Badlands (film)

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Badlands
Badlands promotional poster
Directed by	Terrence Malick
Produced by	Terrence Malick
Written by	Terrence Malick
Starring	Martin Sheen Sissy Spacek Warren Oates
Music by	James Taylor (theme "Migration")
Cinematography	Tak Fujimoto Steven Larner Brian Probyn
Editing by	Robert Estrin
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	October 15, 1973 U.S. release
Running time	95 min
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$500,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

Badlands is a 1973 film directed by Terrence Malick from his own script, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Warren Oates and Ramon Bieri are also featured. Malick has a small speaking part although he does not receive an acting credit.

The story, though fictional, is loosely based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1957.^[1]

Contents 1 Production 2 Plot 3 Score 4 Recognition 5 References 5.1 Bibliography

[edit] Production

The film was edited by Robert Estrin. Billy Weber is credited as associate editor and both he and the art designer Jack Fisk went on to work on Malick's next two features Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998).

[edit] Plot

Badlands is narrated from the perspective of Holly (Spacek), a teenaged girl living in a dead-end South Dakota town. One day she meets Kit (Sheen), a rebellious young greaser who sweeps her off her feet and takes her as his accomplice on a cross-country killing spree. Holly's narration, describing her adventures with Kit with romantic clichés, is juxtaposed with the grim reality of Kit's sociopathic appetite for grisly violence. This use of voice-over to create a dialectic between sound and image has become a dominant feature of Malick's work.

At the film's climax, Kit and Holly are arrested, having accumulated a large body count. Kit is sentenced to die, while Holly receives probation and becomes a local pariah.

[edit] Score

The film's score makes repeated use of the short composition Gassenhauer from Carl Orff's Schulwerk, and apparently also uses other pieces from the Schulwerk^[2]. The same piece was used for a scene in the film Ratcatcher as well as the films True Romance and Finding Forrester.

[edit] Recognition

In 1993, Badlands was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Michel Chion, 1999. The Voice in Cinema, translated by Claudia Gorbman, New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press.
• Michel Ciment, 1975. ‘Entretien avec Terrence Malick’, Positif, 170, Jun, 30-34.
• G. Richardson Cook, 1974. ‘The Filming of Badlands: An Interview with Terry Malick’, Filmmakers Newsletter, 7:8, Jun, 30-32.
• Charlotte Crofts, 2001. ‘From the “Hegemony of the Eye” to the “Hierarchy of Perception”: The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven’, Journal of Media Practice, 2:1, 19-29.
• Cameron Docherty, 1998. ‘Maverick Back from the Badlands’, The Sunday Times, Culture, 7 Jun, 4.
• Brian Henderson, 1983. ‘Exploring Badlands’. Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal of Film Theory, Criticism and Practice, 5:4, 38-51.
• Les Keyser, 1981. Hollywood in the Seventies, London: Tantivy Press
• Terrence Malick, 1973. Interview the morning after Badlands premiered at the New York Film Festival, American Film Institute Report, 4:4, Winter, 48.
• James Monaco, 1972. ‘Badlands’, Take One, 4:1, Sept/Oct, 32.
• J. P. Telotte, 1986. ‘Badlands and the Souvenir Drive’, Western Humanities Review, 40:2, Summer, 101-14.
• Beverly Walker, 1975. ‘Malick on Badlands’, Sight and Sound, 44:2, Spring, 82-3.

v • d • e Films directed by Terrence Malick Badlands (1973) • Days of Heaven (1978) • The Thin Red Line (1998) • The New World (2005) • Tree of Life (2009)