Terrence Malick

A partire dalla fine degli anni Sessanta il linguaggio cinematografico è contrassegnato dall’affioramento periodico di una duplice pulsione: a disgregare la struttura narrativa mediante la sostituzione del tempo cronologico, omogeneo, irreversibile, quantitativo e calcolabile, con un tempo esistenziale, inesteso, non divisibile, qualitativo, eterogeneo, non misurabile e reversibile; a dissolvere le voci esterne o interne alla diegesi mediante un sistematico disoriginamento, che è prima di tutto un divorzio tra l’immagine e il sonoro, in direzione, direbbe Michel Chion, di un cinema «acusmatico». In direzione di un cinema che mette in questione l’ontologia e l’innocenza della sua tecnica audio-visiva, smascherando l’ideologia e il dogmatismo che hanno trasformato in religione l’unione di suono e immagine: le voci sono dissociate dai corpi di appartenenza e anche dalle individualità che essi incarnano.

Classical mise-en-scène analysis elides an excess that, when revealed, exposes film’s figuration as a movement of appearing or Erscheinung – a revelation of “otherness” as the very constitution of film in its relation to the viewer. My aim is to undertake an analysis of this figuration in Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life, as the shining of the film in its possibilities – in what it reveals of itself as “other” to character and narrative drive. The essay responds to Steven Rybin’s analysis of The Tree of Life, recently published in this journal, which focuses on the acting style of Jessica Chastain who plays the mother in the O’Brien family, a typical mid-twentieth century family living in Waco, Texas. Rybin argues that Chastain’s acting style, and in particular her glances, resist male authority and project her own vision of the world. My analysis shows how the actor’s glances can be seen in terms of a more comprehensive vision enacted by the film which reveals an Erscheinung or revelatory appearance of “otherness” repeatedly shown throughout the film.

In 1995, Disney released its first animated movie based on a historical figure. Despite some criticism, the movie was fairly successful at the box-office, and was followed by a sequel two years later. More recently, in 2005, Terrence Malick offered his own interpretation of his story. These three movies are but some in an endless line of representations of the Native American girl, even though the sources that attest of her, are few and contradictory. What makes her so popular? In this paper, I will use the Annette Kolodny's theory (the Lay of the Land) to offer some suggestions.

The viewer’s experience of Malick’s cinema can be arguably approached from the notion of dwelling. As Toles points out, the essence of this dwelling derives from the use of the medium’s capacities to reveal the world as something real. In contrast with earlier films, ‘The Tree of Life’ (2011) opens up the possibility of transcendence by pushing the limits of the world revealed by the film medium: here the world is no more an absolute presence, but the visible sign of a further presence, that of its Creator. The chain of revelations is thus expanded: the filmic dwelling holds the world’s presence and, in turn, this screened world points towards God’s presence. In this vein, the image of Jack O’Brien standing at the enigmatic doorframe in the wilderness might well illustrate the experience of the viewer of ‘The Tree of Life’.

In To the Wonder, Terrence Malick asks us to consider the equivocity of erotic love. Malick presents eros as revelatory, uniquely capable of disclosing glory; at the same time, erotic love is fragile and fallible, subject both to time and the contortions of sin. Is there a form of love that persists despite this equivocity? Malick provides an answer in the character of Fr. Quintana, a figure of Christ who embodies the self-emptying love of kenosis. Interpreting Malick’s film through Plato’s Symposium and Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, this essay argues that eros can be redeemed only by a love that endures the dark night of the soul.

Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) has been hailed as 'one of the most beautiful films ever made', but the film's immense cinematic beauty has detracted from the impact of its experimental soundtrack. Drawing on interview material with editor Billy Weber (who worked on all three of Malick's films), the original screenplay of Days of Heaven and detailed sequence analysis, the paper examines the film's manipulation of the traditional relationship between sound and image. Indicating that Malick's experimentation with sound largely developed in post production, Weber confirms that the dialogue-heavy screenplay was transformed in the cutting room with the addition of Linda Manz's haunting voice-over. Ridding the film of dialogue created a different emphasis on sound and Weber's states that he and Malick were disappointed that this aspect of the film was critically overlooked. This article redresses this lack of critical recognition, whilst arguing that it is reflective of the general under-theorisation of sound within a body film theory and criticism which tends to emphasise the visual image. With reference to Jean-Louis Comolli, Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman, amongst others, I underpin my discussion of sound in Malick's film with a look at the wider context of the marginalised position of sound within film theory.

