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The Three Burials, Tommy Lee Jones
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is set along the U.S-Mexico border in far west Texas. Jones plays the part of a rancher who befriends a Mexican ranch hand whose murder sets the brutal and lonesome film into motion. In a recent interview in LA Weekly, Jones discusses some of his unlikely influences for the film.
Q: In the press notes, you’ve cited several filmmakers and artists as sources of visual inspiration for the film, some of which, like Sam Peckinpah and Akira Kurosawa, are easy to understand; others of which, like the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd and installation artist Dan Flavin, are a little farther afield.
Jones: I would often sit around the monitor while things were being set up and ask different people if they thought there was any emotion in geometry. And they would say, “What?” And I would say, “Do you have any feeling for triangles? Hexagons?” There’s a geometry to the film that I find very pleasing. I think Judd’s work is highly intellectual and deeply emotional. And of course the influence of Flavin is obvious in the lighting, but nowhere more so than in the scene at the clinic where the border patrolman gets cured of his snakebite.
full article

Recent Additions to the Marfa.Org Gallery
Exhaustive Study of Marfa Lights
- compilation of geology and oil prospecting notes
Cal. State University Museum to Tour Marfa in May

On the Screen at the Library
Days of Heaven (1978) PG, Friday, Feb 3, 8 pm
Director Terrence Malick's beautifully shot period piece tells the story of Bill (Richard Gere), an early-1900s Chicago steel mill worker who flees town after accidentally killing a man. He moves his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and younger sister to the wheat fields of Texas to search for a better life. Instead, they run into tragedy when a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard) falls for Abby. The film's cinematography earned an Oscar.