Jessica Svendsen

A couple weeks ago, when it finally came to New Haven, I saw Terrence Malick’s new film, Tree of Life. The experience, along with reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, beginning my 3,000 page exodus into Proust, and watching more of Malick’s oeuvre, has prompted a new inquiry into how recollection (and image making) can beautify one’s reality and one’s past. The Texas scenes in Tree of Life have a romantic beauty, but the film is far from romantic or even happy. The scenes of children frolicking through suburban front lawns are tainted with a certain painful nostalgia that comes with narrating and framing the scenes through the memory of an older protagonist. A similar thing happens in The New World with the blissful and idyllic romance between John Smith and Pocahontas. The scenes where they are discovering each other in the unexplored forest are not without a certain, already lost innocence. But the viewer only recognizes later, how those scenes were narrated with a voice over mostly composed in the past tense.

I realized that these films were, in essence, about memory. Though Proust has a number of scenes where specific objects can provoke an involuntary memory, the novel also “introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our re-creation of it to suit our desires; thus the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.” In the Introduction to the first volume, translator Lydia Davis writes how the imagination can also beautify the real:

“In one early scene, for example, the young protagonist sees the object of his devotion, the Duchess de Guermantes, in the village church. He has never seen her before; what he has loved has been his own image of her, which he has created from her name and family history, her country estate, her position and reputation. In the flesh, she is disappointing: she has a rather ordinary face, and a pimple beside her nose. But immediately his imagination goes to work again, and soon he has managed to change what he sees before him into an object once again worthy of his love. Similarly, later in the novel Swann finds that his love of Odette is wonderfully strengthened, even transformed, the moment he realizes how closely she resembles a favorite painting of his: he now sees the painting, as well, when he looks at her. The power of the intellect, and the imagination, have come to transform the inadequacy or tediousness of the real.”

I’m still struggling to articulate these thoughts about recollection, imagination, past/present, fiction/reality, but I’m sensing the bubbling thoughts of my ever-near thesis. Regardless, last week I came across some of the first stills from Tree of Life. Though the film roughly narrates the story of a young family in Texas, there are also IMAX-like scenes where Malick attempts to show the history of life. From images of outer space to the smallest reacting elements, the images are beautiful to watch on their own. View more stills here.

And if you happen to be a budding Malick fanatic, like me, you can listen to the full Tree of Life soundtrack here.

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