Cited in Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall (eds),Terrence Malick, Film and Philosophy, Continuum Int. Publishing Group, 2011.

The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema develops a timely ecocinema approach to film analysis illuminated by Walter Benjamin’s notion of the turn of time. Emphasizing the currency of phenomenological notions of film-experiences, this book redirects scholarly attention to the way Malick’s directorial work shapes time and duration, laying new groundwork for the analysis of how films unsettle nature-culture binaries in modernity. The study performs this intervention through a rigorous engagement with Benjamin’s work on time, violence and technologies and a figural approach to aesthetics in film studies. The combination of methods performed in this book contributes to Malick scholarship and the relevance of a time-based relation to history in contemporary ecocinema discourses.

The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema develops a timely ecocinema approach to film analysis illuminated by Walter Benjamin’s notion of the turn of time. Emphasizing the currency of phenomenological notions of film-experiences, this book redirects scholarly attention to the way Malick’s directorial work shapes time and duration, laying new groundwork for the analysis of how films unsettle nature-culture binaries in modernity. The study performs this intervention through a rigorous engagement with Benjamin’s work on time, violence and technologies and a figural approach to aesthetics in film studies. The combination of methods performed in this book contributes to Malick scholarship and the relevance of a time-based relation to history in contemporary ecocinema discourses.

When one comments Terrence Malick’s work, one often refers to him as a “Heideggerian director” and to his films as Heideggerian ones. But, considering that Heidegger himself was not a “movie goer”, what do we mean by that phrase? Malick started his academic career at Harvard University studying Philosophy with Stanley Cavell; he translated The Essence of Reasons by Heidegger into English but latter he decided to devote himself entirely to cinema, directing only four films in thirty years: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005). Regarding the idea of “what calls for thinking” in Martin Heidegger (and Gilles Deleuze), I will try to consider his criticism on cinema based on a brief and single analysis of Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa. If there is an internal relation between cinematic and aesthetics choices and philosophical approaches, therefore Malick’s work can express the “poetic visions” of reality in the Heideggerian sense, that is, as an intuitive and philosophical thought.

The films made by the American filmmaker Terrence Malick to date - from ‘Badlands’ (1973) to ‘A Hidden Life’ (2019) - are not that many, but all of them have left a singular mark on the history of cinema. What does this singularity which has provoked both praise and rejection entail? Malick’s cinema has managed to convey, using a very characteristic film language, some concerns that affect every human being such as the search for identity, the distance or connection with the others and the finding of a home. Taking this latter issue, home, as a starting point, this book unfolds an approach to the filmmaker’s filmography of broad focus and human interest, in which two big references stand out: the biblical tradition and the thought of Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who is as cinematographic as American. In the end, it turns out that the fictional worlds and characters created by Malick, as well as the experience in which the viewer becomes immersed, converge toward the same spirit of homecoming.

Melancholia lies at the core of the films of Terrence Malick; it can be regarded as a lens through which the director sees the world. It encompasses the endurance of loss, the search for faith, for the absolute of love and for God himself. In Malick's oeuvre, the paradise which was lost always refers to a Christian theological concept but at the same time is connected with the irretrievably lost personal past of the characters. The nature/grace dialectic is also a signature theme in Malick whence melancholia stems. In this essay I will use Jean Starobinski's work on melancholia while investigating the distinctly theological nature of the interpretation of melancholia which Malick presents in his films. His theological themes pave the way for a metaphysical cinema, which I will attempt to analyse through the interpretation of five of his movies, spanning from Badlands (1973) to the more recent Knight of Cups (2015).

