Critical response to this movie beggars belief. If he had just made the dullest movie ever (people walked out of my showing), Malik could be forgiven. But this empty, patronising, sentimentalised farrago of historic lies is scandalously ethnocentrically, totally white European. It perpetuates the worst form of a myth of such indestructible power that it must serve a deep psychological need among Euro-Americans. Malik’s writing and direction makes this play like cod Jane Austen – all prejudice, no pride. We expect crass sentimentality from the Disney Corporation (Pocahantas - 1995) but one might have expected better of Terence Malik.

‘The New World’ - New to whom? The Euro-centric heart of this misconceived film is signalled even in the title. Without a trace of irony. On a par with the shameful fiction peddled to every European child including me for almost 500 years – that Columbus ‘discovered’ America. The hell he did. The history and culture of the indigenous peoples of North America for 20,000 years BC (before Columbus) ignored before the first portentous frame of this over-wrought, over-long movie hits the screen.

The real life of Matoaka (Pocahantas) has been stolen and mythologised by Euro-Americans into the perfect Indian: mediating, conciliatory, submissively female and apparent convert to Christianity, who for whatever actual reasons eventually lived among white colonists and adopted their dress and culture. “Kill the Indian, and save the man” Capt Richard C Pratt, Founder of the Carlisle School for Indian students, on the education of Native Americans (1875). Artistic truth can transcend the historical but the indigenous peoples of North America still wait in vain for the reality of either to be heard. Despite the ethnically self-serving mythology surrounding Mataoka, there is historical consensus that if this daughter of an Algonquin chief saved mercenary soldier John Smith’s life she was barely 12 when she did so. If this strikes you as significant, check out the history for yourself at www.powhatan.org. and elsewhere on the internet where more balanced views can be found of her abduction and eventual fate as the trophy wife of tobacco planter John Rolfe. I will leave the history to others with this from Thoreau – “history recorded by one who believes his race superior to others, is no history at all.”

Malik directed one of the seminal movies of the 70’s in Badlands (1973) and one of the best war movies in The Thin Red Line (1998). This makes the sheer awfulness of TNW hard to credit. Some of the imagery is even re-cycled from TTRL like the closing shot of the tops of tall trees rooted in the ground yet reaching for the sky. Clunking dialogue is rendered worse by a risibly reverential narration with portentous sentiments far too weighty for the travelogue-pretty but frequently banal images they are intended to enhance. The intention of the images of nature is clear enough: the sense of a pristine wilderness shared by two cultures uncomprehending of one another and with a profoundly different sense of their relationship to that natural world. And this mirrored on a personal level by a tragic love story trapped in the cultural no-mans-land between. This is a serious, interesting and worthwhile subject – so why not tell it establishing its truth through its imaginative artistic authenticity instead of trying to invest it with a crass, false authority based upon blatant historical distortion and downright falsehoods?

Philosophy not history is my area, and it is conceptually that this film is so shallow. Malik’s film actually only shows one culture but under two aspects. And I can only assume he doesn’t realise it. First he shows directly the Christian-based culture of the Euro-American colonists. But then, undermining his whole project, he shows a sentimentalised, patronising Euro-centric distortion of the crucial other half of this dramatically potent equation.

Nothing proves this better than the vapid, submissive, quintessential victim that is his ‘heroine’. Women should be almost as angry at this film as Native Americans. By all accounts Matoaka, the fiercely intelligent independent daughter of a great Algonquin Chief, was used abused and transported to England as a trophy wife. There she died, separated from her people and her culture. Perfect as a base upon which the white man could construct his myth of the perfect Indian - submissive, naïve victim. Matoaka was actually born into a culture that placed respect for women at the heart of its spiritual and earthly values. Women in Native American society could occupy almost any position: from warrior to priest (nota bene Catholics and Anglicans), Their voices were heard and respected in the highest tribal forums several hundred years before European women were even allowed to vote let alone lead prayer.

Deeper still: when Mataoka, in an apparently true incident, brings food from her people to help the starving Europeans survive the implacably hostile winter the suppressed premises speak volumes. First this is seen as distinguishing Mataoka from her people, when in fact her act would have been totally in keeping with her tribe’s attitudes and beliefs – the felt necessity to help through sharing, fellow human beings struggling for survival in a hostile environment. Not said, but implied, it seems to me is the sense of this act being a surprise, i.e. not what you’d expect from such ‘primitive’ people. The whole Christian conceptual framework of such acts - duty, charity, doing something self-consciously ‘good’ in the name of, and in obedience to God etc is missing. Yet the un-self-regarding naturalness of the act, and lack of ‘rewards-in-heaven’ sub-text, enhances its true moral force rather than diminishes it.

This is the true background against which Malik’s film should be judged. His passive, unthreatening heroine is turned from the real 12 year-old who first met John Smith into an ambiguously older woman in order to perpetuate the cliched Mills and Boon fiction of a pretty little princess who falls helplessly in love with the strong, manly adventurer Smith. This has about as much to do with the facts as the Life of Brian has with Christian theology and is about as ethnically authentic as a plate of microwaved Chicken Tikka Marsala.

The indigenous people of North America have been subjected to virtual genocide; their lands looted, stolen and polluted; their culture systematically denigrated, prohibited and ignored; and even in modern times, their civil rights abused and treaties reneged upon in the cause of political expediency and corporate profit. It is hard to imagine any more harm we, the white European peoples could do to them, yet Mr Malik with this self-indulgent, misconceived, world-distributed film has perpetuated the ongoing injustice against this extraordinary, almost miraculously surviving people – the theft of their history itself.

