ELLIPSIS - Aula de Cine Cineteca Laboral

This is a narrative device consisting of the omission of parts of the story not considered essential for its understanding. Ellipsis is so natural to the cinematic narrative that only the sequence shot, which reflects real time, stops it from being used. Every step from one sequence to the next, and even each transition using cutting, can contain an ellipsis.

Ellipsis is natural to the cinematographic narrative discourse to the extent that only the sequence shot, which reproduces real time, detains its existence

Often ellipses can be seen in transitions in which a similarity or contrast in forms or motion endow the film with beauty. For example, in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick we see the transition, with continuity of movement, of the falling bone of a great ape turning into a spaceship descending, implying an ellipsis of hundreds of thousands of years. In Citizen Kane (1942) by Orson Welles, the sequence of breakfast scenes with the Kanes also contains ellipses. These do not involve a change in location, always being at the breakfast table, but show short episodes that gradually move from a happy time to a difficult one, linking each episode through the sweep or filage. The Tree of Life (2011) by Terrence Malick is characterised by important ellipses as the narrative takes place within a discontinuous pattern that goes from the present life of a middle-aged architect to his past as a child in the 1950s, with incursions into sequential episodes about the origin of life in the universe.

The tree of life

The Tree of Life / L’Arbre de vie | Terrence Malick, 2011, U.S.

The Tree of Life is configured as a poetic ode to existence that seeks answers to the most disturbing, personal and human questions through a whirlwind of images full of spirituality and beauty which, from an eminently pantheist perspective, take us from the smallest to the largest, from the foot of a new-born baby to the origin of the universe itself. The film focuses on the experiences of a family from a small Texas town in the fifties, and follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack (Sean Penn), from the innocence of childhood to the disillusion of his adult years, reaching the point of no return with the death of one of his brothers. Jack will remember the sweetness of his mother (Jessica Chastain) and try to reconcile himself with the memory of his more than stern father (Brad Pitt). The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 2011.

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything

Terrence Malick

(1943)

An American cult director par excellence, screenwriter and producer, the elusive Terrence Malick was born in Ottawa, Illinois, but grew up between Oklahoma and Texas. After completing his secondary education he studied Philosophy at Harvard and at Magdalene College, Oxford prepared a thesis on Heidegger which would never see the light of day. Before devoting himself entirely to the film industry, he worked as a translator and journalist, writing for Life magazine as a freelancer, in addition to working as a philosophy lecturer at MIT in Massachusetts. His two first films, Bad Lands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), saw him acknowledged as one of the most individual, unclassifiable and interesting writers of his generation. Malick, who never gives interviews, would not return to directing until twenty years later, when he shot the anti-war film The Thin Red Line (1999), an elegiac adaptation of the book of the same name by James Jones. His next film would be no less poetic, The New World (2005). From that moment, his production rate unexpectedly accelerated with such atypical titles in the panorama of contemporary commercial cinema such as The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), Weightless (2015), and the documentary Voyage of Time (2016).