"Abstract:
This paper argues that Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life can be read as a post-religious film that offers its audience an experience of the “beyond” of the non-cinematic real. In order to make this argument, the paper employs Schleiermacher’s concept of religious experience as the beyond of human existence, experienced in moments of openness to the infinite-divine otherwise blocked in the natural state of finite human being. In western culture, cinematic experience is enclosed within the apparatus of melodrama, serving a quasi-religious function by offering audiences an amelioration of human existence in a world from which God has withdrawn. Hollywood melodrama subjectifies the audiences’ belief in the moral good within the mythic presentation of a world defined by ideals of historical progress linked to the power of industrialised capitalism and the nation state. The cinematic real is simply this reality presented as an experience of an ameliorated state of being unfolding in the film melodrama itself. Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life breaks with the apparatus of melodrama, and opens into the non-cinematic-real – the nothing of the cinematic world opened up by the film breaching its own framework. My reading will show how The Tree of Life presents human life as an evolved way of being blocked in a masculinised mode in mid-twentieth century America. The film releases this blocked way of being through the unwilling of the will of masculinised power, shown in visions of nature as the “beyond” of the cinematic real. These visions of nature, appearing through cracks in the film frame, enable the feminine way of being, otherwise blocked by the masculine will to power, to lead the way into the beyond of the non-cinematic real.

Key terms: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life, post-religious film, Schleiermacher, film melodrama.

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AbstractThe problem of evil is not only a logical problem about God's goodness but also an existential problem about the sense of God's presence, which the Biblical book of Job conceives as a problem of aesthetic experience. Thus, just as theism can be grounded in religious experience, atheism can be grounded in experience of evil. This phenomenon is illustrated by two contrasting literary descriptions of aesthetic experience by Jean-Paul Sartre and Annie Dillard. I illuminate both of these literary texts with a discussion of the 18th Century philosopher Lord Shaftesbury's concept of ‘enthusiasm’.

Leaving a promising career in academic philosophy to embark on a career in film, American director Terrence Malick has created cinematic works of art that are also deeply philosophical. His contribution to philosophy through a half century of filmmaking has become the focus of increasing scholarly attention. Inviting the reader along a journey of reflections at the intersection of film, art, and philosophy, Life Above the Clouds brings together an international team of contributors to present the most current and definitive statement of the filmmaker’s work. Accessibly written and exploring films such as Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life, the nineteen essays herein will be of interest not only to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, film studies, and aesthetics, but also to anyone with a true love of film.

Abstract
What is cinematic poetry? This is the fundamental question that this master’s thesis will attempt to answer by analyzing the works of American film-director Terrence Malick. By positing this question in different ways within the realities of his films, one will inevitably reach the following conclusions: cinematic poetry occurs where the forms of representation are opened by a modality of expression; cinematic poetry occurs when the sentient is no longer a sign of the intelligible, but of the matter and of the mode of its production over time, that is, in its evolution. Describing this poetry will only be possible by describing one’s experience of the sensation-cluster of images and of figures proper to Malick’s films. This involves making the world come into existence by doing justice to the core of meanings buried in the visible, a justice rendered by the sharing of a description of the sentient. It will be argued that, in Malick, this poetry manifests itself through a phenomenology of light and gravitation. Also shown, the importance of sound in the emergence of the sentient world, which, through open voices, through materialization of noises, and through music, develops into a total musical score consisting of metamorphoses and destinies. Furthermore, this poetry resembles the sensibility of early German romantics who, through their resistance to language and to absolute reason, destroy the hierarchy of the world in order to redefine it. The constituents of Malick’s cinema of poetry, namely the expression of light and movement, the invisible inhabiting the visible (like an elsewhere that exceeds it), the reinvention of language, the chaotic system linking mankind and nature, as well as the dual world (from darkness to light and from light to darkness) will thus be defined. This master’s thesis therefore suggests an approach of Malick’s cinema inspired by phenomenology, which presents it as being “always underway”, in an immediacy seeking to think within, through, but also beyond cinema.