If you want to know the truth – check this out on the many web-sites on the internet. If you want to help, check out the Nihewan Foundation or its Cradleboard Project. If you want to hear an authentic and far more eloquent expression than mine, of the anger and pain of 500 years of shameful exploitation and injustice you can do no better than listen to the music of (Dr) Buffy Sainte Marie, especially perhaps the CD Coincidence and Likely Stories (1996). She wrote and performed the best-known anti-war song of all time – ‘The Universal Soldier’. Even here most people think this powerful song was actually written by Britain’s Donovan, who had a hit with it at about the time Buffy Sainte-Marie’s version and other music was being kept off radio stations in the United States.

In the end I suppose we must judge Malik’s film on its intrinsic artistic merits. For me, it is tedious, dull, poorly written, even in its own historical terms, and prettily but indulgently filmed. It is unfair perhaps to judge the performances given what the actors had to work with but only the excellent Christopher Plummer is remotely credible. As for 16 year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher – let’s hope her charismatic screen presence and natural beauty can be directed towards a more worthwhile project in the future.

Hello,
Malik makes us see through the Smith caracter until he goes back to England. Then we see trough the the english ladies in the colonie, and then partly through Rolfe.
Never Malik pretends to put us into the head and body of the indians...
Talking of honnesty...he has nothing to learn here...
Never we penetrate into the native princess 's mind, never Malik pretends showing us the world through her eyes...
For me this film is an exploration, a dive into the european mindset. Malik, puts us through the processes that constitute our culture, and, above all, the european male desire for a perfect, virgin, non-sexualised, fantomatic and forgivefull female.
" You don't know who I am" says many times Smith...and we...spectators...know who he is...because we see everything through him...therefore we are him...
With people who "tell the truth", who reveal us ignorants what really happened, how the world really is...I cant learn who I am...with Malik I can...and knowing who I am...

He called his movie The New World...you put that for being the revelation of his ethno-centered mind...how stupid do you think he is ?
Making such a film, he knows people like you are out there, waiting to "tell the truth"...
This film; for me, is one of the few who have given me the desire to explore more profoundly my culture and mindsets, and gave me a bit more distance to do so.
Malik is a lyrical voice : what he gives comes from this relentless amplification of a mindset, in which he immerses us
regards
Karlovie.

Karlovie

Away from base so have limited time.

Thanks for the thoughtful commments. I'll respond properly when I get back.

regards

Zettel

Karlovie

Thanks for your thoughtful and challenging response. Sorry it took a while to reply properly. Just a few comments on what I take to be your meaning.

I agree with you that a lyrical, subjective perspective in a film is not only valid but can be immensely powerful and affecting. And this is a persuasive way of reading both Badlands and The Thin Red Line. Also, as I put in the review, I accept that aesthetic truth can sometimes move and illuminate more than empirical truth. A theme well exemplified in recent times in both Burton’s Big Fish and Godard’s Notre Musique. I would also agree that many films are a great deal more subjective in reality than they purport to be.

The trouble with a totally lyrical view is that it places itself logically beyond criticism. One can only challenge subjectivity or solipsism from without, not from within, for it is a logical feature of both that someone else cannot know what the individual knows, certainly not in the same way or to the same degree. This was a major post-war anglo-saxon philosophical dispute in the philosophy of mind, centring on the idea of the possibility of a private language. I would only point out that the solipsist as artist is contradicting his own mindset in offering a work for others to understand and share which by the artist’s own logic, they cannot do.

If therefore I must respond to Malik’s film in much the same way as I would to any natural or contrived example of beauty, then of course logically, I am restricted merely to “this does not move, touch, affect, reach me” And that, for what it is worth, is my reaction to Malik’s film, irrespective of any issues of truth, historical or otherwise. I find the images hackneyed, repetitive and re-cycled from other films. I find the sequences screaming out for editing discipline, pace or cadence. This is not an Andy Warhol point-the-camera-at-reality aesthetic experiment, it is a scripted, performed, constructed work of art and therefore all these elements are open to assessment and comment. I think the script clunks frequently with a kind of portentous pretentiousness. Unsurprisingly the performances lack any kind of conviction given the inadequacy of the dialogue the actors are required to speak. If this film is lyrical then to this viewer it lacks any form of poetry, visual, aural or textual.

I can see your holistic view of the film as a possible way of reading it. If it is a subjective euro-centric one-man’s-eye view of a critical moment in human history and in so doing invites us to see that Euro-centricity for what it was - blind to the indigenous culture that it met, exploited, corrupted, then virtually wiped from the face of the earth, then it would indeed be a very impressive film. But even on one viewing, I see no remotely convincing evidence within the film to support this view.

Not sure what to say about your suggestion of “the european male desire for a perfect, virgin, non-sexualised, fantomatic and forgiveful female.” I certainly recognise this also as a believable psychoanalytically persuasive description. But I would argue it must be interpreted as an unconscious not sub-conscious aspect of Malik’s direction. i.e. if it’s there it’s not there intentionally as part of his artistic vision, but sits unrecognised in his own unconscious mind. And the critic’s focus must be the art not the artist.

My objection to the title ‘The New World’ was to make a point about the film's Eurocentric colonisation of cultural as well as geographical history. Overall, my objection to the film is that it re-states a popular, demonstrable historical lie, thus perpetuating a racist, colonialist myth, which has had the effect of creating a comfortable illusion under which the abdication of the claimed Christian values of the conquerors can be hidden. Pocahantas was no more than 12 year’s-old when she met John Smith. To ignore this and turn real events and a real human being from someone else’s culture into a comforting racist myth with romantic sexual undertones in the interests of at best a misplaced aesthetic lyricism and at worst an entertainment product made for profit, is in my view unconscionable.

So I guess we must agree to disagree. But thanks for the comments. If Malik had, for me, made the film you feel he has, I would be the first to agree with you and congratulate him.

Regards

Zettel