not quite good enough at expressing my feelings to give a description on my own of quite what it is about his style I found so enthralling, but this excellent article will provide you with some idea and I will quickly steal some words from it that accurately express, as much as it can be expressed, why I adore Malick’s films so much.
^v^v^v^v^v^v
“Malick’s films are in some sense a profound challenge to such notions, as their primary concerns are not plots and characters with complex psychologies, nor some kind of intellectual engagement with ideas. Rather, Malick’s films are most distinguished for the primacy and beauty and poetry of their imagery, which reminds the viewers of the fact that the most primal and direct way in which cinema engages its audiences is via the power of images.”
“Malick, likewise, is wholly uninterested in envisioning his films as epistemological (or moral, or sociological, or what have you) inquiries for the audiences and the characters, instead preferring to envision them as a presentation of the world, in all its variety, as something to be faced with reverence. One might say, borrowing Wittgenstein’s phrase, Malick’s films are not interested in “how the world is,” or what happens to be true, but in “that it is,” the uncanny (and tragic and wondrous and humbling) fact of its very existence (which is to say, they are not trying to say something at all).”
“Malick’s films are both…realistic and expressionistic. Indeed, contrary to some misconceptions about them, Malick’s films (and their images) are profoundly anti-abstract, anti-symbolic, and anti-modernist.”
“His films are intensely visual, abound in beautiful nature imagery and they elude explanation, in the sense of the reduction of a given phenomenon (say, a character’s behaviors) to various (psychological, sociological) causes, usually favoring expression of moods instead.”
“[of Days of Heaven] A characteristic surge of images is the sequence that begins with the departure of Bill (Richard Gere) with the circus performers and ends with the time-lapse image of sprouting seed; there is no dialogue, save for the offscreen narration, no narrative content, and no continuity, but only the overwhelming power of the images which have not degenerated into “signs” or “symbols”.”
“[of Badlands] However because the film eschews any particular moral stance, it makes the viewer realize that attempts at trying to judge the characters as “inhuman” (or look for explanation for their actions) cover up the fact that our world and values are more fragile than we think they are.”
“[of Days of Heaven] Primarily a tragic love story, the characters and the plot are almost dwarfed by the overwhelming scale and the beauty of the film’s nature imagery.”
“Still, Malick’s sympathy towards silent cinema may be thought of as some sort of yearning for purity in images, and may be borne out of a refusal to see cinema (and particularly cinematic images) as governed by various abstractions or opposing theses, instead understanding cinema as first and foremost a “physical” phenomenon that elicits awe and wonder before any impulse to understand and interpret it in terms of its meaning.”