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A film means finality, in our general conception of what a film is. You can write a screenplay on a popular program called Final Draft; you can edit a film on a popular program called Final Cut. ‘Final’ is fetishized in film. Scripts are locked, cuts are made, pictures are locked — occasionally a popular film will be re-released as a ‘director’s cut,’ which typically means the theatrical release has a few extra, usually weak scenes, tacked on. Given how plastic, how fluid, a medium as film (a moving picture) is, films themselves are traditionally fixed (perhaps as a existential bulwark against the medium’s inherent openness). In a YouTube culture, even in a culture in which images are perpetually, reflexively being recombined, filmmaking has clung to its telos of finality; as far as I know, no filmmaker has attempted to release several versions of a picture at once — or let audiences download scenes and combine them as they please.
Terrence Malick’s new, extended edition (Criterion Collection) of his 2010 Palmes D’or-winning Tree of Life, however, is a rare, and perhaps progressive, step away towards open-ended filmmaking, and away from the traditional notion of a film as a complete and final art object, like a Rembrandt in The Met. The new Tree of Life is not Malick’s first re-edit (there are several versions of The New World), but it is by far his boldest; the extended…
