Voyage of Time: Terrence Malick's masterful space documentary premieres digitally

Streaming service MUBI brings Malick’s audiovisual event to digital home cinema.

Frankfurt – With Terrence Malick it’s always just about the really big questions, which of course everyone has to answer for themselves: Where do I come from? Where am I going? What really makes a human being human? What is love? To put it with pathos: Terrence Malick is Stanley Kubrick’s deputy on earth. In fact, both US master directors have a lot in common. Above all, an unmistakable visual signature that does not ignore the acoustic design of their films. Like Kubrick, who died in 1999 shortly after the completion of his final epic “Eyes Wide Shut”, Malick, born on November 30, 1943 in Ottawa (Illinois), only made relatively few films, but set standards in a wide variety of genres. Both are perfectionists – and also moralists.

They can confidently be described as artistically and commercially immensely successful outsiders in the otherwise uninnovative Hollywood cinema. You are or were extremely shy of publicity, give/give (almost never) interviews. All of their employees, especially the actors, rave about them. And both worked(ed)n faster and faster on their numerous projects in the autumn of their lives. Immediately after Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick wanted to bring AI (completed in 2001 by his friend Steven Spielberg) to the big screen. After Malick only made three films from 1969 to 1978 (“Lanton Mills”, “Badlands – Shattered Dreams”, “In the Embers of the South”), a record-breaking 20-year directorial break followed. But unexpectedly, at the end of the old millennium, he rose like a phoenix from the ashes!

“Voyage of Time”: First documentary by Terence Malick

With “The Thin Red Line” (1998) he made perhaps the first esoteric anti-war film with a star cast, which preferred to devote itself to the observation and destruction of nature than to the usual combat operations. After a stint as producer (including 2001’s Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times and 2006’s Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace), Malick retired from the 2005 biopic Che (Steven Soderbergh later took over). With renewed vigour, he created “The New World” (2006), the best film of the new millennium to date. In the true love story of the Native American princess Pocahontas (embodied by the then 14-year-old new discovery Q’orianka Kilcher), who falls in love with the British explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell), he shot like Kubrick in “Barry Lyndon” (1973- 75) with highly sensitive (Nasa) lenses, without using artificial light in the morning and evening hours.

In 2011, “The Tree of Life”, which was shot in 2008, was followed by what is probably the most unusual family drama in film history: the story of a strict father (Brad Pitt) who wants to make his sensitive sons more resilient, the film went into breathtaking images that, like Kubrick’s ” 2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1965-68) were largely based on chemical experimentation and accurate photography (rather than digital effects), going back to the origin of the universe and from then to the future. The Palme d’Or in Cannes was quite rightly so.

During his last four feature films – “To the Wonder” (2012), “Knight of Cups” (2015), “Song to Song” (2017) and “A Hidden Life” (2019) starring August Diehl as an Austrian executed by the Nazis Resistance fighter Franz Jägerstätter, where he again relied more on a structured script instead of improvisation – all of them had a regular theatrical release in this country, his first documentary has only very rarely been shown in special screenings: “Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey” (the original title ) was produced in two versions, a 45-minute IMAX version with Brad Pitt as the narrator and a longer one with Cate Blanchett as the narrator. While the essayistic monumental epic without dialogues and battles was shown around the world after the premiere at the Venice International Film Festival on September 7, 2016 and the “IMAX Experience” variant even had a regular US start a month later there is only one DVD release in Germany on February 23, 2018. Incomprehensibly, one has not seen more beguiling images of the universe since Kubrick’s stroke of genius “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

