Terrence Malick is a filmmaker who asks us to experience cinema not only as story told, but meditative engagement with life itself. Malick’s films incorporate many themes, but “time” and “memory” are perhaps the two most important. His conceptualizations of time and memory do not depend on traditional narrative techniques to depict those ideas. Instead, Malick treats time and memory like living, breathing things that intercede with the sensory world, the inner life of the characters, and his larger philosophical ideas. He doesn’t just show the time-passage of the moment; he asks us to feel how memory shapes our sense of time, how things from the past bleed into the present, and how human consciousness struggles with the relentless flow of life.
In many ways, Malick’s conceptualization of time is disorienting—a sensation not uncommon when sitting through one of Malick’s films. He often presents a film in a non-linear way, and shifts back and forth between past and present, and multiplex perspectives, and revisiting subjective impressions. All this is not a style choice; he is intentionally mirroring how memory operates in the mind. Memory does not unfold in an orderly and linear fashion. Other than the fact that there are some things that we can typically consider “memory,” memory is often fragmented, associative, and emotional— it is not only distinct actions we can experience. Every moment flows into the next moment in time, and may be blurred, or sharp, and colored by affective quality rather than by factual representation. Malick’s voiceover narration—also fragmented, and often poetic, philosophical, and impressionistic—can voice this important interior experience to give us access to the thoughts and memories rain-raining and layering all of our experiences.
Consider The Tree of Life (2011), perhaps Malick’s most ambitious meditation on time and memory. The narrative of the film finds its anchor in Jack, a mature adult reflecting upon his childhood memories of growing up in Texas in the 1950s, especially his relationship with both parents as he grapples with larger and deep questions about existence, grace, and nature. But instead of structuring the narrative with typical flashbacks, The Tree of Life bobs along a continuum of memories and sensory moments, like sunlight flickering through the leaves of a tree, the rush of childhood liberation, and the quiet sadness that derives from loss. It shifts back and forth from depiction of personal family lives to enormous, and sometimes fantastical, cosmic imagery. The Tree of Life collapses the time scale, suggesting that the personal and universal are interchangeable.
Here memory is not a recollection of facts but about re-experiencing the emotions and sensations that constitute a person’s life. The scenes feel dreamlike; they feel less like a narrative in time. Time loosens and memories run together. The past year and the present year come together in Jack’s adult voiceover, as he recounts moments that are both no more and still alive in memory. The impressionistic motifs in the sequence of non-linear editing create an aesthetic that parallels the flickering nature of memory – how a single image, or sound can suddenly unleash an avalanche of feelings; the way memory flits unpredictably from moment to moment.
Malick has long tinkered with time and memory, particularly in Days of Heaven (1978) in similar ways, but with an important distinction. In Days of Heaven, the narrator is a child named Linda. She narrates, poetically recounting a tragic love story set in her childhood. While we follow along with the plot because of Linda’s voice-over narration, the experience is less linear because of the lyrical and fragmented quality of her narration and processing the narrative in memory that grabs onto pieces of time. The rural beauty of the films—golden fields, light, and seasons in nature—does not just show us the passage of time and movement, like a timeline of sorts, but highlights time as a cycle. Here, time dances to a rhythm following the seasons of nature’s growth and decay, allowing humanity to think about living life as a cycle, rather than a single, linear, uninterrupted process. Malick’s fascination with memory is often framed against innocence and experience, or wonder and mystique children, usually in the shroud of loss or trauma. The Thin Red Line (1998), a film set during World War II, embodies character’s past memories, thoughts and reflections that create a rhythm against the violence surrounding them. Here, the inner voice of a character explains to us the fears, hopes or regrets in their relationship with their past. Memory carries on a subjectivity through a sense of identity and self, even amid war’s destructive potential; time has elasticity here, folds upon itself, allowing soldiers to remember a moment that exemplifies peace or innocence amid the brutality of war.
What makes Malick’s treatment of time and memory all the more emotionally impactful is the merging of the sensory and spiritual. Malick encourages us to think about memory but more so experience the memory. He uses natural light, long shots of landscapes and nature, and limits dialogue to encourage a way of watching that encourages a reflective state of memory. We enter into the characters’ subjective world and live their memories as moments and experiences that are vividly alive. Malick’s use of reflection acts as an interactivity, dissolving the viewer distance from the film, and creating time and memory, not as a narrative structure, but relationally and emotionally.
Malick suggests that memory is redemptive. Memory can connect us to our previous selves and others, and while time moves on, memory can also enable a sense of continuity and meaning in our lives. Often the characters’ memories, musings and reflections take on a spiritual dimension—a searching for grace, a reconciling of the mystery of life. In fact, memory serves the function of reaching toward understanding, healing, and (dare I say it) transcendence in The Tree of Life.
At the same time, Malick’s films counter a way of thinking about time as behaving as a straight forward progression, as suggested by time being one direction and linear—it is cyclical, layered, and subjective. You never really leave the past, nor lose it; the past lives with you in the present through memory and consciousness. The past and present, together by time, offers us a more human, lived experience of time, where emotion operates, that is uniquely shaped by emotional sense(s) like loss, nostalgia, etc. The non-linear structure of Malick’s films in no small way, highlight a more meaningful style than structure in proclaiming the way we have lived our lives.
Malick engagement with time and memory consider cinema’s unique capacity to tell and express complexity about human consciousness. Malick’s films are arguably not about plot, but about creating space to lose yourself in the flow of memory and reflection. They offer us the opportunity to reflect and foreshadow they chaos of everyday life and living as not a coherent, neat story, but a tenuous collage of moments- some crisp, some out of focus, all with time limits, but all defined by our capacity to remember.
To watch a Malick film is to feel as though you have entered a waking dream. Time bends, twists and pauses. Memories emerge as whispers. And this space of present-being allows a glimpse of the deeper currents of existence; of how we carry our past with us; the meaning we find in change; and that time is, in the end, who we are.
