The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema 9789462989108, 9789048541515

Citation preview

FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION

the work of

Terrence

Malick

time-based ecocinema gabriella blasi

The Work of Terrence Malick

The Work of Terrence Malick Time-Based Ecocinema

Gabriella Blasi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Still from To the Wonder (2012) Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 910 8 e-isbn 978 90 4854 151 5 doi 10.5117/9789462989108 nur 670 © G. Blasi / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

For Alaya



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Framing Nature and History in Malick Scholarship Ecocritical Film Studies and the Problem of Space The Figural Approach to Analysis in Film Studies Benjamin’s Concept of Time in Film Studies Terrence Malick’s Work: Time-Based Ecocinema Works Cited 1. From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory, Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven Symbolic and Allegorical Nature in Badlands Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Days of Heaven Prehistory and Second Technologies in Badlands and Days of Heaven The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology: Splinters of Messianic Time in Badlands and Days of Heaven Conclusion: from Mythic to Figural Temporal Relations in Films Works Cited 2. Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World The Thin Red Line Between Historical and Mechanical Nature Critiquing Violence in Nature and History Timidity and Courage in The Thin Red Line and The New World Camera Work as Pure Mediality Conclusion: Time-Based Phenomenology Works Cited 3. Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time Replaying Life’s Tape? Competing Mythological Narratives in Malick’s The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time Reconfiguring Modern Aesthetics in Evolutionary Narratives Figural Space beyond Idealism and Nihilism

9 11 13 18 21 30 38 41 49 51 55 60 66 70 73 77 80 83 87 90 98 100 105 107 114 118

Materialist Theology in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey 119 Conclusion: Counterfactual Histories in Evolutionary Narratives 123 Works Cited 125 4. The Wastelands of Progressin To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song 129 The End of Teleological Time in To the Wonder 133 The Pilgrim’s Progress in Knight of Cups 138 Twenty-First Century’s Histories and Technologies in Song to Song 143 Contemporary Ecocinema in Song to Song  147 Conclusion: Finite Freedom and Materialist Theology in ­Ecocinema 149 Works Cited 152 Conclusion

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Bibliography

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About the Author

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Index

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Acknowledgments Many voices contributed to this book’s arguments over the years. I would like to thank Warwick Mules, Tony Thwaites and Jane Stadler for their support and challenges during my PhD at The University of Queensland, where the majority of the research informing this book took place. I acknowledge the long lasting impact of Thomas Elsaesser’s UQ Masterclass on Lars von Trier, and the conversations that ensued from it, in October 2014. I am also grateful for the support and collegiality of many others, including David Baker, Amelia Barikin, Jamie Carson, Joanne Faulkner, Susan Forde, Greg Hainge, Ian Hesketh, Lisa Hill, Jason Jacobs, Wendy Keys, Marguerite La Caze, Helen Miller, Ted Nannicelli, Tom O’Regan, Richard Read, Steven Rybin, Robert Sinnerbrink, Lisa Trahir, Herman Van Eyken, Sara Visocnik, Marcus Waters, Jillian Whitlock. Some sections of Chapter 1 of this book were published in ‘The Orchid in the Land of Garbage: an Ecocritique of Terrence Malick’s Badlands’, Environmental Humanities, 5 (2014), pp. 55-75. Limited sections of Chapter 2 of this book were published in ‘The Cinematic Life of the Figural: Mapping Shapes of Time in Terrence Malick’s The New World,’ Cinema: the Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 7 (2015), pp.11-27 and in ‘Nature, History and “Critique of Violence” in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line’, Parrhesia: The Journal of Critical Philosophy, 26 (2016), pp. 81-95. Limited sections of Chapter 4 were published in ‘The Cinema of Entanglement: How not to Contemplate Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, Voyage of Time and Knight of Cups’, New Review of Film and Television Studies. 17 (2019), pp. 20-37.

Introduction 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 f initude in f ilms. The combination of Lyotard’s f igural 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; f igural 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

Blasi, G., The Work of Terrence Malick. Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989108_intro