“Voyage of Time”: MUBI releases IMAX version for digital home cinema

Now the subscription-based streaming service MUBI (formerly The Auteurs), founded by the Turkish entrepreneur in 2007 and specializing in cinematic art and classics, has brought Malick’s audiovisual event to digital home cinema. Namely the shorter IMAX version, which can hardly be surpassed in terms of plasticity due to its extremely fine-grained 65 mm film look. A 3D look was created in 4K, so to speak, without 3D technology. Despite all the technical innovation, “Voyage of Time” starts with the word. A text panel with white writing runs in front of a black background: “Dear Child, I remember when I was young – how, at night, I’d go out on the lower road. Look upon the stars and wonder – where we came from, and how things get set up, anyway – and where it all goes.” Only then does Brad Pitt’s economical but poetic off-commentary set in, depicting the images of children playing, a accompanying oversized tree of life (“The Tree of Life”!?) and passing clouds full of associations. And then the screen goes pitch black again for a few seconds until a tiny orange-red dot glows in the middle, which quickly gets bigger and bigger. It is the “big bang” that in cosmology marks the beginning of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago, i.e. the starting point of the emergence of matter, space and time. Watching the entire documentary is worthwhile just for this cinematic “re-enactment” of the exploding “pinhead”.

Malick then switches a little too quickly to the first physical structures in space: bluish spiral nebulae, suns outshining everything in the various galaxies, first planets and the emergence of life on an island in the almost limitless space called Earth.

At the beginning, 4.5 billion years ago, this was still completely uninhabitable. However, the earth continued to cool down, so that liquid water could collect on the crust and oceans were formed. And that’s where life began about 3.8 billion years ago – but initially only in the form of the simplest bacteria. At extreme magnification, these and other microorganisms look like oblong, blue sausages, some without a skin but with hair. But these are also filmed in swarms by Malick as beautifully as a gigantic underwater ballet.

Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time: The Beginning and End of Time

The journey through time and space leads from the “Big Bang” to the dinosaurs to the present and even beyond – the death of the entire universe. This could be in a Big Rip, the Big Crunch (“The Big Crash”) or the Big Freeze (“The Big Freeze” after an almost eternal expansion of at least 10 to the power of 100 years). end up. In this period of time, which is so unimaginable for us, one particle that continues to disintegrate is so far away from the other in space that the time bound to matter “freezes”, so to speak. The state of eternity would be reached. However, the universe may still be able to escape thermal death from quantum fluctuations, which could cause a new big bang in about 10 to the 10 to the 56th year. A spontaneous reduction of entropy, caused by fluctuations, would be conceivable over a quasi-infinite period of time after the recurrence principle. This would make a rebirth of the universe possible. It’s comforting, even if we won’t live to see it…

Malick, the philosopher among filmmakers who once studied this scientific discipline at the University of Oxford but abandoned his doctoral work on Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein after disagreements with his dissertation supervisor Gilbert Ryle, is not so detailed. His “Star Child” is not the fetus stuck in an amniotic sac, who looks at our blue planet with wide open eyes in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, but the little girl who is already walking across a meadow at the beginning of the documentary.

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Malick does not hear Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, Johann Strauss’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (son), “Lux Aeterna” by György Ligeti or the Armenian lullaby from the ballet “Gayaneh” by Adam Chatschaturjan, but rather the 9th Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven as well as various, almost sacred pieces by film composer Simon Franglen, “Cosmic Beam Experience” creator Francesco Lupica or Arvo Pärt, the Estonian-Austrian representative of the “New Simplicity”. Terrence Malick underscores their sometimes ethereal, sometimes anthemic sounds with his mix of actual images of space, obtained with the help of the Hubble telescope and NASA space probes, and artificial images created by practical effects by BAFTA-nominated VFX master Dan Glass. His advisor was none other than Douglas Trumbull (“2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Space Silence”, “Star Trek: The Movie”, “The Tree of Life”). One of the executive producers is Jacques Perrin: the former French teen idol (“The Self-Deceived”, “Murder Included in the Fare”, “Z”) has long since established itself as a director and producer of animal films (“Nomads of the Air – Das Secret of the Migratory Birds”) started a second career.

Malick himself says about “Voyage of Time” that it was his greatest dream to realize the twelve million US dollar project, which he worked on overall, filmed in the Southwest of the United States and in Papua New Guinea as well as in Hawaii and Iceland worked for over forty years. In the song in praise of nature, life and science, which received the “Green Drop Award” and the “Future Film Festival Digital Award” (“Special Mention”) in Venice, he has achieved the impossible: the depiction of the beginning, the middle and possible end of time. What else can come after that (filmically)? (Marc Hairapetian)