Laurel Creighton
HIST 14100 02
The United States from the Colonial Era to the Civil War
July 12, 2023
A Comparative Review of Historical Realism within Terrence Malick’s The New World and Robert Eggers’ The Witch
In Cinema, the art of historical realism has been a subject of continuous exploration and interpretation from the birth of Lumiere's machine. Through the lens of adept filmmakers, the past is brought to life, giving audiences a glimpse into bygone eras, cultures, and worldviews. Terrence Malick's magnum opus, "The New World," and Robert Eggers' haunting masterpiece, "The Witch," are examples of how two visionary directors tackle historical realism in distinct ways. Both films transport viewers to early periods of human history, immersing them in worlds long gone but preserved through meticulous research and artistic vision. This paper endeavors to undertake a comparative review of how Malick and Eggers approach historical realism in their respective works, analyzing the methods employed to reconstruct historical settings and their impact on the portrayal of characters, themes, and the overall cinematic experience. By delving into these filmmakers' distinctive yet interconnected approaches, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of how they harness the power of historical realism to breathe life into their narratives and captivate audiences with stories from the past.
Terrance Malick’s The New World was his third production following the success of Badlands and Thin Red Line (Gunning, 7). The film focuses on the founding of Virginia’s Jamestown settlement and the troubled relationship between John Smith, Pocahontas, and her eventual marriage to her husband and tobacco giant, John Rolfe. The film was released in 2005 and stars Colin Farrell as John Smith, Q’orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, and Christian Bale as John Rolfe. There is a notable performance of Christopher Plummer as Captain Newport. Malick's film captures the essence of an untamed land on the brink of irrevocable transformation, leaving audiences with a profound contemplation of history, humanity, and the eternal interplay between civilizations.
Armed with a research team of historians, archeologists, anthropologists, and members of Virginia tribes to represent a faithful reconstruction of Powhatan and English agriculture, architecture, language, and material culture, the sets for Fort James and for Werowocomoco were reconstructed exclusively with local materials, and within a ten-mile radius of their original locations. Considered a “time capsule” from 1607-1617, the film is shot on 35 mm stock, using only natural lighting and without the aid of computer-generated effects. Malick even went as far as to hire choreographers and martial arts experts to teach the actors the fundamentals of “seventeenth-century body language” and dialect trainers to help Q’orianka Kilcher pronounce both the Algonquian language and Algonquian-accented seventeenth-century English (Siebert, 130).
While the film starts off historically as accurate as one can assume the time period would allow, it makes a sharp divestment of its historical purity at the base of its storytelling. Malick offers us a lyrical and beautiful world being built but skimps on the realities of the romance it portrays. The fictional relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas gives the audience little more than a live-action Disney-on-steroids retelling of tragedy and star-crossed lovers doomed from the start. The question I allow myself to continue rumbling is whether all the detail and work that Malick put into this film offers anything more to the story other than imperialist nostalgia and how that pertains to a film like Eggers’ The Witch, another brutally meticulously planned film but based entirely on a fictional world.
The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers, is a chilling and atmospheric horror film set in 1630’s New England. It was released in 2015 and stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, and Kate Dickie. The story follows a Puritan family exiled from their devout community and forced to settle at the edge of a dense and foreboding forest. As they strive to create a new life on their isolated farm, strange and sinister occurrences plague the family. Their infant son mysteriously vanishes, and malevolence looms over their household. As paranoia, fear, and religious fervor grip each family member, they become convinced that a malevolent witch lurking in the woods is responsible for the misfortunes plaguing them. Blurring the lines between supernatural and psychological horror, "The Witch" delves into themes of religious fanaticism, isolation, and the disintegration of familial bonds, providing audiences with a haunting and deeply unsettling journey into the darkness of human nature and the supernatural realm.
According to sources, Eggers undertook an “aggressively accurate portrait of the time period… and the fears it contained,” including a three-year research period while working with historians at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts, where he studied details about 17th-century colonial life, including Calvinism to goat farming to witchcraft. Eggers was originally trained as a production designer before becoming a director, giving him the propensity to create an immersive mise-en-scene. Like Malick, Eggers used only natural lighting except for night scenes but took the set building to the extremes of only using tools available during the time period to create the historically accurate homestead. Eggers also took into consideration the sound in addition to the image and used instruments from the period to score the film (Briefel, 4).
There are five classroom-tested ways of teaching social studies with films. The first is viewing the film as a visual textbook, followed by the film as a depicter of atmosphere, film as an analogy, film as a historiography, and film as a springboard (Russell III, 157). Film as a learning-based module has proven to be impactful and to influence a person’s perspective of history (O'Connor,25; O’Connor and Jackson 47), as well as; that film can also be an accurate interpretation of historical events (Rosenstone, 36). When comparing these methods with The New World and The Witch, the former would best be categorized as film as a visual textbook (i.e., film as historiography), and the latter could be considered film as a springboard, while both films could easily also sub-categorize themselves as film as a depicter of atmosphere.
