About the movie "Heaven's Day"
Before World War I, Chicago. The city's factories are filled with flames and smoke, and it's dark, and the only bright thing is the scalding molten steel. Poverty, exploitation and resentment thrive in the foul air. Capitalists waving hats, slums full of clothes, workers with wooden looks, maidens looking out into the distance by the sea... A set of old black-and-white photographs that have lost their color gives the metaphor of "here is hell" amid the messy piano sounds.
Heaven's Day
Days of Heaven
1978 | United States
director
Terrence Malik
Starring
Richard Kier Brooke Adams Sam Sharpd et al
"Heaven's Day" begins in such a "hell".
"A lot of people endure pain and hunger, and some people have their tongues hanging out of their mouths." Little girl Linda sews bright yellow cloth flowers with her head down, while she gently singles the streets of the city. Linda's older brother Bill, a worker struggling to survive, kills the owner of the factory with a shovel, and the carrier's sister escapes the city's "hell" with his girlfriend Abby and boards the train that goes into "heaven".
The black train with billowing smoke under the large panorama cut through the clear blue sky and white clouds, and the tone of the film suddenly went from gray to clear with the train. With a stunning view of Chicago, texas' sweeping farm, which is full of factories and slums, is a metaphorical paradise for director Malik:
Nature under primitive agricultural civilizations.
In "Heaven", people still used to drive carriages, accompanied by cows, geese, and undistracted birds, and could laugh and chase while harvesting wheat.
From here, the film begins to feature a large number of empty shots for the connection between man and the natural environment, and director Malik does not hesitate to lengthen the rhythm of the film, dilute the drama of the story, and spare no hesitation in dedicating a large number of shots to nature, as he does in any of his films: the distant view is Makino, which is layered with dark or light colors, the close-up is the scarecrow standing alone under the burning clouds, and the close-up is a messy but organically intertwined full ear of wheat.
These empty shots that constantly interrupt the narrative and intertwine interpret Malik's concept of "Heaven's Day":
In nature, God, in this vast, heavenly wilderness, man is as small as at God's feet.
In the "hell" of industrial civilization, man is the master of man, and under such domination, birth becomes a privilege belonging to the ruler, so that for the exploited Bill family, even the most primitive and primary desire to live decently is not allowed; in the vast "paradise" of Texas, human beings lose their dominance over human beings.
Man-made things (including man's domination) are despised beings, and everything is placed under a higher, nature's own laws, because man can never dominate the wilderness.
"I've come to love this farm, doing whatever I want, rolling around in the fields, talking to the wheat fields, and when I sleep they talk to me, and they come into my dreams."
- Linda
Along with the release of freedom in this paradise, there is also bill and Abby's desire. In "Heaven", they don't face trial from anyone because of their desire to live decently, so in a flowing stream, this twist-and-turn dialogue takes place: Bill asks Abby to marry a terminally ill farmer who loves her, waiting for him to steal his inheritance after his death soon after.
They are talking about life and death, but at this moment, the two people's actions and circumstances are quite different from the beginning of the film, they are no longer curled up in the cramped slums with frowns, but laughing and playing in a large river. The vast environment of existence gave them a deeper and darker desire to survive than the most primitive, and they began to crave money, even if it cost the death of another life.
Nature (God) grants equal permission for the survival of anything, and after Abby marries, both Bill and Linda have a life of a hundred times more decent than they did in Chicago. But He will judge people's desires further. After the farmer discovers that Bill and Abby are still cheating after their marriage, Malik still uses several consecutive empty shots to predict the disaster: unusual winds blowing down ears of wheat in the field, horses starting to run restlessly, and the first locust quietly appears on the cabbage in the kitchen.
The Bible says that the origin of original sin in human beings comes from desire. Adam and Eve were banished from heaven by God for stealing the forbidden fruit because they did not fight against desire. Bill and Abby's Texas "paradise" finally became crumbling in the judgment of "God." It is nature that makes this farm a "paradise", and only nature can make "heaven" turn into a sea of hell. The green field was finally overwhelmed by the darkness of locusts, and instead of the setting sun was a burning wildfire, and they ruthlessly expelled the man and woman who were bound by desire from this quiet field, and the two people's "heavenly day" was burned, and it was finally death that greeted Bill.
"I met a man named Jingle,
He told me that the world was going to become a sea of fire.
...... He who has done good deeds will go to heaven,
Escaping the baptism of fire,
But if you do something bad
God can't hear your cry
He can't even hear you."
In the chicago factory, the capitalists who tried to judge Bill's morality were killed by him; on the farms in Texas, the employees who tried to judge Bill's morality were beaten by him. All mankind's judgment of him was null and void, and only nature finally succeeded in casting a judgment of sin against him.
Under the metaphor of the wilderness is heaven, nature is God, sin is not determined by man, but by heaven, a law of nature. We cannot define Heaven's Day as "a simple moral film", and Malik simply borrows the rebellious desire between men and women to show that only nature is qualified to dominate and judge mankind. Malik denies the supremacy of humanity to industrial civilization and returns the right of judgment to nature, which is in a way a reverence for nature and reverence for life. Human beings cannot be above human beings, let alone above nature.
Finally, as the red sun sank, Linda, who was wandering on the road of desperation, sighed:
There is never a perfect man in this world, and there is always half a devil and half an angel in his heart. Perhaps because of this, the human world has become the destination of mankind, which is neither heaven nor hell.
Article author: Yan Si
Explore the possibility of poetry of everything
(The article was originally published by the empty mirror solo, and plagiarism must be investigated)