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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. Twenty-five years later, Malick, a then Philosophy student from Harvard, visits Heidegger in his hut near the Black Forest as he prepares to work on the English translation of The Essence of Reason. In 1969, after abandoning academic pursues and his thesis on the concept of world in Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Malick chooses to sit the inaugural class of the American Film Institute Conservatory, beginning his remarkable career as a filmmaker. This book joins a growing number of scholarly work on Malick’s oeuvre that recognizes the important contribution of his cinema to contemporary culture and thought. Its main argument is that Malick’s body of work articulates a radical shift in traditional human relations to time, nature and technology in the twenty-first century. The concept of a time-based ecocinema announced in this book’s title encapsulates the central notion that Malick’s cinematic work alters teleological notions of time and history in human culture and destroys traditional conceptions of spatio-temporal continuity. Malick’s films bring forward a new temporal framework in nature-culture relations, opening up a reconsideration of the role of films and spectatorship in the twenty-first century. In 2019, at a time in which nation-states’ powers ignore people’s voices and ecological disaster is a transnational emergency, Malick’s films mobilise considerations on the role of ecocinema studies in human-nature relations beyond nation-state authorities and borders. Malick’s cinematic work is here analysed focusing on precise questions on human freedom in finitude and in technologically determined communication frameworks, questions that were central in both Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s philosophical projects and that are crucial today, when human beings are, once again, metaphorically jumping on a train to hell, ignoring calls to address climate change and systematic loss of natural habitats and animal species on a global scale. The image of the train, borrowed from Franz Jägerstätter’s writings in A Hidden Life, resonates in Malick’s early work and portrayal of human history in his films. As I shall argue in Chapter 1, one of such images is at the end of Days of Heaven when Abby joins a group of young soldiers going towards World War I, just after a rather enigmatic figure, an apple seller,

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exchanges glances with her as she crosses the road to reach the train station. The apple seller offers unexplored considerations on human freedom of choice in historical time, a figural thread that returns and recurs in Malick films, disguised under many shapes and forms as the trope of ‘fallenness’ into finitude and history in human-nature relations. In many ways this book tells the story of Abby’s missed choice, the same choice that over the past 40 years continues to be offered to a growing number of spectators of Malick films through shifting film technologies and styles across nations, languages and borders. Three major influences inform this book’s theoretical approach to the analysis of Malick’s films, providing the framework, vocabulary and concepts of a time-based ecocinema. These are Benjamin’s phenomenology and concept of the ‘shape of time’ as discussed by Peter Fenves in The Messianic Reduction; a figural approach to aesthetics as discussed by Jean François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure; and contemporary debates in ecocinema scholarhip, particularly the work of Salma Monanni, Sean Cubitt, and Adrian Ivakhiv. The aim of this book is to shine a light on the relevance of a Benjaminian film-phenomenological framework in Malick studies and to complement traditional formalist approaches to film analysis with a figural approach in ecocinema studies.

Framing Nature and History in Malick Scholarship From Kit and Holly’s vain escape in the forest (Badlands 1973), to the biblical plagues of Days of Heaven (1978), the invasion of indigenous land and communities in The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), the evolution of life in the cosmos in The Tree of Life (2011) and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey (2016), and the deeply alienated twenty-first century settings of To the Wonder (2014), Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017), Malick’s films consistently deal with the difficult relation between humans and nature in the form of finitude and freedom of choice. Malick’s complex treatment of nature images in his films is the object of extensive scholarly work that privileges a mythical rather than historical framework of analysis on nature-culture relations. The mythical critical strand is broadly divided into Christian and transcendentalist views of nature. David Davies notes that many critics see an ‘Edenic yearning for a lost wholeness of being or the expression of an Emersonian Transcendentalism’ (p. 3) in Malick’s films. Taking their cues from The Thin Red Line’s voice-overs referring to ‘one big soul’ and ‘all things shining’, Ron Mottram and Stacy

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Peebles argue that Malick’s conception of nature refers specif ically to the work of Thoreau and Emerson in the American transcendentalist tradition. Peeble argues that for ‘Emerson, as well as for Witt, and also Malick, nature and spirituality are inextricably intertwined,’ and only through communion with nature, humans can regain their connection to an Emersonian universal soul (p. 157). Moving from similar premises, Mottram sees in the chronology of the historical settings of Malick’s films a progressive loss of transcendental unity and wholeness with the world of nature. Whereas Robert Silberman sees a constant preoccupation with the pastoral in Malick’s oeuvre, from the Maxfield Parrish print in Badlands, to H.H. Bennett’s photographs in Days of Heaven, to the more explicit lost paradises of the Melanesian and Powhatan people in The Thin Red Line and The New World. Among other mythical interpretations, the myth of the American land and the West figure prominently in John Orr’s and Neil Campbell’s readings of Badlands. With some notable exceptions (Steven Rybin ‘Voicing menaing’, The Thought of Film; Warwick Mules ‘Mise-en-Scène and the Figural’ and ‘How Film Can Carry Being’) the mythical and non-historical critical strand found renewed impulse in the early 2010s and predominates contemporary scholarship on Malick’s films. With the release of The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), Voyage of Time (2016), Song to Song (2017) and A Hidden Life (2019) in uncharacteristically rapid succession, mythical interpretations of Malick’s work have shifted to uncompromised theological readings in the Christian tradition (Peter J. Leithart; Nicola Hoggard Creegan). Malick’s later films undoubtedly present increasingly marked religious themes with the exploration of Gnostic and Manichean worldviews (Bradley TePaske). As TePaske explains, a Gnostic view of the world entails an intrinsic ‘fallenness’ from an original state of grace. In this view, human kind, in particular, has fallen from the world of Grace to the world of Nature and must find their way back to Grace through trials and struggles. In this vein, Malick is treated in rather mystical terms and his films are seen as sacred texts that need to be decoded according to a ‘pansophic tradition’ (TePaske, p. 118) of arcane knowledge.1 The insistence on another world (of peace and/or Grace) beyond the world of war and 1 TePaske likens Malick to a lineage of thinkers that goes from the ‘pre-Socratic philosophers through Jewish apocalyptic, to Gnosticism, alchemy, Renaissance hermeticism, Goethe, William Blake, and on to C.G. Jung’ (p. 118). Exponents of this pansophic tradition, for TePaske, ‘were soulful visionaries who generally knew their Cabbala, were astrologically adept, and whose purview was born of, and intent upon, immediate experience of psyche and the spiritual world’ (p. 120).

