"Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,--there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

In the first chapter of The Theory Of Film Practice (1969), Noël Burch writes that "although film remains largely an imperfect means of communication, it is nonetheless possible to foresee a time when it will become a totally immanent object whose semantic function will be intimately joined with its plastic function to create a poetic function." Burch is speaking here of a sort of transcendence of the general syntactical articulations one finds in cinematic juxtaposition - a transcendence one might cite several examples of in the thirty-something years since Burch wrote his book, but which I believe has been achieved with unprecedented and sustained grace in Terrence Malick's The New World.

One could in fact go through Burch's entire text and apply its contents to Malick's film (consider the chapters 'The Repertory Of Simple Structures,' 'On the Structural Use Of Sound' and 'Chance And Its Functions'), the structure and form of which can be deduced and categorized, just as one can analyze a poem and determine whether or not, say, a particular length of meter is pyrrhic or anapestic. On the other hand, one could also savor The New World in the same way one might a great poem; the precise form and rhythms are noted primarily in that they produce their intended effect. This is a film that can wash over you and work on a sensory level (something which might be inevitable upon an initial viewing). In that sense, intense analyzation might be perceived as theft of the film's grace, its ephemeral qualities; and I'm certainly tempted to simply say that words are not enough to describe it, to limit this review to the Emerson quote at the top of the page. But because there will be more than a few viewers who label the film as 'pretentious' or 'dull' (or, as if it were a pejorative, 'poetic'), such exegesis must be undertaken if one is to justify those qualities as belonging to a work that is, indeed, truly great; and indeed, I believe The New World is a masterpiece.

And thus I find myself in a curious dilemma, in which my memory of the film is not literal enough to support such a claim in a truly exegetical manner. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that my two viewings of the picture weren't quite that at all; I've seen both the initial 152 minute cut and the newer version that is seventeen minutes shorter, and the two are different enough to provoke slightly different reactions; the former is more elliptical, the latter more urgent; both are, with the exception of perhaps one or two shots, bound by strict linear chronology, but the shorter cut is more temporally structured than the longer. These are matters not of content but of (to use Burch's term) dynamic articulation of content; The New World is triumph of cinematography and performance, of sound and picture, but it's in the cutting that Malick has truly achieved that lofty poetic function, and it is the cutting one must study to truly get to the heart of the film. I've experienced the film - and what an experience it is! - but I have yet to study it.

Hence, for the time being, I cannot demonstrate this transcendent form by example, but merely suggest it. To that end, there are three points in the film which I'd like to jump.

1.

The first is a single edit, one that is illustrative of Malick's formal intentions. It occurs in the opening sequence of the film, as the camera, moving at a swift gait, follows Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) and her brother Parahunt (Kalani Queypo) up to a forested ridge to catch a glimpse of the English ships in the outlying bay. They slow down as they reach the edge of the forest - and then Malick cuts, not to different composition but to a few moments later in the same shot, as Parahunt is taking his lingering sister's hand and leading her off-screen, while the camera continues to push in on the barely visible ships visible beyond the trees. Such a jump cut might go unnoticed in most modern pictures, but within a period piece it's a bit more overt. Why did Malick include it? Certainly it wasn't for matters of expediency (matters of tempo, however, I'll concede to the possibility of, especially since in correlation with the outcome detailed below, they support the notion of the intrinsic deep structure of Malick's vision; such a structure can certainly be supported by chance).

Most films dealing in the past tense have an implicitly objective view; their narratives are contained within an understood capsule. Had Malick maintained this shot in its entirety, it would have certainly been a lovely model of this formula; but with this jump cut, Malick has radically altered our expectations for the shot. It is no longer about the characters' perception of an event, but our own. This is not a perspective maintained for the entire film, but its establishment in this deceptively complex shot predisposes viewers to the intensely subjective form of the film. It is a subjectivity of character, certainly, and Malick's trademark use of lyrical inner monologue are as useful to this end as ever (as is his sound design in general - take notice, for example, of the foley recorded from within Colin Farrell's helmet); but the film is also subjective in terms of tempo-spatial orientation - a trait alluded to from the onset by the title, which is not the historical cliche it seems to be.

