In a review where she calls The New World the “first necessary film of this young year” and describes Q’orianka Kilcher as “the sensational newcomer,” Manohla Dargis waxes poetically on film-making and imagery.
In the 1950’s, the young turks at Cahiers du Cinéma advanced an idea that cinema is not literature, but instead expresses itself visually through the mise-en-scène. The image of laundry hanging on a line or of a pair of empty shoes in a film by Yasujiro Ozu matters as much as the dialogue; those are no more decorative than the image of birds taking flight in “The New World.” The images don’t exist apart from the narrative; they are the narrative, adding layers and moods, imparting philosophies of life. In one film, the shoes convey a sense of profound loss, the ache of human impermanence; in the other, the birds speak to the idea that the world is not ours for the taking.
One of the pleasures of returning to a favorite film is that you are no longer as captive to the plot; you need not pay as close attention to who is saying what and why, and are therefore free to see – perhaps for the first time – how a filmmaker makes meaning with the images. Something I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw “The New World” a second time was how Mr. Malick uses physical space to contrast two separate world views. Indeed, the entire meaning of the film is conveyed in a single sublime edit that joins a shot of the grubby settlement as it looks from outside its walls – and framed inside an open door – with its mirror image. As the camera looks through the same door, this time pointed out, we see how the settlers would have viewed the beautiful wide world from inside a fort that was every bit as much a prison as their own consciousness.
Miss Kilcher, “Pocahontas,” 14 when the film was shot, was born in Germany. Her father is Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian (Peru), her mother Swiss.