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nature is a common thread of the mythical and transcendental approach to Malick’s films. Silberman, for example, sees in the recurrent figure of speech of the ‘spark’ in The Thin Red Line, ‘a kind of visual fire sermon [… that] offers another view of transcendence to go with the idyllic images of light and water [… these] indicate a realm of peace beyond the landscape of war’ (p. 171). Notwithstanding the proliferation of theological readings of Malick’s films of the 2010s (Kathleen E. Urda; Brent S. Plate; George B. Handley; Paul Camacho; Christopher Barnett and Clark Elliston), there is a consistent body of academic work framing Malick’s concerns on nature and grace in philosophical rather than religious terms. An important strand of critical work analyses Malick’s cinema through the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and draws on some fascinating biographical elements of Malick’s career.2 Focusing on the specifics of nature-culture relations, the general consensus is that the world of nature in Malick’s films stands for the world of finitude and mortality or, in Heidegger’s words, ‘being toward death’ (Heidegger, Being and Time). Among many nuanced Heideggerian readings in this vein (Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Salazar Prince; Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy; Martin Donougho; Roger Clewis) Kaja Silverman argues that rather than speaking of Being, Malick’s cinema, particularly The Thin Red Line, ‘shows it to us’ (324). This showing of Being, for Silverman, translates into a phenomenological approach to the sensuous possibilities of cinematic experiences. In this, Silverman’s interpretation of ‘fallenness’, through Heidegger, is very different from the Gnostic interpretations mentioned above. Moving from Heidegger’s insight that ‘death is a way to be which Dasein takes over as soon as it is’ (p. 228), Silverman suggest, ‘fallenness’ signifies not a permanent lapse out of innocence into sinfulness but rather Dasein’s normal, everyday state’ (p. 342). As Davies points out, however, reading Malick’s work through Heidegger brings forth a different set of preoccupations on nature-culture relations through his films: not only nature as an expression of being-towards-death and mortality, but as an ‘expression of the Heideggerian ontological critique of technology, and of the Heideggerian role of the poet in destitute times who reveals through the medium of cinema the presencing of Being through language’ (pp. 3-4). 2 Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell, who, commenting on Malick’s Days of Heaven, first noticed the director’s affinity with Heideggerian thought in the introduction to his book The World Viewed. As John Rhym and others have noted, Malick’s academic background in philosophy and his translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reason have inspired many readings of his films as emergence of a Heideggerean cinema, especially from The Thin Red Line onwards.

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Heideggerian readings of Malick’s oeuvre privilege a thoroughly historical, rather than mythological, framework of analysis. Rybin’s book-length analysis on Malick’s films, for example, openly resists mythological views of nature and maintains that his cinema enables a phenomenological connection between characters and viewers: I seek to understand Malick’s cinema and in particular our encounters with his characters, as the experiential site of our film-philosophy. Heidegger’s concepts […] will not determine what Malick means to us, then, but will rather open for us a space in which the meanings Malick’s characters strive to make, and how they strive to voice this meaning, eventually mark who we ourselves strive to become in watching his films. (p. 3)

Rybin suggests Malick’s characters do not occupy clearly defined subjectivities, ideologies, and viewpoints, but strive to make meaning. In his analysis of striving, he explicitly connects Heidegger’s philosophy to Vivian Sobchack’s existential phenomenology in film studies. Rybin’s productive analysis of Heidegger’s notions of striving, worlding, and dwelling in Malick’s films is therefore to be understood as striving for meaning solidly anchored in historical space, in the space of the films’ characters and their viewers’ contingent circumstances. Rybin’s study of Malick’s films intersects with work on film-philosophy and cinematic thinking. The question that runs through film-philosophical understandings of Malick’s films, as Robert Sinnerbrink’s work (‘A Heideggerian Cinema ?’; New Philosophies of Film) suggests, is not concerned with mere illustration of a philosophical meta-text, but should take into greater consideration the specific role of film and media technologies in generating and provoking philosophical thought: A ‘Heideggerian’ approach to Malick’s work […] presuppose[s] that we have already considered the question of the nature of the cinematic image and its capacity to provoke thought. And these are questions still very much to be explored. (‘A Heideggerian Cinema?’, pp. 36-37)

