Unanswered Questions: Vision and Experience in Terrence Malick's the Thin Red Line
2003; Issue: 62 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoIn the chapter Participant Observers in his 1972 Film as Film V.F. Perkins writes the following: [F]ilms are unlikely to replace speech or writing as the medium for examining and conveying ideas. Moral, political, and other concepts can attain in words an (at least apparent) clarity and precision which no other medium can rival. The movie's claim to significance lies in its embodiment of tensions, complexities and ambiguities. It has a built-in tendency to favour the communication of vision and experience as against programme. (1) Perkins' claim about the significance of movies applies to the achievements of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line; it also anticipates Simon Critchley's advice on how to avoid slipping up on any hermeneutic banana skins when interpreting The Thin Red Line: Malick's movies seem to make statements and present positions. Nonetheless, to read through the image to some identifiable master text would be a mistake, for it would be not to read at all.... To read from to some metalanguage is both to miss what is specific to the medium of film and usually to engage in some sort of cod-philosophy deliberately designed to intimidate the uninitiated. (2) Critchley's informative article brings valuable contexts for The Thin Red Line to my attention and I agree with most of his observations; yet, though he warns against reading from cinematic language to philosophical metalanguage, Critchley nevertheless overlooks some significant elements of Malick's style. Critchley notes that It]he narrative of The Thin Red Line is organized around three relationships, each composed of a conflict between two characters. While I might not argue that Malick organises The Thin Red Line around these three relationships, I agree that the film assigns distinction to them, although these relationships do not exhaust all the material of the film. As Critchley observes, one relationship is between Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) and Captain Staros (Elias Koteas)--Malick uses this to dramatise the conflict between an ambitious senior officer, although the film qualifies that ambition, and his more caring subordinate; Tall's relationship with his senior officers, represented at the start by John Travolta's General Quintard, provides a context for Tall and Staros' relationship, while Captain Staros has a significant relationship with his men. The relationship between Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) and First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) yields a debate between idealist and materialist prompted by and focussed upon war and death. In turn, the relationship between Witt and his dead mother, established in the prologue, provides one context for the staging of Witt's idealism against Welsh's materialism. Disagreements over perception put pressure on these two relationships; and this is the case with the relationship between Bell (Ben Chaplin) and his wife (Miranda Otto), his visualised memories of her alluding to Witt's memories of his mother. Witt and Bell participate in the assault on the Japanese bunker and their comrades in that group play important parts: they include Private First Class Doll (Dash Mihok), who steals a pistol and later shouts to Corporal Queen (David Harrod), another member of that group, after killing a retreating Japanese soldier; Captain John Gaff (John Cusack), who compares importantly with Captain Staros; and Private First Class Charlie Dale (Arie Verveen), whose collecting of teeth from dead Japanese soldiers in the village produces one of the film's prominent moments. Critchley concentrates on the relationship between Witt and Welsh and in this article I do the same. As he writes, [t]he conflict is established in the first dialogue between the two soldiers, after Witt has been incarcerated for going AWOL in a Melanesian village (the scenes of somewhat cloying communal harmony that open the film). …
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