Nature and the unmaking of the world: Reading figures of nature in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven

Nature and the twentieth-century industrializing of America provide the setting for Malick's film Days of Heaven (1978). This article offers a figural analysis of images of nature to reveal the moving forward of both human and natural cycles in the film. Through a reading of figures of nature, Days of Heaven reveals a clear figural communality between human and natural cycles of world making and unmaking. Furthermore, it retrospectively illuminates the formation of the world of twentieth-century American industrialization