#malick

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Collaboration with @jayden-for-now !!!

+ Terrence Malick, Olga Kurylenko: 'He wanted me to combine their influences—the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side.'

Nastasya Filippovna - Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

“I know that once when your sister Adelaida saw my portrait she said that such beauty could overthrow the world. But I have renounced the world. You think it strange that I should say so, for you saw me decked with lace and diamonds, in the company of drunkards and wastrels. Take no notice of that; I know that I have almost ceased to exist. God knows what it is dwelling within me now–it is not myself. I can see it every day in two dreadful eyes which are always looking at me, even when not present. These eyes are silent now, they say nothing; but I know their secret. His house is gloomy, and there is a secret in it. I am convinced that in some box he has a razor hidden, tied round with silk, just like the one that Moscow murderer had. This man also lived with his mother, and had a razor hidden away, tied round with white silk, and with this razor he intended to cut a throat.

All the while I was in their house I felt sure that somewhere beneath the floor there was hidden away some dreadful corpse, wrapped in oil-cloth, perhaps buried there by his father, who knows? Just as in the Moscow case. I could have shown you the very spot!

He is always silent, but I know well that he loves me so much that he must hate me. My wedding and yours are to be on the same day; so I have arranged with him. I have no secrets from him. I would kill him from very fright, but he will kill me first. He has just burst out laughing, and says that I am raving. He knows I am writing to you.”

Dostoevsky’s Nastasya Filippovna from “THE IDIOT” (Snegovski _)

“but when he was two rooms distant from the drawing-room, where they all were, he stopped as though recalling something; went to the window, nearer the light, and began to examine the portrait in his hand.

He longed to solve the mystery of something in the face of Nastasia Philipovna, something which had struck him as he looked at the portrait for the first time; the impression had not left him. It was partly the fact of her marvellous beauty that struck him, and partly something else. There was a suggestion of immense pride and disdain in the face almost of hatred, and at the same time something confiding and very full of simplicity. The contrast aroused a deep sympathy in his heart as he looked at the lovely face. The blinding loveliness of it was almost intolerable, this pale thin face with its flaming eyes; it was a strange beauty.

The prince gazed at it for a minute or two, then glanced around him, and hurriedly raised the portrait to his lips. When, a minute after, he reached the drawing-room door, his face was quite composed.

…

Mrs. Epanchin examined the portrait of Nastasia Philipovna for some little while, holding it critically at arm’s length.

“Yes, she is pretty,” she said at last, “even very pretty. I have seen her twice, but only at a distance. So you admire this kind of beauty, do you?” she asked the prince, suddenly.

“Yes, I do—this kind.”

“Do you mean especially this kind?”

“Yes, especially this kind.”

“Why?”

“There is much suffering in this face,” murmured the prince, more as though talking to himself than answering the question.

“I think you are wandering a little, prince,” Mrs. Epanchin decided, after a lengthened survey of his face; and she tossed the portrait on to the table, haughtily.

Alexandra took it, and Adelaida came up, and both the girls examined the photograph. Just then Aglaya entered the room.

“What a power!” cried Adelaida suddenly, as she earnestly examined the portrait over her sister’s shoulder.

“Whom? What power?” asked her mother, crossly.

“Such beauty is real power,” said Adelaida. “With such beauty as that one might overthrow the world.” She returned to her easel thoughtfully.

Aglaya merely glanced at the portrait—frowned, and put out her underlip; then went and sat down on the sofa with folded hands.”

“The prince declares, upon marrying Nastasya Filippovna, that it is better to resurrect a woman than to perform the actions of Alexander of Macedonia.”

“The prince. Essential social conviction: the economic doctrine of the uselessness of individual good actions is absurd. On the contrary, everything is based on individual action.”

Dostoevsky, The Idiot’s Notebooks

Photo via X/Twitter

“All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest—worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty!

… Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. But a man always talks of his own ache.”

The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky

Marcel Proust: “Well, then, this novel beauty remains identical in all Dostoevsky’s works, the Dostoevsky woman (as distinctive as a Rembrandt woman) with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been but make-believe, to a terrible insolence (although at heart it seems that she is more good than bad), is she not always the same, whether it be Nastasia Philipovna writing love letters to Aglaé and telling her that she hates her, or in a visit which is wholly identical with this — as also with that in which Nastasia Philipovna insults Vania’s family — Grouchenka, as charming in Katherina Ivanovna’s house as the other had supposed her to be terrible, then suddenly revealing her malevolence by insulting Katherina Ivanovna (although Grouchenka is good at heart); Grouchenka, Nastasia, figures as original, as mysterious not merely as Carpaccio’s courtesans but as Rembrandt’s Bathsheba.”

“This radiant, dual face, with sudden bursts of pride that make the woman appear other than she is (‘You are not such,’ Muichkine says to Nastasia in the visit to Gania’s parents, and Alyosha could say it to Grushenka in the visit to Katherina Ivanovna).”

Photo: Olga Kurylenko: Marina, To the Wonder, Terrence Malick

“Terrence Malick recommended that Olga Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna.”

Olga Kurylenko: “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

“Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot: Those books were, in a way, his script,” Olga Kurylenko says”. - BEHIND THE SCENES: https://www.vulture.com/2013/04/how-terrence-malick-wrote-filmed-edited-to-the-wonder.html

…

“In To the Wonder (Terrence Malick), Marina (Olga Kurylenko) has a predisposition to melancholy,” Kurylenko says. “She’s a very unstable woman. She’s suffering. So when she meets a man, she sees him as the ending of all her suffering. But it’s just an illusion.” To prepare, Terrence Malick directed the actress to the bricks of Russian literature – Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot (Dostoevsky). Olga Kurylenko: “I didn’t even need the script after that. Those were my script. I built the character as a combination of the different female characters in those books.” https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/olga-kurylenko-talks-russian-literature-and-terrence-malick-181787/

"Terrence Malick asked me to reread Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. All the three of them are that thick!" Olga Kurylenko, 'To The Wonder’, Terrence Malick

“Because life is not a thin book. It is terribly long, and tangled, and dense. Tolstoy didn’t even want to stop War and Peace. Two epilogues, eight new chapters… it was like Time itself in motion. And Dostoevsky, writing these gigantic books precisely because he always wants to start reality anew.” George Steiner, translated from French

SUBLIME CINEMA #623 - THE NEW WORLD

I love The New World and the mix of a formal style and a more experimental, looser style that marks the later films of Terrence Malick. People are divided about this one. I’m an admirer. 

It is profoundly observant and works as an epic meditation on love and nature. I could sit and watch this all day long and always get lost in it, and then get so much out of it back. 

'the soul, this monument made of stones and grays, composed of water, winds, and tides, this monument of silence that encloses in its corners a thousand deserts and hides a thousand perspectives, but at its heart, there is a red rose, waiting and always opening🌹'

Philippe Fraisse: The Cinema of Terrence Malick, 'To the Wonder'

Video: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Candy's Room (Live at The Paramount Theatre 2009)

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