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Time Without Alibi: The Poetic Surpassing of Classical Narrative —and the Stumbles— in the Cinema of Terrence Malick

Translation by Tiffany Amber Elías Trimble

The scene occurred: spectators leaving the auditorium during the screening of The Tree of Life in 2011, some demanding a refund, and certain commercial theaters accepting, as company policy, to exchange the ticket for another film if the first had not been to their liking —a reaction that, for some observers, had a certain logic when the spectator expected to see a conventional story of recognizable heroes and instead encountered a director who confronts Brad Pitt with the death of a son through a lyrical inquiry that even unfolds images of the origin of the universe. The same film, presented as a candidate for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, provoked boos that mingled with even louder applause, a division of opinion that critics attributed, in part, to the excessive expectations generated by Malick himself. This episode transcends anecdote; it constitutes a symptom. It reveals that there exists a tacit contract between industrial cinema and its spectator —a contract that regulates, among other things, how time should behave within the narrative— and that this contract, when broken, produces indignation rather than aesthetic perplexity.

What exactly does Terrence Malick break, and at what price? To what extent does the poetic cinema developed by Malick, which deliberately departs from classical narrative and particularly from its conventional management of time, constitute a legitimate surpassing —not a mere authorial whim nor a self-indulgent degeneration— of the industrial conventions of film narrative, and what real, verifiable limits does this gamble have when examined without the reverence that usually accompanies consecrated works?

Malick’s cinema, which reaches its peak in The Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011), replaces the arbitrary conventions —naturalized by historical repetition, not by any necessity of the medium— with which industrial cinema administers time, for a temporality more faithful to the real texture of human experience: memory, association, the metaphysical question that is not resolved in a character arc. It is an alternative aesthetic institution and, in its best moments, superior. But this superiority is neither automatic nor guaranteed by poetic intention alone: when the method fails, it fails in a specific and documentable way —by an excess of footage sacrificed in the editing, by characters who lose dramatic coherence, by a final third that loses its way— and this failure must be pointed out with the same rigor with which success is noted, if one truly wants to do criticism.

The word «narrative» comes from the Latin narrare, related to gnarus («knowing,» «one who knows»): to narrate is, etymologically, to make known, to let someone know something they ignore. Every classical narrative therefore presupposes an asymmetrical relationship of information between the teller and the listener, and a promise: at the end, the one who did not know will know. The word «poetic,» on the other hand, descends from the Greek poiein, «to make,» «to create,» «to fabricate»: the poem does not inform; it institutes, it produces an experience that did not exist before the work. This etymological distinction already announces the underlying tension between a cinema that understands itself as a vehicle of dramatic information and a cinema that understands itself as a perceptual event.

David Bordwell precisely defined the dominant paradigm, the so-called classical Hollywood narrative: a normalized configuration of options for representing the story, in which psychologically defined individuals struggle to solve a clearly indicated problem or achieve specific goals, in a narrative that ends with a decisive victory or defeat. The causal motor of this narrative is always the character, understood as a differentiated individual endowed with a coherent series of traits. Regarding the management of time in particular, this system demands very specific conventions from the spectator, which are accepted as transparent only by historical habit: the ellipsis marks temporal jumps so that the spectator effortlessly reconstructs what is omitted, and the analepsis (flashback), although presented as the subjective memory of a character, is always anchored in an objective framework of continuity that precedes and follows it, so that memory functions as a mere pretext for a non-chronological rearrangement of the plot. Added to this is the demand for linearity —a line of action must remain open through a «dialogue hook» so that the next scene can pick it up— and a deliberately high communicability, which informs the spectator as clearly as possible. None of these conventions is a necessity of the cinematographic medium: they are options normalized by the industry and naturalized by repetition.

