The 15 Best Shots In Terrence Malick’s Movies

The Boy in the Curtain — “The Tree Of Life” (2011), DP: Emmanuel Lubezki
I’m not entirely sure why it should be, but amongst all the breathtaking, heartstopping shots that make up “The Tree Of Life,” this was the one that cut deepest the first time I saw it (to the point that, when feeling reductive, I sometimes mentally refer to the film as “that curtainy movie”). There are indeed a lot of curtain shots, drapes flapping in the wind or being twitched aside by impatient fingers, but this one, coming early in the film, is just so ineffably beautiful and sad. At the point it appears, we don’t yet know that this is the little boy doomed to drown in a swimming pool, but seeing his mother (Jessica Chastain) tenderly touch his blurred, indistinct features through that light, muslin-like fabric inevitably evokes a shroud. And even without that connotation, the whole sequence is a mini-masterpiece of the kind of tactile, textural photography that makes the film so immersive.

Martin Sheen vs. The Horizon — “Badlands” (1973), DP: Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner, Brian Probyn
There’s another, arguably more famous version of this shot, a little wider, so that Kit (Sheen) is smaller in frame and the sun is still in the sky. But I’ve chosen this one for a few reasons: It gives us that iconic pose, part crucified messiah, part scarecrow as Kit rests his arms over the rifle he has used so murderously already; it aligns his shoulders perfectly along the horizon line (and the horizon essentially deserves top billing in almost every Malick film); and in it, though he is facing away from us, he dominates the frame. Malick’s first film is his most classicist in approach, and while nature and the wilderness plays its part, it’s a terrific character piece because of shots like these that give his two young leads, especially the deliberately James Dean-esque denim-clad Kit, an almost mythic status.

Sunlight Through A Broken Leaf — “The Thin Red Line” (1998), DP: John Toll
It doesn’t take long when you write about Malick before you start to find yourself talking in the loftiest of abstract concepts, but sometimes his imagery is itself so abstract that it’s almost impossible to appreciate any other way. The geometric loveliness of this particular shot, in which rays of sunshine put on a light show, radiating in tiny beams though the insect-eaten holes in a feathery leaf, is a pleasure all to itself. But it also has purpose and meaning in the wider whole: It’s such a fragile, ephemeral moment seen, and probably forgotten, only by one soldier that you can’t help but think of all the other wonders going unseen every split second. And it also foreshadows a shot at the very end, when, having seen a bullet fly through Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel), we cut to the sun similarly punching through some foliage, and into Witt’s last flashes of memory before he dies. It’s Malick’s “tears in the rain” moment: the cruel paradox of beauty existing everywhere in nature, but only where there is a human to behold it, and to be alive to remember it.

Pocahontas in England — “The New World” (2005), DP: Emmanuel Lubezki
There’s such a story told in this one image, in which Pocahontas’ uncle leaves to return to their homeland while she elects to stay. It’s a study in contrasts, for one thing, even within the shot: her newly gentrified manner of dress and hairstyling against his animal hide cloak and long ponytail; the fact that she is facing us, but also looking back behind us, while he is striding forward, and further away. And the neat lines and vanishing-point geometry of the composition are in such stark contrast to the earlier part of the film too. Where once she was a creature of wild verdant untamed jungle (and hand-held, mobile camerawork), now she’s in a corset walking on a gravel path amid manicured trees in a rigid, locked-off shot.

The Salt Flats — “The Tree Of Life” (2011), DP: Emmanuel Lubezki
The one thing that these still images obviously can’t capture is the movement of a shot, the play of light and the way it can exist in time and not just as a static shape. So while this famous shot of Jessica Chastain in “The Tree of Life” has a beautiful symmetry as a still, and makes best-ever use of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, it’s really only a glimpse of its effectiveness in situ. A small sliver of a sequence that’s part-dream, part-wish fulfillment, part-philosophical breakthrough in the psyche of Jack (Sean Penn), it’s unmistakably heavenly in its coloring (and indeed just before, Jack touches his mother’s feet in a directly biblical allusion). But the racing camera that speeds along low to ground gives the moment a more visceral uplift than simply a symbolic one, as though the camera itself, like his memory of his mother, is suddenly liberated, and unburdened by resentment and regret, is free to race toward and embrace that celestial horizon.

For reasons of space and time, I’ve kept this to just 15, but the additional shots that nearly made it were: Nick Nolte bellowing down the field phone against a blood-red sky in “The Thin Red Line”; Kit and Holly dancing at night in the sliver of light given off by the car headlights in “Badlands”; Pocahontas standing amid the felled trees in “The New World”; Marina turning her anguished face toward the camera as an odd directional golden light plays over here eyes in “To The Wonder”; the open-top car full of Japanese girls waving their arms around in “Knight Of Cups”; any shot of Jim Caviezel’s face in “The Thin Red Line”; any part of the abstract “dawn of life” sequence from “The Tree Of Life” (which by itself makes us very excited for the Venice premiere of “Voyage Of Time“);and the lovely prelapsarian simplicity of the underwater Adam-and-Eve handholding at the start of “The New World.” Have you got others? I’m sure you do, so tell us about them below.