The Tree of Life

1

My mum and I went to see Terrence Malik's new film this week; it was an extraordinary experience. I'm really not sure what it was about, and it was certainly one of the strangest things I've ever seen in the cinema. But it had an ongoing effect - Mum and I have both talked about it a lot since, and as Mum was flying home the next day the memory of the film made her feel quite funny about being up in the sky. It makes you think about all the molecules and fibres that make up the world and through which we are part of a huge organism called life. 

2

This makes it sound like some kind of gaia philosophy, and maybe that's what it is supposed to be expressing, but I think of gaia (perhaps unfairly) as almost neutralising relationships into millions and millions of connections that operate on the same principle. Whereas this film was definitely about how specific things or people connect to other specific things or people.

3

It has absolutely beautiful and totally absorbing sequences on childhood, where you can feel and smell soft baby skin, light breezes at the window, washed fabrics, tiny fingers and toes, eyelashes and bedhead. And it, rightly, makes parenting a profound and responsible process. You see both parents (the acting was brilliant) moving through different phases of relationship, proximity, domination, anger, responsibility and gracefulness involved in being parents.

4

Because they have to deal with bereavement, parts of this film are so painful and raw, it's incredible. Much of this comes from the cinematography, lighting, sound: this film uses technical aspects with touching sensitivity. Since the birth of the camera (as we learn from Walter Benjamin) art has to build, rather than assume, a relationship with aura, which is complicated when you have cameras and film that appear to capture an everyday reality, no part of which is more significant than the next. I love gritty realist films and photographs, but this offers something totally different.

5

It is unapologetically non-realist and, to me, feels more like the experience of a Renaissance painting, a Michelangelo ceiling, or his pieta. The film captures memory more than plot, and grief and emotion more than action. It made me think about how so many of those huge paintings to the glory of God seem also to be about the pain of life on earth. Long sequences that spin through time from the big bang to now put individual bereavements into a bizarre, disorientating but, I think, ultimately comforting perspective.

6

Perhaps best of all is the music - Smetana, Preisner, Couperin, Bach. 

1. on a walk in the trossachs

2. last week in the botanic gardens

3.the beautiful meadow that we are about to lose to developers

4. the family baby

5. jellyfish and pudgy toddler arms in la jolla

6. more jellyfish at the scripps institute