The Thin Red Line - 9781844570447

The Thin Red Line (1998) is only the third film to have been directed by Terrence Malick, the maverick genius of American cinema, in a thirty-year career. Set during the savage World War II battle for Guadalcanal, it boasts a stellar cast - including George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn and John Travolta - but otherwise goes entirely against the grain of conventional Hollywood film-making. Action, narrative and patriotism are subordinated to sometimes cryptic interior monologues and exquisite images of animals and nature which many viewers found perplexing and disconcerting.
Michel Chion traces the connections to Malick's earlier work: a complicated sense of 'paradise on earth', an intensely questioning sensibility, characters whose disembodied voices yearn for new knowledge and truth. He links The Thin Red Line not only to James Jones's novel on which it is loosely based, but also to a tradition of American thought (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman). More than that, Chion pays minute attention to the substance of the film itself - the images, sounds, faces, landscapes and words which combine to create a magnificent reflection on the beauty, inexplicability and tragedy of people's co-existence with each other and with the world.