Résumé
Qu’est-ce que la poésie cinématographique? Telle est la question primordiale de ce mémoire de maitrise, qui tentera d’y répondre en analysant les œuvres du cinéaste américain Terrence Malick. Inscrivant par divers moyens cette question dans les réalités de son cinéma, nous déboucherons forcément sur la réponse suivante : il y a poésie cinématographique chaque fois que les formes de la représentation sont ouvertes par une modalité de l’expression ; il y a poésie cinématographique chaque fois que le sensible n’est plus manifestation de l’intelligible, mais la matière et le mode de sa production dans le temps ou plutôt dans le devenir. Décrire cette poésie, ce ne sera possible qu’en décrivant l’expérience que nous avons du régime de sensations des images et des figures propres au cinéma de Malick. Il s’agit de faire venir le monde en présence en rendant justice aux noyaux de sens enfouis dans le visible, justice rendue par le partage d’une description du sensible. Nous verrons alors que, chez Malick, cette poésie se manifeste par une phénoménologie de la lumière et de la gravitation. Nous verrons également l’importance du sonore dans l’apparaitre de ce monde sensible qui, à travers les voix ouvertes, la matérialisation des bruits et la musique, forme une partition musicale totale faite de métamorphoses et de devenirs. Encore, cette poésie s’approche de la sensibilité des premiers romantiques allemands qui, par leur résistance au langage et à la raison absolue, déhiérarchisent le monde pour le redéfinir. Seront ainsi définis les éléments constitutifs du cinéma de poésie de Malick, soit la manifestation de la lumière et du mouvement, l’invisible habitant le visible (comme un ailleurs qui l’excède), la réinvention du langage, le système chaotique liant l’homme et la nature, ainsi que le monde duel (de l’ombre à la lumière et de la lumière à l’ombre). Ce mémoire propose donc une approche d’inspiration phénoménologique du cinéma de Malick, qui le présente comme « toujours en train de se faire », dans une immédiateté cherchant à penser dans, à travers, mais aussi au-delà du cinéma.

If all of Aby Warburg's work arises from wanting to know how Botticelli and his contemporaries imagined classical antiquity, how his images thought other previous images, then what place does the movement-image of cinema occupy within his iconological project? How does the concretion of the gesture, its ability to shape even a place of detention, a form of resistance, interfere with the control of the anachronism on which the conception of images and the atlas as an organ of social memory stands? How, even, the Warburgian method can be the foundation of the tension between the act of filming and the gestation of a gesture of political resistance?

Since the beginning of film history, film makers put their efforts to synchronize sound into images. And finally when they achieved that goal, cinema shifted into a whole different level. Now, it is impossible to think movies without sound effects, music or dialogues.

My thesis adapts Immanuel Kant’s theory of sublime within the context of film music and sound. I tried to understand how he would describe cinema and film sound based on sublimity.
Kant’s theories on beauty built on the perfect combination of imagination and understanding. With his revolutionary book Critique of Judgment, he opened up a whole new approach to aesthetics. He called art as the universal pleasure and a way to enlightening. By combining two different concepts as sound and Kant’s aesthetics theory I aim to answer; “Could film sound be the key point on way to achieve sublimity?”.

The aim of this dissertation is to see how American filmmaker Terrence Malick transposes fundamental ideas developed by the Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson into a cinematic narrative. The study will mainly focus on how Malick adapts the notion of Nature as an interrelated whole, which is pivotal in Emersonian Transcendentalism, in two movies: The Thin Red Line and The New World. This relationship is supported by an analysis of the cinematic language of some sequences from both movies in relation to some relevant passages written by Emerson.

The interest of the Spanish speaking readers on the writings of philosopher Stanley Cavell has been generally belated. This is evidenced by the years –more than forty– that have passed until a Spanish translation of his most influential book on film has been published: ‘The World Viewed’ (El mundo visto), originally published in 1971 and enlarged, with significant additions, eight years later. The recent passing of Cavell in June 2018 appears in this context as a reproach against the delay and, in any case, as an invitation to revisit one of his fundamental books. But before raising the hand in favor of ‘The World Viewed’, it is compulsory to warn the reader that he is facing a book that may be deemed original for many reasons. A great part of this originality lies in its condition of being a founding oeuvre: the debt of Cavell’s reflections to thinkers of film such as André Bazin, James Agee or Robert Warshow, among others, does not prevent us from considering his book as the opening of a conversation –concerning the possibility of thinking and writing about films “with the same seriousness that any work of art deserves”– which lasts to this day. In this sense, this book invokes an already existing conversation but, above all, invites us to start a new one.