Classical cinema operates under what is called the sensory-motor schema: a continuity between perception, affection, and action in which time is subordinated to the movement of the plot. It is a cinema that presupposes —and demonstrates through its own functioning— a faith that the subject can act effectively upon the world. After the Second World War, in Italian neorealism and later in authors like Welles or Rossellini, this sensory-motor link enters into crisis: the nexus between what is perceived and what is acted upon is broken or deferred, allowing «something else» to occupy the interval, and thus emerges a kind of direct time-image, which no longer subordinates time to movement, but presents it in itself. The character ceases to be an agent who solves problems to become a kind of seer who witnesses pure optical and sound situations that no longer necessarily refer to action. This historical mutation of cinematic language —academically documented long before Malick shot his first film— is the philosophical ground on which his poetic cinema rests, and it is worth keeping in mind to avoid confusing his proposal with a rarity without genealogy.

Classical cinema demands arbitrary concessions from the spectator in the management of time, and Malick, by refusing them, does not commit an error, but executes a deliberate and coherent rejection consistent with his project. The reason for this rejection is that the classical continuity system was designed to maximize commercial legibility and the spectator’s psychological identification with a goal-oriented protagonist —as shown by Bordwell’s definition cited above— systematically subordinating time to the development of a dramatic action located in individual agents. When the object of a film is not the resolution of a conflict between agents, but the relationship between a particular event and an order that exceeds it —the existence of evil at the heart of nature, the reason why a child dies, the meaning of a war in which soldiers do not know why they must kill— the causal-linear form is not simply insufficient: it is a categorical betrayal of the film’s very object. Critical analysis agrees that the war conflict in The Thin Red Line could have been any other, Vietnam or Yugoslavia, because what is truly examined is a broader existential context and not the tactical victory over a hill. The famous opening of the film, in which the voice of a narrator who does not belong to any visible character asks what war means at the heart of nature while the camera follows a crocodile that submerges and melts into the water, is the exact visual translation of that renunciation: there is no dialogue hook, no line of action to open.

Malick’s editing is not a visual adornment at all, but his formal thesis. It has been rightly pointed out that his editing tends to push the scene out of linear continuity through inserts of natural elements and a camera that moves out of the story it is telling, accompanied by a voice-over that externalizes thoughts and feelings beyond immediate narrative verisimilitude. In The Tree of Life, this strategy reaches its most ambitious form: Malick seeks, through the use of music as a structuring element, a balance between the disorder inherent to the poetic evocation narrative and the minimal order that any cinematic narrative needs to be intelligible, in a film whose reflective tone responds to a desire to transcend the discursive narrative containing actions. It is not, therefore, a lack of technical mastery —the same study documents the meticulous control exercised at every stage of production, from locations to sound mixing— but a decision: that the film’s time be that of memory and association, not that of goal and obstacle.

Malick does not invent the surpassing of the causal schema, but radicalizes it within a tradition already constituted by post-war modern cinema, a consequence of the fact that the modern faith in effective action upon the world had been historically broken, and that classical cinema and modern cinema respond to a periodization —classical/modern— in which the second reverses the subordination of time to movement characteristic of the first. This is relevant because it deactivates the laziest objection against Malick —that his cinema is a personal whim without foundation—: the surpassing of the causal-action schema is a historical possibility of the cinematographic medium already explored and theorized several decades before he shot The Thin Red Line, and his specific merit consists in having taken it, with Hollywood production resources, into the terrain of war cinema and the American family drama, genres that the industry considered exclusive territory of canonical narrative.

Malick is accused of self-indulgence and pretension. This is not a minor objection nor can it be dismissed with a reverential defense of the author. The Fotogramas review of The Tree of Life was explicit in this regard: it is likely that the film’s excessive ambition, presented in advance as a masterpiece, harmed its own objectives. More than one actor declared not having found on screen the emotion that the script conveyed, and reproached the director for not having clearly explained what he expected of his character. And regarding The Thin Red Line, there is a verifiable editorial fact that makes criticism inevitable: the final cut reduced an original version of more than five hours to one hundred and seventy minutes, which meant completely eliminating the interventions of actors such as Billy Bob Thornton —whose three-hour voice-over narration was entirely discarded—, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, or Mickey Rourke, and reduced Adrien Brody to a secondary role, despite the fact that his character was, in the novel and in the original script, the central protagonist of the story. The very final third of the film, after the taking of the hill, has been pointed out as the section in which Malick fails to sustain the level of coherence achieved until then, producing the feeling that the film lacks a defined direction.

