As Terrence Malick's The New World eases into its climactic movement, its heroine Pocahontas enters the latest (but not last) phase of her journey. Once a Powhatan princess, she became the lover of convict-turned-explorer John Smith; then a diplomat taking pity on Smith's stubborn, hapless countrymen; then a pariah cast out by her father as a betrayer; then a slowly assimilating Englishwoman and grieving (presumed) widow, deceived into thinking Smith dead; then a ward—and later, lover—of a kind Englishman, John Rolfe; the toast of Rolfe's mother country; then a contented wife living in a high-ceilinged manor in which she welcomes Smith as her guest.

Now she is about to become, in Rolfe's words, "but a fond memory" to a son that barely knew her.

Pocahontas's toddler-aged son runs along a hedgerow amid a flock of sheep. The camera follows like a tagalong ghost. The wind comes up.
The wind signals that the movie is over—that the end is near.

But what follows is a beginning.

Malick understands the aesthetic potential of sound. The sound design on his four features—Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005)—marries precision and depth and is as meticulously timed and orchestrated as his editing. In a review of The New World, I described the director's style as "epic naturalism," a mode that combines "classical Hollywood production values (including Cinemascope photography and an eclectic symphonic score) with a documentary approach to narrative, characterization, and editing." These aspects might seem incompatible—Hollywood gloss plus indie grit. But in Malick's films they work in tandem, and sound design is a big part of the reason why.

Malick's attention to detail is positively Kubrickian. I once got an email from a researcher entrusted with gathering bird sounds for The New World. She told me that Malick had contacted her and her ornithologist colleagues asking if they could help fill the movie's soundscape with recordings of every Jamestown-area bird that still existed today. If a particular bird was extinct, he wanted a recording of a species that was somewhere in the ballpark. They spent weeks gathering birdsong recordings, and they all ended up in the movie, mostly unadorned.

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