God cannot be viewed and cannot be comprehended, but is there a possibility of God being revealed through a film? There are several ways used by the Church to represent God in worship: worship through singing or music, visual worship through icons, and participation in dramatic performance. In this study, the methodology of finding God in films is suggested and applied to some films. It is based on works on theological aesthetics by John Panteleimon Manoussakis and David Bentley Hart. The films of Terrence Malick and Andrey Zvyagintsev are used as examples. One of the main ideas of this study is related to viewing God through Jesus as God who can be comprehended (in some way) and incorporating Christological reading of reality into film analysis. There is also a strong emphasis on the interpersonal dimension of film experience as theological aesthetic experience.

Dieses Buch zoomt in informationsreiche und pixeldichte Welten in HD. Digitalbildliche Hochauflösung ist hier ein Potenzial, das es ermöglicht, mit und an Bildern Wirklichkeit zu erforschen und zu befragen. Dokumentarfilme, Videokunstarbeiten, Galaxiefotografien, Blockbuster, Pressebilder und Netflix-Serien bestellen diese visuelle Kultur in HD und zeigen auf, dass Bilder und Wirklichkeit nicht in fixierten Rahmen sitzen, sondern im Prozess werden. HD heißt Image Processing. Lässt man sich darauf ein, entfaltet sich das Angebot, mit HD zu denken und sich vom Denken der Bildprozesse mitreißen zu lassen.

Due to its peculiar way of thinking through images, film seems able to evoke philosophical questions. The very nature of this art aims at a kind of knowledge where the affective component prevails over the intellectual, something already present in the work of some philosophers of the 20th century, particularly in Martin Heidegger's. This knowledge proves out to be most suitable to cope with experiential issues such as the relationship between the human being and the world and the way this relationship affects his or her confrontation with death. This paper raises the legitimacy of a heideggerian approach to the study of these two notions and their correlation in the first three films of Terrence Malick.

Malick’s 2015 Knight of Cups portrays the chaotic-yet-cathartic life of a Hollywood screenwriter and his spiritual ascent out of decadence towards existential meaning. With the backdrop of John Bunyan’s 17th century allegory, the prison epistle The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the constant visual storytelling themes of Platonic ascesis and enlightenment, the film can be fairly interpreted as utilizing the scala literary form, that is, having to do with the “ladder of divine ascent.”

With this in mind, a “spiritually formative” (rather than expository) reading of each of the arcana in the film (characters who Malik links to Tarot cards) may also elucidate the mystical journey of the protagonist, Rick. The “anonymous” author of Meditations on the Tarot explores the Tarot of Marseilles through this lens and serves as a helpful interlocutor. His elucidations on various cards (The Moon, The Tower, The High Priestess, and Death) will be examined, building typological links between the characters’ portrayal in the film and their potential meanings in Rick’s spiritual exercises.

This essay considers the prominent role of acts and gestures of walking-a persistent, though critically neglected motif-in Terrence Malick's cinema. In recognition of many intimate connections between walking and contemplation, I argue that Malick's particular staging of walking characters, always in harmony with the camera's own "walks", comprises a key source for the "contemplative" effects that especially philosophical commentators like to attribute to his style. Achieving such effects, however, requires that viewers be sufficiently engaged by the walking presented on-screen. Accordingly, Malick's films do not fixate on single, extended episodes of walking , as one would find in Slow Cinema. They instead strive to enact an experience of walking that induces in viewers a particular sense of "walking-with". In this regard, I examine Malick's continual reliance on two strategies: (a) Steadicam following shots of wandering figures, which involve viewers in their motion of walking; and (b) a strict avoidance of long takes in favor of cadenced montage, which invites viewers into a reflective rhythm of walking.