Notes on Malick, Misrach, Millet, Sternfeld

Ever since i saw Badlands (1973) three years ago, I became a fan of Terrence Malick. I picked up Days of Heaven (1978) and couldn’t help but notice how much it seemed to have in common with the new breed of American photography that was developing alongside it, as pioneered by Richard Misrach, Stephen Shore, Mitch Epstein, Joel Sternfeld, and Joel Meyerowitz.

Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” film still, 1978; Joel Sternfeld, A Blind Man in his Garden, Homer, Alaska, July, 1984, from American Prospects

The style and story of Malick’s films seemed to anticipate their works. As far as I know, Days of Heaven was in the making before any of the photographers’ color work had received wide-spread critical acclaim, which would lead me to believe that Terrence Malick and his cinematographer, Néstor Almendros, were no different than the group of color photographers in their approach and sensibilities. Shore’s first major color exhibition was held at MoMA in 1976, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art published a limited-edition portfolio of 12 prints the same year; Meyerowitz showed Cape Light at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1978; Sally Eauclaire’s seminal The New Color Photography, in which she writes at length about the new photographers, was not published until 1981; both Sternfeld’s American Prospects and Misrach’s Desert Cantos books appeared in 1987; Sternfeld did not even begin touring America until 1978, when he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. For the majority of the photographers, their photos were not widely seen until the late 1970s.

Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” film still, 1978; Richard Misrach, Desert Fire #249, 1985, from Desert Cantos

All the photographers were working in a sort of self-reflexive manner, photographing, for the most part, solely within America. Their pictures are completely in touch with their times, suggesting a shifting of the idyllic American society and a collapse of American politics. Malick’s films are concerned with many of the same aesthetic principles that interested the pioneering color photographers, such as light, color, and emotional depth, but what is most compelling is how their conceptual interests were completely attuned to one another. That is, the visual similarities are a point of departure, but beyond that, their interest in American mythology and its corruption is at the core of their work.

Richard Misrach’s photographs of the devastated American desert in the Desert Cantos and Bravo 20 (1990) recall Cold War politics, armament, environmentalism, and other international issues while remaining contained within a plot of Nevada desert. Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects describes a dilapidated American landscape, populated with the same disenchanted characters that can be found throughout Malick’s films.

Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” film still, 1978; Joel Sternfeld, Bear Lake, Utah, July 1979, from American Prospects

Sternfeld, like many other contemporaneous color photographers, understood that if color photography were to be taken seriously, it would have to compete with painting.

In “Corrupting Photography,” Kenneth Brougher’s forward to the newest imprint of American Prospects, Brougher writes: Sternfeld aspired to “paint” a larger canvas or worldview that brought together figure, landscape, and narrative into one master frame that slowly reveals its secrets. His goal was to create a contemplative and slow viewing experience without returning to the late-nineteenth-century photographers’ mimicry of painting techniques with such “special effects” as diffused lighting and silhouetted imagery. He wanted to depict man’s place within the complex contemporary world, to reinvest the landscape with a sense of narrative, to offer vistas peppered with myriad details rendered in crystal clarity that, as much of traditional landscape painting, leave the viewer with a mystery yet to unravel. Bruegel, as well as other painters ranging from the Limbourg brothers to Jacob van Ruisdael used compositional and perspectival methods to bring the macrocosm into the microcosm, to examine man’s relationship to both tamed and untamed nature; their work offered Sternfeld a way of thinking about photography’s ability to create landscape imagery imbedded with meaning.

Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” film still, 1978; Jean-François Millet, Les Glaneuses, 1857, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” film still, 1978; Jean-François Millet, L’Angélus, 1857-59, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Just as the 19th Century Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet used the landscape and its inhabitants as the backdrop for a sociopolitical stage, Sternfeld and Misrach created beautiful and relevant images with the same subtle gradations of tone and respect for their subjects. Millet’s almost religious paintings of French peasants tending to their work seemed to reflect the plight of the workers in Days of Heaven, and the desolate and bleak landscapes of Misrach and Sternfeld. The crepuscular activities of Millet’s peasants were always described with a muted color palette, adding to the solemnity of the images. While Millet’s paintings were never meant to be a critique of French society or the terrible working conditions of the French peasantry, the sober tone was certainly established within the frame, and his stance towards his subject matter is understood. Similarly, Sternfeld and Misrach’s work articulate observations that neither condemn nor praise American life, yet their visions are clear and efficient enough for us to understand the larger picture at hand.

