For a director who has made only four feature films over three decades, Terrence Malick has sustained an extraordinary critical reputation as one of America's most original and independent ...filmmakers. In this book, Lloyd Michaels analyzes each of Malick's four features in depth, emphasizing both repetitive formal techniques such as voiceover and long lens cinematography as well as recurrent themes drawn from the director's academic training in modern philosophy and American literature. Michaels explores Malick's synthesis of the romance of mythic American experience and the aesthetics of European art film. He performs close cinematic analysis of paradigmatic moments in Malick's films: the billboard sequence in Badlands, the opening credits in Days of Heaven, the philosophical colloquies between Witt and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, and the epilogue in The New World. This richly detailed study also includes the only two published interviews with Malick, both in 1975 following the release of his first feature film.
Cottle discusses the enigma of Days of Heaven directed by Terrence Malick. What he wishes to pursue in the argument that follows is the contention that this critical hesitancy about proposing a link ...between the film's title and its historical content is unfounded, and that this interpretive path represents an alternative and compelling possibility for understanding the fundamental vocation of the film. If this is the case, the relationship between title and content might be less a vexing contradiction than a privileged hermeneutical point of access into the inner dynamics of this canonical piece of New Hollywood cinema. Any analysis of the overall balance of the film, he argues, must take into account a necessarily empty space, an unrepresentable and dimly theorized future mode of human subjectivity in which "meaning and life are once more indivisible."
Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film explores how the experience of viewing Terrence Malick's films enables imaginative acts of philosophical interpretation. Useful for both professional ...philosophers interested in film and scholars of cinema intrigued by philosophy, this book shows the ways Malick's films cast philosophy in new cinematic light.
Editor's Note Kuebler, Carolyn
New England review (1990),
01/2018, Letnik:
39, Številka:
2
Journal Article
To conjure a physical world and give it a place in the reader's imagination is one of the ways language can mask its intangible nature, but sometimes the words seem to come straight from physicality ...itself. The pain in your left shoulder, the bothersome noise of the neighbor's TV, the smell of the soy ink on the page-that's part of the art now too. When we pick it up again in another season, when the space we work in is no longer warmed by the sun, and the smell of gasoline and fresh-cut grass is not wafting through the window screens, what impression will it leave on us-and you-then? -CK
Tan argues for a reassessment of the relationship between Terrence Malick and Martin Heidegger through a reading of his latest film A Hidden Life (2020), which takes as its material Franz ...Jagerstatter's refusal to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler's Nazi regime, his prosecution and incarceration for that resistance, and death in the service of his personal convictions. This reading will intervene in the abovementioned lineage of scholarship by complicating Malick's straightforward endorsement of Heideggerian tenets by emphasizing the political aspect of Heidegger's thinking about Being and Dasein. This tension between philosophy and politics has not only tainted Heidegger's historical reputation through his connections with National Socialism in the 1930s, but also polarized retrospective assessments of Heidegger's philosophy as advocating aspects of Fascist ideology.
Abstract
Many creatures exhibit desires of various strengths competing with one another for the prize of interacting with beliefs to cause behaviour. Harry Frankfurt famously analyzes persons in ...terms of the ability to form second-order desires; desires that intervene in this economy of first-order desires in ways that sometimes award the prize to weaker competitors. This paper augments Frankfurt’s analysis with Kendall Walton’s understanding of pretence behaviour and then interprets the central metaphors in several films by Terrence Malick in terms of this augmented analysis. The result is an understanding of those films as investigations into personhood and factors that inhibit attempts to manifest it. Along the way, the discussion touches on the relation between linguistic and visual metaphor, the potentially ethical character of art, and the question of whether a valid interpretation must be congruent with the actual communicative intentions of the artist.
