Painting & Still: Sonic Representations of the American Heartland

Director Terrence Malik’s sophomore film Days of Heaven (1978) is an ode to the industrialized American Heartland at the turn of the twentieth century. After a violent outburst prompts Bill, a steelworker, to flee Chicago, he, his girlfriend Abby, and younger sister Linda find seasonal work in the harvesting fields of the north Texan panhandle. As laborers on a wealthy grain plantation, the three endure the conditions of the industrial working class, until the farmer’s sudden illness alters the trio’s dynamic. Malik’s distinct cinematography draws visual and aesthetic inspiration from realist American painter Andrew Wyeth’s body of work — notably, Christina’s World (1948). As one of the most recognizable paintings in the history of American art, Wyeth’s depiction of the American grain fields draws visual parallels to those on screen in Days of Heaven. Yet, while Wyeth’s rendition of the heartland relies solely on iconographic cues inherent to painting as an optical medium to propel its narrative, Malik’s cinematic imitation introduces an auditory layer that projects the once planar representation into filmic three-dimensionality. 

Christina’s World and Days of Heaven are aesthetically and didactically comparable, achieving an analogous thematic premise through paralleling imagery. Still, both artworks utilize the hallmarks respective to their distinctive mediums to convey the depth of each narrative and diegesis. Such communicative differences between the painting and cinematic forms are determined through the mediums’ ontological properties. Painting, as well as all physical mediums, is limited to the portrayal of only a singular moment within the duration of a narrative. The medium must include signifiers catered to this limitation, as the depiction of all content and narrative detail is contained in its entirety at a singular moment of exhibition and spectatorship. This is a fundamental difference from cinema, and other time-based mediums, that employ temporality to convey their narrative fully. While painting’s sensorial effect is bound to appeal to only the eye, film is a layered apparatus of written, visual, and auditory characteristics that together create a framework of spectatorship. Through its ability to further appeal to the ear, cinema has the means to emphasize non-visual details that drive its narrative forward. While the independent properties of these mediums negate the ability to judge them on a synonymous artistic standard, the methodology of conveying a comparable narrative within these differing capacities must be defined. 

Released thirty years before the film, Christina’s World’s dreadful representation of the American Great Plains renders a scene of desperation through its subtle detail and minimal diegeis. The painting depicts a woman from behind, wearing a faint, worn pink dress. She lies in a sprawling beige moor as she peers up at a wooden cabin on top of a hill. The sparsely saturated, dull landscape is visually uniform throughout the painting’s diegetic world. Christina’s seemingly helpless, desperate lunge toward the old home elicits a desire to reach what seems to be unattainable. The painting's inability to provide the full context of the scene leaves only inexplicit interpretation to be extrapolated through visual subtleties. Viewers are not directly given information on why or how Christina came to be on the ground, nor is it revealed what she is yearning for. Her figure is compositionally foregrounded, rendering all points of interest beyond her physical reach. Whether it be the home itself, the longing for mobility, or merely a better life, the object of her desire remains undefined. The painting gives viewers a glimpse into Christina’s world, where her debilitating urge for an undefined interest is solidified in a forever-still frame. Although Wythe uses optical signifiers to convey this thematic premise, the lack of temporality leaves the medium unable to communicate context beyond such visual ambiguities. 

Through these formal qualities inspired by Christia’s World and the optical tradition of painting, the film medium elaborates upon their aesthetic premise through the introduction of sound and its transmission of the off-screen. In an almost thematically and visually identical scene from Days of Heaven, Malik emphasizes sound to drive forward crucial narrative features that are unattainable through visual spectatorship alone. Undertoned auditory techniques and Linda’s direct voice-over narration preface this visual match with plot-driving context that allows viewers to understand the implications of the still within the sequence’s broader narrative. 

After Bill overhears a private conversation between the farmer and his doctor, the audience is made aware of an undefined life-threatening illness — pivotal information revealed not through visual but auditory cues. As he slips just out of their sight, behind the doctor’s vehicle, their dialogue is heard entirely off-screen, the point of audition only slightly removed from its source. The scene emphasizes off-screen dialogue through the use of voice-off. Film scholar Mary Ann Doane establishes this technique as referential to “instances in which we hear the voice of a character who is not visible within the frame. Yet the film establishes, by means of previous shots or other contextual determinants, the character's ‘presence’ in the space of the scene, in the diegesis.” Viewers see the farmer and the doctor exit the home before a cut from their on-screen portrayal enacts this voice-off technique. The medium close-up of Bill, eager to hear the doctor’s diagnosis, exemplifies the form of embedded listening where both viewers and diegetic characters shift their attention to the audio just out of sight. Their voices are localized by prior contextual imagery that places their sound at an identified, off-screen point within the diegeis. The contrast between imagery and audio allows spectators to understand the information within the context of Bill’s morally ambiguous motives. 

