Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory , Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven
- 2 Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World
- 3 Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time
- 4 The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory , Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven
- 2 Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World
- 3 Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time
- 4 The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The Introduction of the book focuses on the concepts of nature and history in Malick scholarship and foregrounds historical and material approaches rather than mythical and theological approaches to his films. The chapter redirects Ecocinema scholarship on the importance of temporal relations to nature and finitude in films. The combination of Lyotard's figural aesthetics and Benjamin's concept of the shape of time are compared and contrasted with Merleau-Pontyenne phenomenology and Deleuzian materiality and notion of the time-image. The chapter frames Benjamin's concept of the shape of time as a novel contribution to film-phenomenology and presents a time-based methodological framework in Ecocinema approaches to time and nature in Malick films.
Keywords: time-image; figural aesthetics; shape of time; Ecocinema; phenomenology.
‘People, you are the future. You will decide what happens to our world. What happens to the birds from the air, the fish in the sea, the water that we drink. You will decide what happens to our world. You. People. You. Are. The Future. And the future. Is. NOW.’ (Song to Song, 2017)’
In May 2019, viewers of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival are the first to experience the latest Malick film, A Hidden Life, a cinematic retelling of historical events that happened in 1943 Europe. The story of an Austrian conscientious objector, Franz Jägerstätter, who was sentenced to the death penalty because he refused to obey state and religious authority of his time, will confront viewers’ relation to ethical actions and choices, at a time in which Jägerstätter's acts and choices were questionable, non-heroic and private and the majority of his contemporaries were metaphorically jumping on a train to hell.
In 1943, Adolf Hitler's Holocaust was at its peak, with millions of European Jews being deported to concentration camps and systematically killed in gas chambers. In the same year Terrence Malick was born in Illinois and Martin Heidegger, a then member of Hitler's National Socialist party, was about to publish The Essence of Truth based on the Aletheia lectures given at Freiburg University ten years earlier. Only three years before, Walter Benjamin, one of the many German Jews intellectuals fleeing the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, also chooses death rather than succumbing to Hitler's laws and takes his own life after a failed attempt to reach the United States and cross the border from France to Spain without legal documents.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Work of Terrence MalickTime-Based Ecocinema, pp. 11 - 48Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019