Letter to Terrence Malick
Mathias Coppens, the director of Musica Divina, has written a letter to the film director Terrence Malick. Reflections on various artforms have made it clear that playing with the truth is a recurrent theme in the experience of art through the centuries. What do the writers Hugo Claus and Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer have in common? Or the visual artist Damien Hirst with the master forger Han Van Meegeren? All of them took shortcuts with the truth, didn’t they?
Dear Terrence Malick,
I seem to remember that the phrase ‘moments of truth’ comes from you. In times of artificial intelligence, it’s important to check your sources. However, I can’t find any published texts or interviews that contain those exact words. Did I make them up? There have been countless doctoral theses written about your work, but you have said very little about it yourself. You’re enigmatic, that is for sure. For a long time, there were only a handful of photos of you to be found, and you declined interviews. The work had to speak for itself. Or maybe its truth is found in my own interpretation? Maybe the meaning of your work is in the dialogue with the audience? If so, its truth would be found in its constantly shifting meaning.
You don’t write a traditional script with one scene after another, where every word of dialogue is written out. Instead, you use an associative book of ideas containing scattered fragments of text, quotations and images, not bound by their chronological and dramatic logic but gathered in a kind of holistic universe where time and space do not impose limits. Your films are pure cinema because they are not filmed scripts. Your starting point is the act of filming itself; the film is created in the editing process. Your existential, primal document is the starting point for conversations with your actors. You ask them, Stanislavski-like, to draw on their own memories, because our past determines who we are in the present. That present is what you are searching for. Your actors are not transformed into something or someone else: we principally see them ‘being’. It follows from this that masks are a frequent motif in your films. You are searching for the fragile moment when the mask drops: a moment of truth? That is why you don’t want to be tied down by a script when filming, and even less by a schedule. You look for the unique moments that have happened to all of us at some point, such as a butterfly landing on an open hand or the golden light of a sunset. The term Dasein, as used by the German philosopher Heidegger, probably comes closest to your intentions. Dasein: attentive being-in-the-world. That you are a philosopher among directors is common knowledge.
Your fellow director Werner Herzog wrote the book The Future of the Truth. It’s striking that, as a documentary filmmaker, he confesses to sometimes deliberately intervening in what he films. He does the exact opposite of what you do: staging non-fiction. By setting the scene, he intensifies reality. These are symbolic magnifications of an idea, leading to a greater impact on the audience. You might say that you were an impressionist, Herzog an expressionist. Your truth is where film coincides with reality itself; his is constructed with a view to dramatic effect. And yet your films are fiction and his are non-fiction. Fact or fabrication: which is more true?
Novelists are inevitably confronted with the pendulum movement between fact and fiction at some point. Some writers boast that every imaginary character is a fragment of their own self. So is writing nothing other than the transformation of one’s own experience? Creating something out of a vacuum is impossible, that much is for sure. I believe it was Jeroen Brouwers who wrote that “Nothing exists that does not touch something elseâ€. His fellow novelist Hugo Claus turned that into a game: the lie as an artform. I wonder if it would be possible today, in the age of literalness, to seek ambiguity in that way. The work of the writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer is probably a present-day example of truth as a complex web, a balance between irony and earnestness.
At the end of Pfeijffer’s novel Grand Hotel Europa, there is a description of Damien Hirst’s exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. The artist claims that the work exhibited there had been brought up from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. “Somewhere between lies and truth lies the truthâ€, was the exhibition’s motto. Hirst invents an alternative history that gives his newly created work a historical context. The value of the artefact shifts if its (conceptual) context is historical. Han Van Meegeren, the famous forger of Johannes Vermeer’s work, would know a thing or two about that. When his work The Supper at Emmaus was assumed to be a Vermeer, its artistic value was inestimable, not to mention its market value. When it was discovered to be a forgery, the work was promptly removed from the museum: the same artefact that was admired the day before as a Vermeer was now reviled as a Van Meegeren.
Pfeijffer uses Hirst’s work as the umpteenth variation on the idea that the prevailing identity of Europe lies in the glorification of its past. Time generates quality, or in the words of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “Lang ist die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber das Wahre.â€
It’s no coincidence that Hölderlin lived at a turning point in art history. After the Enlightenment, there was a growing interest in work from the past. Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s decision to bring Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion back to the concert stage marked the beginning of the emergence of the classical canon. A work can only be included in the canon if it has proved its ability to withstand the test of time. That was also the time when composers began writing music for eternity: the concept of the musical work was born. That term comes from the music philosopher Lydia Goehr, who explains in her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works how the level of detail in the score gained increasing importance. Before then, compositions were highly adaptable to the context. Because that context often changed, many details were not included in the score: it was left up to the creativity and improvisational talent of the musicians to fill them in. However originality became more important in the 19th century, with the result that improvisation, which often makes use of sophisticated musical formulae, began to fade systematically into the background. The score became gospel, the only source of truth. And that led to the cult of the composer as genius. But what if there were recordings of the composers themselves available from the turn of the century onwards? Which source has more weight, the recording or the score? And is a score more true if it is original?
In the 20th century, another new current emerged: historically informed performance practice, which was both a reaction against and a direct consequence of the developments of the 19th century. At its most rudimentary level, it means that you perform music with particular attention to the technology and performance conventions that existed at the time when the piece of music was composed. Academic research into the sources and the provision of evidence form the basis: the impossible search for the ultimate truth of the past began. It sometimes resulted in dogmatic and polemic thinking, but paradoxically enough, it also led to an entirely new and adventurous world of sound. All of that occurred mainly within early music. Within the opera genre, things moved in exactly the opposite direction: the historical context was adapted to the society of today. The historical anecdotalism of a libretto were traded in for its abstract, universal meaning, which was translated in turn to a modern setting. Which is more true, the universal or the anecdotal? Is the truth found in the past, present or future?
Dear Terrence, the characters you present are struggling with existential questions. When there is music in the film, it is often Romantic. More often, though, you cultivate the silence. It is known that your films are based on episodes from your own life, and yet you have been able to turn that specific inspiration into universal contemplations of the human condition. There are no ironic games with the truth in your work, but rather a genuine belief in Bildung. Your films are epic in scale but poetic in tone. They are meditations that come closer to a mystical tradition, the search for a baseline, acceptation and emptiness. They do not seek an ultimate, fixed truth, but in all their modesty, they reveal wonder through the phenomena that surround us. Moments of truth: little wonders that occur for those who are attentive in the world.