Temporally, it is important to note that the film is not occurring in the past tense but in the present, and the manner in which Malick cuts it prevents us from subjugating the narrative with our understanding of history. For example, the criminal treatment of Native Americans by white settlers that continues to this day is not a foregone conclusion. In a scene cut from the film, Captain Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) says: "let not America go wrong in her first hour." Within the context of the film, there is nothing loaded about that statement. This vantage point affords a sense of wonder, hope and, in the first half especially, an enchanting naivete.

2.

It is darkened slightly, however, by a cut of the distinctly syntactical type that has, interestingly, been removed from the shorter version of the film. A sequence showing the English sailors marveling at their new surroundings concludes with an overhead close-up of a man's hands lifting an oyster from the tidewaters, while a voice is heard saying "We're going to live like kings." In the original cut, this shot and line of dialogue were juxtaposed in a hard cut with another close-up, this one of a tree and an axe sinking deeply, violently into it. The correlation here is immediately clear; the English see nature as a means to an end.

Perhaps it was too clear, however, for in the shorter version these two shots are separated by an entirely new sequence in which Capt. Newport explains his plan of action in this new land, intercut by quick shots of the men at work which, eventually, leads to the shot of the axe and the building of a fort. Because the juxtaposition of Newport's dialogue and the accompanying series of shots form a montage, this sequence helps establish the temporal form of the film more solidly than the prior version, which threw the viewer in headlong (this, if anything in the new edit, might be perceived as a commercial acquiescence); it also dilutes the caustic nature of the original splice, decreasing even further any chance of predisposition. Newport's tone of voice has a commanding quality; the violation of nature is no longer such, but a necessary - perhaps even noble - adherence to order. At the end of the film, when the New World becomes not America but England, Malick's gaze, now aligned in subjectivity with Pocahontas instead of John Smith, facillitates the same wonder it did in America, and this early alteration substantiates the unbiased perspective of the film (if not Malick himself).

3.

This closing act of the film finds Malick out of his favored element for the first time in his career; the natural, nurturing opiate of an open landscape has been replaced with the strict verticality of 18th Century civilization. He handles this readjustment in the only way I think he could: as if there was no change at all. As mentioned above, Pocahontas' indoctrination to English society is a mirror of John Smith's time spent at her tribe's camp. Once the initial threat has passed (Smith's tribal death sentence, Pocahontas' repression in Jamestown), each is left unburdened, free to simply radiate.

At least for a while. For reasons far greater than cultural context, the beaming princess who meets King James I cannot maintain that countenance, and before too long she and the film itself reach their end. It is a this denoument that will likely affect most profoundly, and with good cause; thus, it is with it that I want to conclude. The last four minutes of the picture, set to a reprise of the Vorspiel of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, are Malick's masterstroke, the steeple to this cathedral, an organic confluence of seemingly disparate sounds and images. There is a series of three shots in this sequence that I wish to call out. The first is of an empty bed. The second two comprise a jump cut similar to the first I cited; they again featuring Parahunt, who by this point in the narrative has died. He isn't the first spirit to appear in the film; Pocahontas' mother is glimpsed from time to time (although her presence in the shorter cut has been greatly marginalized - a change quite representative, in fact, of the differences between the two versions), answering her daughter's invocation. Both ghosts appear as guide, and are extensions of the film's subjectivity. The mother is opaque, perhaps representing her daughter's literal mother, perhaps signifying the Earth; perhaps both. Parahunt's presence, however, is an abstraction of intense beauty and startling, specific purpose, especially when conjoined with the composition directly preceding his appearance. This is not an example of syntactical juxtaposition. Its articulation is, quite purely, poetic.

There is a fourth shot which is also worth considering. It is a static one, depicting a gravestone weathered by time and the elements. The shot appears without precedent, and is not remarked upon in any way. My instinctive response was that this must be the real grave of Pocahontas; research reveals that the site no longer exists, but nonetheless, the grave seems to exist outside of the established temporal context of the film. It alludes to the death of its heroine, but in so much as it is a man-made monument beset by decay, it is the film's first and only nod to the history that it is to come. It is an acknowledgement that renders the film an elegy; and in it, Malick makes his own opinion known.