The New World

Melmoth

Bruxist
Terence Malick is one of my essential directors, so I was loooking forward to this, and it doesn't disappoint. Very similar in its rhythms to The Thin Red Line, though here, I think, his trademark Heideggereanism if still more to the fore. The New World of the title refers, of course, to the continent that the first settlers in Virginia found, but it also highlights the theme of 'worlding', of Heideggers interest in the webs of meaning that inform discrete historical contexts, and crucially how one such world changes into another. Aside from that its just enourmously beautiful to look at and very very moving. Anyone else see it?
 
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luka

Well-known member
this is easily the shittest film i've ever seen in my whole entire life, the stupidest wretchedsest, dullest most idulgent piece of shit ever to shame a cinema screen. about half the audience walked out before the film ended, the others shatted away amongst themselves with, significantly, no one asking them to be quiet. couples kissed and fondled, others slept. noble savage bollocks, crap acting, ridiculous dialouge, pitiful awful, never have i seen something so dire. i can't beleive anyone liked it, i'm flaberghasted
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
luka said:
this is easily the shittest film i've ever seen in my whole entire life, the stupidest wretchedsest, dullest most idulgent piece of shit ever to shame a cinema screen. about half the audience walked out before the film ended, the others shatted away amongst themselves with, significantly, no one asking them to be quiet. couples kissed and fondled, others slept. noble savage bollocks, crap acting, ridiculous dialouge, pitiful awful, never have i seen something so dire.

That Colin Farrell's lovely though.
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
Melmoth said:
Terence Malick is one of my essential directors, so I was loooking forward to this, and it doesn't disappoint. Very similar in its rhythms to The Thin Red Line, though here, I think, his trademark Heideggereanism if still more to the fore. The New World of the title refers, of course, to the continent that the first settlers in Virginia found, but it also highlights the theme of 'worlding', of Heideggers interest in the webs of meaning that inform discrete historical contexts, and crucially how one such world changes into another. Aside from that its just enourmously beautiful to look at and very very moving. Anyone else see it?

I havn't seen Thin Red Line, but one of my tutors remarked on it as being a very Hegelian film, presumably to do with its treament of recognition. But then I always thought that Hegel's recognition was pretty close to Heidegger's ideas about mitsein/das man.
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
luka said:
this is easily the shittest film i've ever seen in my whole entire life, the stupidest wretchedsest, dullest most idulgent piece of shit ever to shame a cinema screen. about half the audience walked out before the film ended, the others shatted away amongst themselves with, significantly, no one asking them to be quiet. couples kissed and fondled, others slept. noble savage bollocks, crap acting, ridiculous dialouge, pitiful awful, never have i seen something so dire. i can't beleive anyone liked it, i'm flaberghasted

Please stuck to playstation and stay away from cinema.
 

luka

Well-known member
oh franscesco, you've wounded me!

you've put me in my place, how dare i venture an opinion, a mere pleb like myself, raising his voice in the company of his betters!

the film is still shit though. an embaressment to all concerned, though i agree colin farell and the bird are both beautiful people.

anyway, i'm off to live in woods off nuts and berries, free from sin and worldly ways, its the only truth.
 
The film is poetic(visuals) and rhythmic(editing), it is not about acting. You can go to the theatre for that....Also who cares what people in the audience do? Is that how you critque a film? Maybe prior knowledge of Malick's work would have been useful. You could have saved some money.
 

jenks

thread death
chris h lynn said:
The film is poetic(visuals) and rhythmic(editing), it is not about acting. You can go to the theatre for that....Also who cares what people in the audience do? Is that how you critque a film? Maybe prior knowledge of Malick's work would have been useful. You could have saved some money.

far be it from me to stick up for luka - he can do that for himself - but there's some shitty responses to the fact he didn't like the film.

suggesting that someone is unentitled to speak their mind or that they are somehow not qualified to pass comment on the great auteur is worrying indeed

haven't seen the film, can't comment - unlike luka who has and therefore can...
 

jenks

thread death
chris h lynn said:
Nice one, I mail you my dvd copy, when it is released. I think there is 30 minutes of extra footage. Cheers

i'll keep you to that!
cheers
 

zhao

there are no accidents
know what's funny?

it seems like with music most dissensians tend to agree most of the time. (Groove Armada sucks donkey dicks and Digital Mystics is the Bee's Knees, etc.)

but when it comes to film we are going for eachother's throats within 2 posts!

wonder what socio-cultural factors can account for this...
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
luka said:
half the audience walked out before the film ended, the others shatted away amongst themselves with, significantly, no one asking them to be quiet. couples kissed and fondled, others slept. noble savage bollocks, crap acting, ridiculous dialouge, pitiful awful

I expect people walked out because they were hoping to see a mainstream Hollywood historical epic, something like Last of the Mohicans. Thats certainly what the ad. for the film promises, an image so at odds with what you actually get its like having the poster for 2001 advertizing King Kong.

One of the things that interested me was the way in which Malick took the cliches
of the birth of a nation type movie - big stars, widescreen cinemascope, obsessive historical detail, lenghty running time - and mixed them up with his trademark longuers, non-narrative shots, disembodied voices, abstract musings etc. He kind of burrows into the epic, fills it full of holes, delibidinizes it to produce something very very strange.

One of the ways he does this is precisely through the acting and the dialogue. Sure, these are at odds with what you get in conventional films, but they're no more stagey or abstract than in, say, Throne of Blood. Its the context, the elements of conventional production values that draws attention to it. I liked the dialogue and thought the acting was fantastic: if you want the method, well, there's plenty of that around.

And yes there is a large dose of noble savage bollocks. But there is also a real desire, and a successful one, to try and portray the native american culture in the kind of anthropological detail which to some extent balances out the potential stereotyping. And anyway, even if he is idealizing the other, so what, at least he's got some convictions.
 

StrawDawg

Blind Perennium
Melmoth said:
...but it also highlights the theme of 'worlding', of Heideggers interest in the webs of meaning that inform discrete historical contexts, and crucially how one such world changes into another.

should this hook me or put me off?
 

sus

Well-known member
I saw it weeks ago, in a Wisconsin cabin over 2 nights. It's stuck with me, I've thought about it everyday since. The cyclical nature of the Vorspiel. The swirling trees.
 
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