ABSTRACT
Terrence Malick is among the most celebrated and critically acclaimed contemporary American directors. Yet he is also a deeply enigmatic figure whose artistic career was punctuated by a twenty-year absence, during which time his whereabouts and activities remain unclear. Malick studiously avoids interactions with the media, giving no interviews since his first film, Badlands, in 1973. He has, in more than thirty years, directed only four feature films, the others being Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). His work has, from the first, been described as “poetic” and “visionary,” qualities that relate to his often breathtaking use of natural imagery and to his cinematic explorations of human nature and our relationships with the natural world.
