The Magic Hours

The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick

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by John Bleasdale

Type: Biographies
Subject: Director > Terrence Malick
Keywords: Terrence Malick, director
Publishing date: 2024 (November 12, 2024)
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Collection: Screen Classics
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 292 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-9859011-9-3

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Book Presentation:
Terrence Malick is the most enigmatic film director currently working. Since the early seventies, his work has won top prizes at film festivals worldwide and brought him wide recognition as the cinematic equivalent of a poet. His life is shrouded in mystery, leaving audiences with rumors, few established facts, and virtual silence from the filmmaker himself following his last published interview in 1979. This has done nothing to dim the luminous quality of his films, from Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), to later works such as The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree of Life (2011), and A Hidden Life (2019).

The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is the first true biography of this visionary filmmaker. Through interviews and in-depth research, John Bleasdale reveals the autobiographical grounding of many of Malick's greatest films as well as the development of an experimental form of filmmaking that constantly expands the language of cinema. It is the essential account for anyone wishing to understand Malick and his work.

About the Author:
John Bleasdale is a film critic and writer whose work is regularly published in Variety, Sight and Sound, the Economist, Financial Times, and the Guardian. He has contributed to two books: Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy and The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. He also hosts the podcast Writers on Film, which was featured in Time Out's Top 20 Best Podcasts.

Press Reviews:
This splendid book tells a compelling story of Terrence Malick's life and work—a gift to film lovers who long to know more about the gifted director. -George Stevens, Jr., author of My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington and founder of the Kennedy Center Honors and the American Film Institute

Bleasdale's biography of Malick is as smart, readable, and penetrating as fans of the great director's films could wish for—a thrillingly engaged piece of work. -Tom Shone, author of The Nolan Variations

Terrence Malick is one of the most brilliant yet enigmatic of American filmmakers, a contemplative visual poet beyond compare among modern auteurs. After a stunning debut with two of the finest movies of the 1970s, he vanished without public explanation for two decades, only to come back with several ambitious feature films that have been embraced by a devoted audience of admirers, and others that have flopped with both viewers and critics. John Bleasdale, one of our most thoughtful and best-informed film journalists and scholars, dives deep to explore the life and work of an elusive artist who has consistently challenged us with powerful, intense, and idiosyncratic movies that smash through the boundaries of conventional filmmaking. -Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic

Offering in-depth accounts of the making of Malick's films, Bleasdale details how the director's stubbornness and inexperience hamstrung the production of his debut feature, Badlands, and how he privileged authenticity when filming The New World, erecting full-scale recreations of colonial Jamestown and its neighboring Powhatan settlement using only locally sourced materials and period-appropriate construction techniques. Background on how Malick's personal life influenced his films open a window onto his work. -Publishers Weekly

A myth-shattering look into the life and career of the legendarily publicity-shy cinematic visionary.... But his in-depth research uncovered a very different picture from the media-crafted version of the director that developed during the lengthy gap between his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), and its follow-up, The Thin Red Line (1998). In doing so, the author tells of a complex artist and human being whose films, good and bad, are among the most thrillingly original works of art on the planet.... No matter how you feel about Malick's oeuvre, this book is a must for cinephiles. -Kirkus Starred Review

John Bleasdale's impressive new biography The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick reveals many crucial and insightful details on the filmmaker's life course, from his Persian family history and fledgling youth in Oklahoma-Texas to an ongoing artistic career, spanning over half of a century.... For those curious as to how Malick curated such a sui generis approach to filmmaking, this text serves as both a series illuminating windows into the myth of the artist and a tonic for any doubts one might have levied against him. ... While honoring aspects of Malick's known preference for privacy, Bleasdale imparts many formative and absorbing details on this mysterious figure. In so doing, he humanizes the mythic Malick and illuminates the biography of a man whose fascinating personal journey through life is truly the stuff of legend. -Film International

John Bleasdale's impressive biography of Terrence Malick, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, opens a window into the life of a somewhat private filmmaker and offers insight into his work, including The Tree of Life. There are also little-known stories about his past, including the time he played basketball with Fidel Castro. -The Independent

A reclusive filmmaker with a famously challenging oeuvre, experimental American auteur Terrence Malick is an ambitious choice of subject for critic John Bleasdale's first non-fiction book. However, through elegantly framed prose, erudite criticism and meticulous research, Bleasdale more than rises to that challenge, mounting a biographical study of Malick and his movies that makes for illuminating reading. -Empire Magazine

Go inside the world of one of Hollywood's most acclaimed filmmakers in The Magic Hours, author John Beasdale's inside look at Terrence Malick. If you're a movie wonk, you'll dig reading about the acclaimed lensman whose heralded films are often cited for their use of soft natural lighting shortly after sunrise or before sunset, the so-called 'magic hour,' a term that his work ushered into filmmaking lingo.

Through this lens, Malick's supposedly pretentious, philosophical films transform into substantial works full of personal urgency. Bleasdale's biography thus provides a total reorientation of Malick's work, allowing you to experience his films in a different context.... This book should actually be mandatory homework, so that one can experience and interpret this long-awaited new film with the right eye. -Filmkrant

[A] brisk, well-researched biography.... Whatever you think of Malick's work, this book makes abundantly clear that 'the black hole of his presence or absence in the media landscape still bends light around it.' -Sight and Sound

One of the strengths of John Bleasdale's The Magic Hoursis that it punctures some of the long-standing myths associated with the most famous cinematic Sasquatch of them all....(it) helps us understand why Malick's films remain so compelling. -FILM & HISTORY