fallen petals
in the gutter -
broken promises

Photo by iheartpandas

Film Review The New World

This year the director Terrence Malick will release his sixth film - 'The Tree of Life'. His first film Badlands was released in 1973 - 37 years ago. He has made some of the most beautiful films I have ever seen and in anticipation of 'The Tree of Life' I'm going to review all five of his previous films over the next couple of months.

'The New World' - is Malick's most recent film - released in 2006 and is based on the true story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. It is set in Virginia in 1607 and follows the arrival of the first English settlers to America and the establishment of the first English settlement that eventually became Jamestown.

Perhaps one way of summing up the film "The New World" is to quote a line from 'To His Mistress Going to Bed', by John Donne. Donne writes to his lover as he seduces her, "O my America, my new found land". There is bound up with this erotic line a particularly colonial and masculine sensibility that we may not appreciate in the early 21 st century. But underpinning these sentiments is a wonder and a feeling of awe that forms the core of this breath taking film. Malick seems to make a reference to it when he has John Smith call out with yearning as he thinks about her,'O my America'.




The film follows the relationship between Captain John Smith - who arrives in chains and the wild, enigmatic and beautiful Pocahontas - daughter to a local Chief. The two are mezmerised by each other as they explore their different languages and ways of life. Their growing relationship is in stark contrast to the communities they represent that grow increasingly fearful and suspitious of each other, often breaking out into violence.





Although the film begins with John Smith - the explorer and adventurer - which promises an action film. Instead after Smith's departure, the film follows Pocahontas's oddessy. It follows her grief in her separation from Smith, her exile from her own people and isolation from the new settler community. Eventually she arrives in England with husband and child and an audience with James I. It is in England she meets Smith again and is able to be reconciled with Smith. She seems to finally commit herself fully to her husband. But she dies soon after.





I loved the depiction of 17th century England and the contrast it makes with the America scenes. I loved Malick's evocation of nature that owes so much to the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki - who is also working on The Tree of Life. I thought the presentation of the English settlement facinating. There were echoes of Lord of the Flies - in power conflicts, the desperate day to day fight to survive as the settlers struggle to create a sustainable community. I loved Q'orianka Kilcher who played Pocahontas. I loved the depiction of native American's. Malick researched very carefully the native American tribes in the Jamestown area. This was done so beautifully, sensitvely. They had a vitality and integrity of their own.

At the end of The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald writes about another colony, a Dutch colony, situated further south along the eastern coast that later became New York. In the last paragraphs of the novel he writes of the sailors that first encounted Long Island.

". . . gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder..."

The New World captures that unique moment in history and we watch in wonder and dread as that history unfolds.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore 7 by Steve.wilde

There is an aura that surrounds a Henry Moore sculpture. They were perhaps dimmed a little by the limited space in Tate Britain and the busy crowds that seemed to come and pay their respects to a great sculptor.

But it is a spellbinding exhibition of sculpture and drawings all the same. Although the larger pieces seem to demand a large space, in the last Gallery called Elm - we seem to join the six huge figures in an intimate communion. The room is light and the graceful curves and natural grain of the wood draws us in. We are in a warm and familiar space here as Moore works again on his main theme. And walking among them we are transfigured by them. I felt honoured to be a passing shadow wandering through this space.

But I loved it all. The early work inspired by Sumerian art, the later abstractions and surrealist experiments. Then there are the disturbing subterranean drawings taken from war photographs of Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the blitz. They conjure up images of the holocaust. And the later disturbing post war figures, menacing and threatening, the hard unforgiving Helmets, fallen Warriors and in contrast the domestic Rocking Chair figures,and finally the Elm figures. They form a kind of synthesis of all the work displayed.

Often I am confronted by a gulf between a work of art and me. There is a conceptual distance between us. It is a good thing. It is as it should be. Whether it is music or poetry, film or painting, I am faced with the works strangeness and separateness from me. I often feel excluded from it and there is a tension a struggle for meaning and understanding. But not this time. I felt sort of at home with his work. Perhaps the raw impulse of his art makes his work universal and accessible. After all there is something childlike and playful here.

Oh yes and what I also found addictive about the figures was there elemental quality. I wanted to touch them, to stroke them and perhaps even to hug them. Too embrace them within my own arms. Even the stone figures had a drift wood quality about them. Sea water washing them over and over again with the ebb and flow of ancient oceans. Except that its not water but a single man's mind, a single man's hands - just amazing.

What I didn't expect. And what I think you cannot get from looking at a print or photograph of the work is the material from which his work is formed. The colours and textures are a narrative by themselves. They tell there own story - an ageless one of England and its own geological history. Moore has not destroyed that narrative but added his narrative to the older story of the rocks. They are entwined with each other. They tell a spiritual story. They are a love story. And I loved every bit of it.

The exhibition is on at Tate Britain until August.

God spoke to Moses
from a burning bush -
flowering Magnolia

Easter

What ripened fruit hung
from those dead branches
torn down and planted,
seeded deep into the earth?

What crop will it bring?