On what makes Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) formally perfect.

Days of Heaven was shot by Nestor Almendros, with Haskell Wexler completing the photography after Almendros left to honor a prior commitment. The film was shot almost entirely during the 'magic hour' — the twenty minutes after sunset when the light is warm, low, and diffuse.

The magic hour is one of those cinematographic concepts that sounds like a stylistic preference but is actually a formal argument. The light quality at magic hour has no shadows. It makes everything look luminous. It removes the hierarchy of light and shade that conventional cinematography uses to direct attention. Everything is equally beautiful and equally present.

For a film about migrant farm workers in the Texas Panhandle at the turn of the century — people who have no power, whose lives are beautiful and temporary and dispensable — the light is a moral position. The film refuses to glamorize poverty in the way that poverty is often glamorized, but it refuses to squalor it either. It insists that these lives contain beauty because beauty is a property of the world, not of wealth.

The narration — delivered by the young girl Linda — is the film's other formal achievement: an unreliable, incomplete, grammatically imperfect account of events that are too large for her to understand. The gap between what is seen and what is narrated is where the film lives.