With the conclusion of the farmer’s one-year expiration date, the film’s primary sonic register then fades away from voice-off dialogue and into a narrative-propelling voice-over interlude. Linda’s off-screen, first-person account communicates the film’s premise from her often skewed perspective. Unlike the commonly omniscient narrator, her words are naive and childlike. As the character’s bodiless, unlocalized voice overlays the often unrelated imagery, an asynchrony between sound, time, and diegesis occurs, enacting the cinematic I-voice. In Michel Chion’s The Voice of Cinema, he identifies this categorization of voice-over as a technique in which a voice embodies a particular “placement, a certain sound quality, a way of occupying space, a sense of proximity to the spectator's ear, and a particular manner of engaging the spectator's identification.” Unlike the mere traditional first-person voice-over, Chion differentiates the I-voice through two criteria — close-micing and spoken affect. Linda, the acousmêtre or off-screen narrator, sonically expresses this I-voice classification through her unlocalized point of narration and subdued tonal register. While her voice is affiliated with a diegetic character, the unspecified point in time and location of utterance leaves her narration on a plane independent of time and space within the diegesis. Her continuous anecdotes, often unrelated to the imagery on screen, evoke an intimate relationship between the spectator and this unlocalized, indifferent voice. 

In this scene, her narration’s close yet unidentifiable origin attempts to draw attention to the farmer’s emotional state as he grapples with the arrival of his fatal illness: “He knew he was gonna die. He knew there was nothing there could be done. You only live on this earth once, and, to my opinion, as long as you're around, you should have it nice.” Detached from both emotion and source, her words become intermixed with diegetic sounds displaying imagery distinct from her account. Abby, and Linda herself, are included - yet not aware - of the illness and its narrative-shifting implications. This use of voice-over as a context signifying technique is immediately followed by the graphic match from Days of Heaven’s still to Andrew Wyeth’s painting. In this brief moment, Abby slowly approaches the farmer's mansion, encompassed by the grain fields leaning toward the home poised in the distance. The farmer raises out of the brush as if her gate is directed at him. Her appearance on-screen prompts a clear optical parallel between the film’s framing and the painting’s imagery. Yet, through the use of sound as a situational primer, the dualistic imagery is narratively contextualized in a method unattainable to Christina’s World’s nearly exact graphic match. The narrative context places Abby in a situation comparable to Christina’s — stuck in an undesired position, longing for a visual but seemingly unattainable change. If Christina’s aim is toward the house and the better life its symbolizes, Abby’s approach toward the home can operate under the same assumption — the farmer waiting as the method to achieve the once futile goal of escaping the working class. As a byproduct of temporality, sound allows the film medium to transcend the limitation of the frame. Even if still and painting can be deemed optically identical, sound’s ability to convey the unseen, multi-planar diegesis pushes mere visual interpretation into a multisensorial apparatus where meaning and narrative are propelled sonically. Techniques of sound allow the viewer to receive information not visually stated. Even as Christina’s World becomes an exact visual match to the scene, sound allows spectators to extrapolate significantly more narrative context from a still alone than from the painting. 

Because the use of sound is beyond the limitations of painting, Christina’s World must incorporate purely visual imitations of multi-sensory signifiers to communicate its narrative and diegetic world. Visual details thus reveal an indication of auditory features. The presence of wind, for example, is typical of the barren landscapes in both artworks. It is a force unperceivable to the human eye, yet both Christina’s World and Days of Heaven employ the properties intrinsic to their mediums to portray the unseen. The representation of Christina’s hair is indicative of the wind and its accompanying sensorial effects. Faint strands of her matted hair extend horizontally as if moving with a breeze. This visual indicator applies an additional dimension to the painting’s diegesis through its optical implication of what can traditionally only be felt and heard. Because her hair reveals the presence of wind, viewers can infer its effects on the surrounding landscape. A change in temperature, the sounds of whistling, and the movement of grain can all be extrapolated from this minute signifier. Such detail within the painting medium carry the weight of significant sensorial implications, for the extent of the medium’s communicative effect lies within its subtleties. Insinuations from visual signifiers within the painting serve as an indication of a medium-specific off-screen space. 

Although its presence is unable to be explicitly shown in any medium, film’s ability to represent wind is much more direct. Throughout Days of Heaven, wind is an ever-present detail. Notably, preceding the film’s acclaimed locust scene, the wind is signified through both visual and auditory sensations. Sonic tones of a rustling atmospheric drone overlay imagery of its effect on the expansive arid landscape and its animals. Tall grasses brush against each other in the breeze, horse hair flows as a result of its invisible presence, and the rapid flap of the fluttering flag is both seen and heard. Because visual details alone cannot fully convey the effect of the wind’s presence, the film must employ its auditory capacities. By doing so, the medium can capture this sonic tone from its source through the direct, simultaneous recording of audio and video. As this direct sound becomes inherently tied to its original source, the medium surpasses the need for mere auditory signifiers, becoming interlinked with the real. Still, the use of texturization renders direct sound subject to manipulation. Days of Heaven’s representation of these strong winds enacts a form of sonic rendering where the film’s heightened portrayal of a familiar sound prompts a feeling beyond what it can give us naturally. This phenomenological effect is the byproduct of film’s optical and auditory representation. 

Differing portrayals of comparable aesthetical diegeses are not placed within a hierarchy. Instead, inter-medial adaptations of theme, narrative, and detail each derive properties and techniques ingrained into their ontological form. In Christina’s World and Days of Heaven, such comparisons are drawn, yet their medium-specific capabilities of a seemingly parallel visual premise guide the communicative properties of their mediums. Malik’s filmic imitation of the notable painting does not diminish its value or exceed its communicative ability, but cinema’s medium properties broadens the painting’s visual singularity through the implementation of sonic techniques that expand narrative diegesis beyond the boundaries of the frame.