Terrence Malick, “Days of Heaven” film still, 1978; Jean-François Millet, Bergère avec son troupeau, c. 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

In the work of all four of these visual artists, man is connected, bound, and defined by the earth. The connection is clear in Millet and Malick’s case, where the peasants are inextricably chained to the earth. In the same way that modern architecture defines the space and characters in Antonioni’s films, I find that the American landscape does the same for Misrach and Sternfeld’s work — it becomes a character that forms and interacts with those who inhabit it. The restless and outlawed nature of the killers in Badlands is shaped by the endless sprawl of suburbia and the American countryside. The characters in Days of Heaven are as defined by the landscape as the real-life Americans who left the cities to find work in rural America. As Brougher stated in “Corrupting Photography,” the figures within Sternfeld’s landscapes are completely intertwined, each notifying the other. For Misrach, they identify one another, yet because his work is the most overtly political, he posits that man has destroyed his surrounding landscape, which in turn, destroys him.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror

Best movie ever.

David Campany, Photography and Cinema

I’m reading a very good David Campany book and found this excerpt to be particularly interesting:

Still Photography, Still

“In photography something of this loss of faith in speed can be measured against the steady waning of interest in the instantaneous snapshot. As we have seen, it was only from the 1920s, in the shadow of cinema and with the growing dominance of print journalism, that photography became the modulator of the concept of the event. Good photo-reporters followed the action, aiming to be in the right place at the right time. This lasted until the late 1960s, with the standardized introduction of portable video cameras for news coverage. Over the last few decades the representation of events has fallen increasingly to video and was then dispersed across a variety of platforms. As television overshadowed print media, photography lost its position as a medium of primary information. It even lost its monopoly over stillness to video and then digital video, which provides frame grabs for newspapers as easily as it provides moving footage for television and the Internet. Today, photographers often prefer to wait until an event is over. They are as likely to attend to the aftermath because photography is, in relative terms, at the aftermath of culture. What we see first ‘live’ or at least in real time on television might be revisited by photographers depicting the stillness of traces.
In this way immersion in subject matter has given way to distance. Sharp reflexes have given way to careful strategy. The small format has given way to the large. Nimbleness and a ‘quick eye’ are passed over as photographers attune to the longer wave rhythms of the social world. As a consequence, the photographic image becomes less about the ‘hot’ decisiveness of the shutter and more about the ‘cold’ stoicism of the lens. Where the boundaries between the still and moving image are breaking down the photographic image circulates promiscuously, dissolving into the hybrid mass of mainstream visual culture. But where photography attempts to separate itself out and locate a particular role for itself, it is decelerated, pursuing a self-consciously sedate, unhurried pace. Slower working procedures are producing images more akin to monuments than moments. Many of the defining photographic projects of the last decade or so have been depictions of aftermaths and traces in the most literal sense. They include projects as diverse as Joel Meyerowitz’s documentation of Ground Zero in New York; Paul Seawright’s and Simon Norfolk’s images of the traces of war in Afghanistan; Robert Polidori’s records of the damage wrought by Katrina on New Orleans; and Sophie Ristelhueber’s images of the sabotaged Kuwaiti oilfields in 1991. In all of these examples photography has re-engaged its forensic function, although none of these photographers makes images that resemble police pictures. Instead, forensic attention to traces is spliced with an almost classical sense of place typical of traditional landscape photography. Just as the medium has been sidelined from events, these image-makers find their outlet away from the popular press, in the expanded field of fine-art photography. In parallel to this, others have focused on the time before the event. At first glance, An-My Lê’s series 29 Palms (2003-4) look like battlefield photographs from a contemporary war zone. In fact, they document the military preparations of US Marines on American soil for conflict in the Middle East. This is not the ‘theatre of war’ but its rehearsal studio.

An-My Lê, Night Operations, 2003-4, from the series 29 Palms.

That many photographers now work in these ‘late’ ways is not just a consequence of their coming to terms with the marginal status of the medium. It is also a question of coming to terms with the idea that documentary and photojournalism are now thoroughly allegorical. These photographers know full well that their restrained images are read through the barrage of mass-media coverage of the events they so studiously avoid.”

© David Campany. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008.