Poetry in Motion: Heidegger, Malick and the Art of Dwelling

Heidegger asserts that poetry, in the broadest sense, is man's dwelling on earth. This idea originates from a verse by Hölderlin: "Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on this earth." Humans work hard to cultivate fields, build houses, and toil to survive. All of this makes them deserving. However, the essence of their dwelling on earth is not the merit they gain from this labour but rather poetry. Poetry allows us to connect with the world in a deeper, more meaningful way. For example, consider these lines from a poem by Ezra Pound:

the apparition of these faces in the crowd: 

petals on a wet black bough 

Or this excerpt from Eliot's "The Waste Land": 

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, 

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, 

I had not thought death had undone so many 

Without poetry, we might simply see a crowd on the subway as an inconvenience that delays us on our way to work, or London Bridge as nothing more than a means of quickly crossing the Thames. But thanks to these verses, we can be overwhelmed with emotions when we encounter a crowd on the subway or see London Bridge. These emotions engage all our senses at once and transport our minds on a journey. This experience connects us to the crowd or the bridge and makes the world cosier and more exciting at the same time, populating it with familiar entities and powerful feelings. It becomes our dwelling place. Poetry, in the sense of Hölderlin and Heidegger, does not transport us to an abstract, detached dimension, as some might suggest, but rather leads us to the earth, "making us belong to it, and thus brings us into dwelling" (Heidegger). 

Two red threads connect Heidegger, and Terrence Malick, a legendary but elusive figure who stands in relation to cinema as Thomas Pynchon does to literature. Malick studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, which he possibly abandoned due to a disagreement with Gilbert Ryle. He returned to America and worked as a journalist before teaching Heidegger's philosophy (here is the first red thread). His debut film, Badlands (1978), was a huge success; his second, Days of Heaven (1980), is considered one of the most beautiful movies ever made. After that, there was a twenty-year hiatus before The Thin Red Line. During this time, it was rumoured that Malick had died, or was studying plants in Groellandia; or reading piles of books in a house without water or electricity; or teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne. Or all of these things put together.

Days of Heaven tells the story, narrated in an elegiac tone by the off-screen voice of Linda, Bill's twelve years old sister,of a love triangle that develops between Bill, a handsome and mysterious drifter played by Richard Gere; Abby, his young and beautiful girlfriend played by Brooke Adams; and the owner of the farm where Abby, Bill and Linda move to work on the harvest. When Bill hears that the wealthy farmer who employs him is dying, he decides to pass himself off as Abby's brother in order to inherit his fortune. However, the farmer's death is delayed, and the trio must spend the summer on the farm, waiting for the inheritance.

The style is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's The Waves: a collage of brief, poetry-infused episodes. To me, the film truly felt like a poem written with the Panaflex 70 mm at the golden hour. Sequences of a castle-shaped house suspended on a hillside at a spectral sunset; a train crossing a track that appears to float in the sky while smoke thickly flows in the opposite direction. Blonde fields of wheat, stretching all over Texas, move like waves when the wind picks up. The observer is thrown into a metaphysical dimension of symbols, stories, and poetic images. A realm that exists only in the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper—that inspired the film's cinematography—in which objects and characters are no longer such but rather representative figures of an entire epoch. A time in which technology spreads throughout the American continent, instilling a promise of prosperity in the minds of men who are tempted to do whatever it takes to achieve it. 

Like all the films that truly shake us, I have watched Days of Heaven alone. It has shown me sequences of pictures that have altered and made my perception of the world more familiar. The film's frames surface, much like Proust's memories when he tastes the madeleines, when I see the fields at sunset, or the wind rustles through the grass, or I see a train on a bridge. I notice that the two series of images—that of the film and my own experience—interfere and resonate, amplifying and sublimating the emotions that come out. As a result, I now see more beauty scattered throughout everyday life, and many places or objects feel familiar to me, like rooms in a house. 

Days of Heaven, with its glowing golden hues, is a film that lingers in the mind long after it has ended. Its images and emotions stay with the viewer, becoming a part of their own personal dwelling place on earth (here, the second thread).