Terrence Malick’s cinema takes place within a spatial and temporal framework that has the elasticity of human consciousness and moves to its pulse—we are on the Texas panhandle early in the twentieth century (Days of Heaven, 1978), or on Guadalcanal during World War II (The Thin Red Line, 1998), or in an unnamed Texas suburb in the 1950s (The Tree of Life)—but we always understand the geographical locations to be points within the greater universe, and the moments to exist within eternity. It can be difficult or impossible to know how much time has passed between scenes, or even between shots. With every cut, the world is reborn and seen anew. The only other narrative filmmaker with whom Malick might be compared in this sense is Jean-Luc Godard, but Godard’s angle of vision is purely existential, while Malick’s is profoundly spiritual.

In fact, comparing Malick with other filmmakers is a difficult task. His attraction to immense physical spaces might be likened to that of David Lean, but in all other respects these two artists are worlds apart, particularly on the question of acting. Lean timed his actors’ exchanges to the millisecond during lengthy rehearsals of precisely worded texts, whereas Malick creates working environments for his actors and then constructions in the editing room that are meant to replace the very ideas of text and performance with pure behavior. Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini were kindred spiritual artists, but their respective aesthetics of austerity are quite distant from the grandeur of Malick’s perspective. That grandeur and awe put Malick quite close to Stanley Kubrick, but while the vast spaces and silences of Kubrick’s films are momentarily comical and finally terrifying and shudder-inducing, in Malick’s work the terror is always tinged with thanksgiving and a sense of wonder that one might call childlike. Perhaps more useful comparisons can be found outside of cinema: in Herman Melville’s Mardi, Moby-Dick, or Clarel; in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; or in Gustav Mahler’s symphonies—all works that allow their very forms to be determined by the gravitational pull and sway of consciousness itself.

The Tree of Life is at once the culmination of Malick’s development as an artist and the beginning of a new phase in his filmmaking. Right from the start, his films were made from a cosmic perspective, which is why his debut, Badlands, inspired by the notorious teen killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, felt like nothing else around it in 1973. In that film, we are offered a double vision of every event, seen on two contrasting scales: actions, and the vast unknowable spaces in which they occur; human affairs, and the world of animals, plants, deserts, and mountains; a personal sense of innocence, and the terrible damage of destruction.

In Days of Heaven, the story of a love triangle gone tragically wrong on a Texas farm, there is a greater focus on human passions and endeavors—we become involved in the terrible calculation made by Richard Gere’s itinerant farmhand, already on the run from the law, when he encourages his lover (played by Brooke Adams) to give in to the advances of Sam Shepard’s wealthy and terminally ill farmer. Yet throughout the film, Malick constantly reorients the attention of both his audience and his characters toward the greater force and wonder of light, vaulting skies over immense spaces, and the consuming destruction of fire. The sense of irony in Badlands, embodied in a line of narration spoken by Sissy Spacek’s Holly in the middle of her boyfriend’s killing spree—“What’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute?”—has disappeared. Here, the narration spoken by Linda Manz, as Gere’s younger sister, offers a less severe and more poignant illustration of the gulf between individual understanding and the greater mysteries of existence.

In The Thin Red Line, released in 1998, twenty years after Days of Heaven, contrasts in scale and behavior have ceased to make themselves felt as structural elements, and are simply lived and breathed by Malick and his characters. As viewers, we are placed within the infinite, as a condition not of this particular film but of life itself. An AWOL soldier playing with a Melanesian child, the protracted taking of Guadalcanal, the shadow suddenly cast by a cloud passing between the sun and two fallen soldiers in tall grass, an officer observing Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” . . . we seem to alight on every moment and action as if we were a hummingbird or an insect. Or perhaps as if we were not anything in particular but all things existing, known and unknown.

Malick’s cinema from The Thin Red Line on has been on a parallel trajectory, in a certain sense, with that of mainstream filmmaking, with the ever-increasing mobility of the camera and a movement toward the abandonment of temporal and behavioral continuity. Terms like shot and composition have become increasingly difficult to apply. But in the majority of films, big and small, these developments have been a matter of fashion, expedience, or some combination thereof, not to mention a naive faith in the power of technology to actually make the movie for you. In Malick’s post-1998 films, the choices of unmoored camera and spatial and temporal discontinuity are a matter of artistic and spiritual practice.