Opening Credits Most opening credits in films are an afterthought, something that the writer or director seems to come up with after the fact. Occasionally it might have some relation to the plot, but usually it’s a drawn out, mundane event such as a car ride or character walking through a bustling street or going to their job.
However, a great credit sequence will wordlessly immerse us into the world that we are about to experience for the next couple of hours and Days of Heaven is such a film.
We will be treated to something grand and magnificent, mysterious and ethereal. We know it from the moment the first notes of the dreamlike “Carnival of the Animals –The Aquarium” by Camille Saint-Saëns starts to play. We know we are about to witness something beautiful and odd, something like this fantastic castle made of ice.
We’re in America. How do we know this? Simple: they’ve got baseball. There are many who would argue that the great American pastime is baseball. I’m not much of a sports fan but I’ll take their word for it.
This is also a time of with a great divide between the wealthy and the poor. In contrast to the above shot of children in simple clothes playing a sport in the confined space to the city we have these grand men lined up in magnificent suits and tall hats, status symbols of their wealth and power.
And their wealth is built off the backs of hard working men in the upheaval of the industrial era. How man relates to this technology that emerges from this era and how it affects him and the world around him will be of interest as the film develops.
But this is not simply a story of man and machine. Even more than that it’s a picture about man and nature. Here we see man enjoying the world around him in nature. Yet at the same time, man and nature seem to be an awkward fit, not quite in harmony with each other as is indicated by the oblique angle of the canoe.
This will also be a film about the beauty, majesty and awe of nature. Here we see a woman looking out across the ocean in a breathtaking image. Take note of the name that appears in the credits here. It’s no mistake that the director of photography, Nestor Alemendros, is placed in conjunction with this image. It lets us know that the images that we are about to witness are going to be first and foremost about the beauty of the natural world around us.
Yet there’s also something treacherous about our relationship to nature. Perhaps part of it is the harshness of the natural world around us as is visualized in the harshness of the rocks in the frame bellow. But perhaps the treachery is in our human brashness, in our foolish leaps and bold daring into danger.
And here we get a group of children playing in the dirt. It’s an image of absolute poverty yet despite it all they seem happy and joyous, blissfully unaware or perhaps enlightened? It’s interesting that writer and director Terrence Malick credits himself with this image. Little is know about the elusive man, but I would conjecture that perhaps this is his way of suggesting that this film is about him returning to a childlike state.
And then the last shot of the film subtlety shifts us from photos taken in the real world into the world of the film. In a masterful move, the film gives us a shot that perfectly replicates the same look of the previous images, but manufactured in the time the film was made. It’s of the actress Linda Manz who plays the character Linda in the movie. It’s through her perception of the movie that we will take this journey so it is fitting that she is the one who bridges the gap from the credits of the film into the first shot of the film.
And there you have it. In one minute and 48 seconds everything we need to know about the world of the film is conveyed wordlessly with simple still images.