This book is a homage to a fruitful constellation of meanings between Terrence Malick's films and Benjamin's concepts of time and mediated technologies. In 2019, it is safe to say, ecocinema concerns on Malick's films, film theory, and, more generally, Walter Benjamin's writings on modern cinema are not particularly en vogue in film studies. Nevertheless, the constellation of meanings between Malick's films and Benjamin's philosophy of time and technology proves particularly productive in articulating a revolutionary, non-teleological conception of time in twenty-first century's ecocinema studies. Malick films remain to be experienced, studied, and understood by a growing generation of thinkers, viewers and film scholars concerned with material relations to time and the non-human in films. The work is directed to a new generation of viewers whose entanglements with Malick's cinematic oeuvre do not sit comfortably with traditional theological and religious interpretations, at a time in which environmental crisis and reactionary returns to conservative visions of nation-state borders, bigotry and religious dogma threaten not only human evolution, emancipation and freedom in finitude, but the very survival of many other animal species on the planet.

Benjamin's philosophy of art, language, and time offer a productive tool to illuminate Malick's oeuvre beyond postmodern nihilism on the one hand, and mythical and pre-technological interpretations of the world of nature on the other. As argued, the problematic division between the world of nature and that of culture figures prominently in Malick's films, and is consistently portrayed in the form of human relations to history and cyclic temporality. The uneasy relation between humans and finitude can be seen in Kit and Holly's delusional search for freedom in the forest, away from historical and social conventions of their time in Badlands; it takes the form of Bill, Abby, and the Farmer's subjection to a tragic narrative equally associated to non-human nature and human cultural elevation in Days of Heaven. It further takes the form of war and a violent subjection to laws of nature and history in The Thin Red Line and in the The New World; and the form of a false dichotomy between the world of Grace and that of Nature in the context of deep time and the evolution of matter and life in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time.