Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy

241 Pages·2011·0.82 MB·English

by  Thomas Deane Tucker

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick
Film and Philosophy
Edited by
Thomas Deane Tucker
and
Stuart Kendall
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Terrence Malick, fi lm and philosophy / edited by Thomas Deane Tucker & Stuart
Kendall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-5003-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-5003-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Malick, Terrence, 1945—
Criticism and interpretation. I. Tucker, Thomas Deane, 1962- II. Kendall, Stuart.
PN1998.3.M3388T47 2011
791.43023’3092–dc22
2010048884
EISBN: 978-1-4411-4027-2
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker
Chapter 2: Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters 13
Steven Rybin
Chapter 3: Terrence Malick’s Histories of Violence 40
John Bleasdale
Chapter 4: Rührender Achtung: Terrence Malick’s
Cinematic Neo-Modernity 58
Thomas Wall
Chapter 5: Worlding the West: An Ontopology of Badlands 80
Thomas Deane Tucker
Chapter 6: Fields of Vision: Human Presence in
the Plain Landscapes of Terrence Malick and
Wright Morris 101
Matthew Evertson
Chapter 7: The Belvedere and the Bunkhouse:
Space and Place in Days of Heaven 126
Ian Rijsdijk
Chapter 8: The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven 148
Stuart Kendall
Chapter 9: Darkness from Light: Dialectics and The Thin Red Line 165
Russell Manning
vi Contents
Chapter 10: Song of the Earth: Cinematic
Romanticism in Malick’s The New World 179
Robert Sinnerbrink
Chapter 11: Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s
The New World 197
Elizabeth Walden
Bibliography 211
Index 217
Notes on Contributors
John Bleasdale is a fi lm scholar and Professor at Università Ca’ Foscari
Venezia.
Matthew Evertson is an Associate Professor of English at Chadron State
College in Nebraska and a scholar of American literature with a specialty
in the literature of the Great Plains. He is the author of numerous arti-
cles on Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Teddy Roosevelt. His book
Strenuous Lives: Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt and the American 1890s
will be published by University of Alabama Press in 2011.
Stuart Kendall is an independent scholar working at the intersections of
visual and critical studies, poetics and theology. In addition to numerous
articles and reviews, he is the author of Georges Bataille, a critical biog-
raphy, published by Reaktion Books, and the editor and translator of
eight volumes of diverse writings in visual and critical studies by Georges
Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, René Char, Guy Debord,
and Paul Eluard.
Russell Manning is a Postdoctorate Fellow at the Institute for Citizenship
and Globalisation at Deakins University in Australia.
Ian Rijsdijk teaches a variety of fi lm studies and media courses at The
Center For Film and Media Studies at University of Capetown. He is cur-
rently working in the fi eld of ecocriticism and fi lm.
Steven Rybin is an Instructor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He
received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Film Studies and Philosophical
Aesthetics from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University in
Athens, Ohio, after completing his MA in Film Studies from Emory
University in 2005. He has taught classes in fi lm aesthetics, art cinema,
fi lm authorship, fi lm history, and interdisciplinary courses on the arts.
viii Notes on Contributors
He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books, 2007)
and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood: Cinephilia and Film Authorship (forthcom-
ing in 2011).
Robert Sinnerbrink was awarded his Ph.D. on Hegel, Heidegger, and the
Metaphysics of Modernity at the University of Sydney in 2002. During his
postgraduate research period he spent six months studying at the Hum-
boldt Universitaet in Berlin. He has taught philosophy at a number of
institutions, including the University of Sydney, UTS, UNSW, The C ollege
of Fine Arts, and Macquarie University. He is currently Lecturer in Phi-
losophy at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. He is Chair of the
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy and book review coedi-
tor for the journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social
Theory.
Thomas Deane Tucker is a Professor of Humanities at Chadron State
College in western Nebraska. His research and teaching interests are in
philosophical aesthetics, continental philosophy, and cinema studies.
His work has appeared in journals such as Studies in French Cinema, Film-
Philosophy Journal, and Enculturation. He is the author of Derridada: Duch-
amp as Readymade Deconstruction (Lexington Books, 2008). It is the fi rst
text to explore Duchamp’s work in the context of the theories of Derrida
and deconstruction. He is currently working on a book titled The Logic of
Indifférance.
Elizabeth Walden is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Stud-
ies at Bryant University in Smithfi eld, Rhode Island. Her recent work
addresses emerging notions of materiality and posthuman collectivities
in fi lm and visual culture.
Thomas Carl Wall is an English professor at National Tapei University of
Technology in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of
Washington. His interests are in the Twentieth-Century World Litera-
ture, Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, Film Theory, History
of Literary Criticism, and History of Western Thought. He is the author
of Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (SUNY Press, 1999).
Chapter 1
Introduction
Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker
In the preface to his book The World Viewed: Refl ections on the Ontology of
Film, fi rst published in 1971, philosopher Stanley Cavell acknowledges
his gratefulness to Terrence Malick.1 Cavell thanks a number of other
friends and colleagues, as well as his wife, in the same pages, so the com-
ment is almost unremarkable. It is in fact a comment that would only
become remarkable a few years later, after Terrence Malick had written
and directed some of the most astonishing fi lms produced during our
times.
When Cavell fi rst published his remark, Malick was 28 years old and a
recent graduate of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Cavell—
seventeen years Malick’s senior—had been his professor in philosophy
at Harvard in the mid-1960s and the two had stayed in touch as Malick
sought and found his way from philosophy into fi lm or, as this volume
proposes to explore, from philosophy into a certain kind of fi lmmaking
relevant to philosophy. In the second enlarged edition of his book,
published in 1979, Cavell again references Malick, this time in
connection with some passages from Martin Heidegger’s What is Called
Thinking? that strike Cavell as particularly helpful to understanding
Malick’s then recent second fi lm, Days of Heaven as well as to under-
standing the main subject of Cavell’s work, the ontology of fi lm. Cavell’s
book links a c elebrated contemporary American philosopher and an
inchoate c ontemporary American fi lmmaker in a unique and paradoxi-
cal relationship: here the teacher thanks his former student and refer-
ences that student’s fi lm work as an illustration of his own philosophical
ideas. But who has taught whom, what, and when? What is the relation-
ship between the philosopher and the fi lmmaker? This question reso-
nates b iographically—proposing an ongoing friendship between these