4. THE NEW WORLD
efore his 21st century turn towards contemporary subjects and settings with (2012) Terrence Malick had always been a historical filmmaker, albeit a singular and unusual one, less interested in the hard facts than in mapping a series of sensations across time. The impulse for impressionistic re-creation was present all the way back in (1973), with its grimly lyrical allusions to the Starkweather-Fugate murders, as well as in (1978), including a swarm of locusts seemingly unleashed direct from the Book of Exodus. In (1998), the Pacific Theatre is conjured up only to be filmed as a despoiled Paradise wholly out of time. With (2011), the director audaciously conflated his own mid-20th century autobiography with the Big Bang, resulting in concentric origin stories juxtaposing the intimately lived-in with forbidding galactic abstractions.
