On how Terrence Malick's The New World (2005) uses nature as a form of prayer.

The New World is Malick's account of the founding of the Jamestown colony and the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas. It is his most misunderstood film, partly because it arrives with such weighty subject matter that critics expect a historical drama and receive something else.

The film is organized around Pocahontas's experience of the natural world and what happens to that experience when the European world arrives. Lubezki's cinematography insists on the physical reality of the Virginia landscape — the particular quality of light in the tidal margins, the specific textures of the vegetation, the sounds of the birds and water — with a reverence that makes the landscape itself the film's subject alongside the human story.

Malick is working in a tradition of American nature writing — Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir — that understands nature as spiritual experience rather than resource. The film's question is what is lost when a people whose relationship to the land is spiritual encounter a people whose relationship to the land is economic.

The film answers this question not through argument but through the accumulation of images: the Virginia world before and after the colony's arrival, and the specific quality of loss that the comparison reveals.