magiadoreal

As a little girl in Vietnan, the writer Christiane Sacco, who was a very dear friend of mine, experienced the horrors of both war and nature at the same time (alone, her mother dead and her father a prisioner, she wandered through the hostile forest, eating roots and hiding from Japanese soldiers driven mad by war). She told me that for her, the only film to tell the truth about nature was John Boorman's  Deliverance  (1972), in which nature does not humanize human beings. She is no longer with us, but I think she would have liked The Thin Red Line . Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line , p. 72.

Alone. Each and every one of us is alone before the world, and death. Michel Chion. The Thin Red Line , p. 25.

In Malick's work, war is close to play: there be seems no profund difference between children who take the world or a corner of the earth for their playground, and put borders round it, and someone who decides that a hilltop is a strategic point. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line , p.47

A good place to start is with the title, taken from James Jones' novel The Thin Red Line  (1962). Although the words officially refer to the line between life and death, they surely also speak to us of barriers and limits, those mysterious limits that we sense everywhere around us and do not know how to cross. In this film, voices are continually asking questions that it is not our role to answer, but which must be listened to and allowed to resonate. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line , p. 8