The problem with The New World as a source for film as historiography is the issue it’s liberal use of historical fact; many sources refute the love story behind Pocahontas and John Smith. Another issue with using an actor to portray a real-life individual from the past is problematic because, according to James Naremore in his book, Acting in the Cinema, he argues that “human figures in a film are received in three different ways: as actors playing fictional characters, as actors playing “themselves,” and as facts in a documentary” (Naremore, 3386). When an actor steps into the robes and garments of the past as a re-imagined persona, that persona takes on the likeness of the actor. Many years from today, viewers unaware of Oppenheimer will imagine him as Oppenheimer, portrayed by Cillian Murphy. This is even more true for historical figures who lived and dwelled before photography and film. They inherit the actor’s portrayal of them and lose some semblance of their own bodily autonomy. So, when Malick makes a big-budget film casting Q’orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas and then taking liberties with Pocahontas’ original story, we see less of the truth and more of a mirror for Malick’s psyche – one encased in the demise of its original purpose of showing the brutality of the relocation of the Powhatan people, and instead it’s internalized imperialist nostalgia.
Renato Rosaldo, an American anthropologist, defined imperialist nostalgia as a specific emotional economy that dominated the emotional logic of many colonial and post-colonial societies. He describes:
A person kills somebody and then mourns his or her victim. In more attenuated
form, someone deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that things have
not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention. At one more remove,
people destroy their environment and then worship nature. In any of its versions,
imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of “innocent yearning” both to capture people’s
imagination and to conceal its complicity with, often brutal, domination. (108)
The case of imperialist nostalgia in The New World is problematic and garners considerable cause for questioning. Malick’s film juxtaposes the brutal daily life of the colonists in Jamestown with the communist idealism of Werowocomoco – a place of plenty and pleasure without crime or power play. However, when Werowocomoco is destroyed, Malick’s camera captures the empty land as “miraculously recovered from the wounds of conflict” (Siebert, 141). The film’s conclusion shows the vast wilderness that our predecessors of this country chose to come to this country for, the virgin land which offered infinite opportunities for the Europeans.
The Witch utilizes something called “Prosthetic Memory”, a phenomenon that “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum…. The person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more persona, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live” (Breifel, 4). Eggers creates a “Puritan’s nightmare” by placing us into the point of view of a young woman around the time of the Salem witch trials. Exiled from the commonwealth and England, Tomasin is tempted by the devil to “live deliciously” such as experiencing such luxuries as butter, dresses, and world travel. The earlier scenes of destitution and bitter survival by eating bug-infested corn from a dying crop only juxtaposition the nostalgia for a safe place back “home” in England. In fact, it is estimated that one in six colonists returned to England after witnessing the Puritan experiences in the new world (Breifel, 9).
Egger’s decision to keep England isolated from its viewers makes the place seem as disconnected from us as it is from Tomasin and her family. We imagine England and the stained-glass windows of Tomasin’s past, but we do not witness it. “England” becomes more of a dream-like place instead of a concrete entity. Tomasin’s father, William, unable to till and tend to the earth, eats handfuls of it and begs God to forgive him of his pride. William wishes for the earth to become familiar again, like the family he must have left behind and his homestead back in Yorkshire, England, or even the commonwealth from which he was exiled for practicing religious extremism.
Without the use of a real story from history, Eggers produces a textured and layered narrative that would place viewers into a place located in a time far removed from where we currently reside. We first experience the desolation and hardship of Puritan living and then understand the fearmongering of religion and an eventual witch hunt. Tomasin was fighting a battle not only against the elements but religion and feminist oppression leading to a tailspin of certain death by being deemed a witch, a very real thing that happened to many women. Her story is a terrifying feminist nightmare, and the ending gives Tomasin a way out – something that did not happen for the women at Salem, Massachusetts, in February of 1692.
Works Cited
Briefel, Aviva. “Devil in the Details: The Uncanny History of the Witch (2015).” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, 2019, pp. 4–20. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/flm.2019.0002.
Buscombe, Edward. “What’s New in the New World.” Film Quarterly, vol. Vol. 62, no. No. 3, Apr. 2009, pp. 35–40. JSTOR.
Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. 1988, ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA19692945.
O’Connor, John E. Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television. 2007.
O’Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson. American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
Rosenstone, Robert A. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Harvard UP, 1998.
RUSSELL, WILLIAM B., III. “The Art of Teaching Social Studies With Film.” The Clearing House, vol. Vol. 85, no. No. 4, 2012, pp. 157–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23212875.
SIEBERT, MONIKA. “Historical Realism and Imperialist Nostalgia in Terrence Malick’s the New World.” The Mississippi Quarterly , Special Issue on Southern Roots and Routes, vol. Vol. 65, no. No. 1, Jan. 2012, pp. 139–56. JSTOR.
Gunning, Tom, "Dwelling in Malick's New World" in The New World, Terrence Malick (Criterion, 2015), pp. 7-15.
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