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Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) and John Sayles’ Matewan (1987) differ greatly in their cinematographic and aesthetic projects. Yet all share a similar calling into question of the pastoral ideal as the cradle of the American cultural and political imagination. Operating on vastly different scales and production contexts, the three movies nonetheless converge towards a rehabilitation of the American pastoral imagination in the disenchanted context of the late 1970s or the triumphant materialism of the Reagan years. What this article examines is how these films reappropriate the pastoral mode as a means of reevaluating an artistic, historic and generic heritage, while challenging narrative and aesthetic practices, ultimately investigating and investing new forms of artistic and political involvements.