In this regard, two phenomena that adverse criticism tends to confuse must be distinguished. One is the legitimate rejection of the classical contract, which produces in the spectator accustomed to high communicability a genuine disorientation —the reaction at Cannes, half boos half ovation, is precisely the symptom of a broken contract, not proof of objective failure—. The other is the editorial failure proper: when the dismantling of six hours of footage into less than three leaves visible scars —a narrative protagonist turned into an extra, a final act without direction—, we are not facing a poetic surpassing of causality, but a craftsmanship defect that no theory of the time-image redeems. What is argued here is that the second phenomenon is real and that even the filmmaker’s two peak films are not exempt from it.

But there is also another objection: that Malickian poetic cinema, by renouncing the high communicability that Bordwell identifies as a distinctive trait of classical narrative, becomes opaque to the average spectator, unable even to reconstruct the minimum plot. The documented reaction of spectators confessing not to understand the film, and describing it as strange or pretentious, is a massive phenomenon. The response to this objection cannot consist of disqualifying the spectator for their supposed inability —a habitual and lazy gesture of certain self-complacent criticism—, but in specifying the terms of the debate: high communicability is a value relative to the project of classical narrative, not a universal criterion of cinematographic quality; a cinema that challenges the habitual notion of time needs to reduce narrative communicability to free perceptual space for the temporal experience itself. However, this response has a limit that must be recognized: deliberate incommunicability is only justified when it generates, in exchange, a genuine perceptual experience and not a mere accumulation of beautiful images without internal tension. The filmmaker’s own critical trajectory offers proof that this balance is not automatic: while in The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life specialized criticism mostly recognizes that the temporal fragmentation is at the service of a precise philosophical question —evil in nature, the meaning of existence in the face of the death of a son—, other films in his filmography have been pointed out by the same criticism that defends him as examples of recreation in nature that no longer fulfills any function, qualifying some of those shots as unnecessary. Incommunicability, in short, is not a permanent alibi: it is a risky gamble that sometimes pays off and sometimes does not.

Yes: the cinema of Terrence Malick, in The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, constitutes a legitimate surpassing of the conventions with which classical narrative administers filmic time. The supposed demands of the cinematographic medium are nothing but historical options normalized by the industry, and modern cinema, from neorealism onwards, had already demonstrated the possibility of a different temporal regime, of which Malick is a conscious heir and singular radicalizer. His poetic editing, far from being a mere stylistic gesture, visually translates a thesis: that certain questions —about evil, about death, about the ultimate meaning of a particular event— cannot be housed in the causal-linear form without being betrayed.

None of this exempts the author from real failures. The difference between achieved poetic cinema and failed poetic cinema does not reside in intention, which in Malick is always the same, but in whether the lyrical disorder manages, or not, to produce the minimum perceptual order without which no work, however high its pretension, can communicate anything to anyone.

The implications of this diagnosis exceed the Malick case. The film industry continues to demand, as an almost contractual condition of commercial legibility, that every film manage time through the same conventions as always. These conventions presuppose a particular faith —the faith that the subject can act effectively upon the world and that this acting is the only thing worthy of being narrated— which numerous contemporary human experiences no longer share without reservations. A cinema that dares to ask about time itself, and not only about what happens in it, constitutes an open aesthetic institution in the most exact sense of the term: one that does not crystallize its own conventions as if they were needs of the medium, that keeps its own artifice visible and questionable, and that demands of the spectator the same effort of mature judgment as any institution that aspires to expand, and not to administer, the experience of those who inhabit it. This effort, however, is only justified when the work honors it with the formal rigor that its own ambition demands. Malick, despite his errors, perhaps goes further than almost anyone else in the major theater industry, still.