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BFI Filmstore  >   Books & Magazines >  BFI Classics  > Thin Red Line, The: BFI Film Classics
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Thin Red Line, The: BFI Film Classics

02-Nov-04
97 pages
Published/distributed by BFI Publishing
ISBN/EAN: 9781844570447
Paperback
Price: £9.99
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Thin Red Line, The: BFI Film Classics 
Chion, Michel
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 Gaudalcanal, 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.

How to make sense of this extraordinary film? 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.
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