The use of Heidegger’s thought in f ilm-philosophy, for Sinnerbrink, is problematic considering his take on Heidegger’s nostalgic propensity for pre-technological art-forms in nature-culture relations. As Sinnerbrink puts it: Heidegger’s thinking on f ilm, such as it is, remains overwhelmingly negative: f ilm is a powerful instance of reductive technological

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en-framing that only intensif ies the Western obliteration of Being. From this negativistic, ‘end of art’ perspective in Heidegger, cinema can only be regarded […] as an aesthetic resource oriented towards the intensification of subjective sensation and objectification of Being. (p. 35)

For Heidegger, modern science and technological development contribute to the modern enframing (Gestall) and objectification of the world; a world in which technology transforms nature into a standing reserve for human indiscriminate consumption (The Question Concerning Technology). While Heidegger does not explicitly engage with a critique of cinema technologies in any of his writings, his criticism on modern science and subjectivity (‘The Age of the World Picture’) and his considerations on art (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’) suggest that cinema is, indeed, ‘an aesthetic resource oriented towards the intensification of subjective sensation’ (Sinnerbrink, p. 35).3 In his writings on art and technology, Heidegger clearly privileges poetry, painting, and classical art-forms as capable of world disclosure or poiesis, 4 a blossoming or revealing of Being through art. It can be seen that the use of Heidegger’s ideas in film studies has the undesirable side effect of further polarising the subject-object divide at the base of modern aesthetics; a divide that Heidegger’s philosophy and notion of Being consistently tried to resolve throughout his writing and life.5 While this book acknowledges the relevance and importance of Heidegger’s philosophy in contemporary film-philosophical work on Malick’s films (Silverman; Rybin; John Rhym), it maintains that Heidegger’s philosophy of art and technology is less suitable when applied to the historical analysis of nature-culture relations in Malick’s films. Notwithstanding the tragic consequences of seeking an impossible fulfillment in Nature as Being in modernity,6 how is it possible to reconcile Heidegger’s notion of enframing with Malick’s use of f ilm 3 Sinnerbrink’s views on Heidegger’s criticism of modern aesthetics are articulated in ‘Heidegger and the End of Art’ (pp. 89-109). 4 Heidegger’s examples of art capable of world disclosure in ‘The Origin’ essay are Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and Greek architecture. For a notable critique of Heidegger’s pre-technological nostalgia, see Alain Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy. 5 For a succinct and very clear rendition of Heidegger’s ideas on modern conceptions of subjectivity and aesthetics see Joanna Hodge “Against Aesthetics”, and Giovanni Vattimo’s The End of Modernity. 6 While Heidegger’s thought has contributed to important developments in ecocritical approaches to literature and culture (see Ladelle McWhorter), Greg Garrard has voiced the dangers of using Heidegger’s thought and language in environmental discourses. This is also evident in Mules’s work With Nature in which Mules engages with Heidegger’s concepts and

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technologies in dealing with nature-culture relations in his films? Perhaps for this reason, Sinnerbrink’s own work on Malick after ‘A Heideggerian Cinema?’ does not use Heidegger’s philosophy at all, but interprets Malick’s poetic relation to the world and nature using German Romantic philosophy (‘Cinematic Romanticism’) in the analysis of The New World and Bazin’s ontological realism (‘Cinematic Belief’) in the analysis of The Tree of Life. This book will specifically enter into dialogue with a number of critical and philosophical works on Malick (Sinnerbrink; Rybin; Stuart Kendall; Donougho; Iain Macdonald; Mules) to demonstrate that Malick’s cinema presents exciting challenges for contemporary film studies dealing with cinematic, non-mythological and historical approaches to nature-culture relations in his films. As shall be seen in greater detail in the course of the argument, these challenges are very relevant in contemporary ecocinema dealing with the importance of a renewed relation to nature and subjectobject relations in contemporary culture. Benjamin’s philosophy of art and technology not only illuminates Malick’s distinctively cinematic treatment of nature-culture relations, but shifts ecocritical attention from issues of space and representation to issues of time and duration in f ilm studies.

Ecocritical Film Studies and the Problem of Space As a sub-branch of ecocriticism, ecocinema or ecocritical film studies is a productive field of investigation in the humanities. Ecocriticism investigates the complexities of nature-culture relations through their historical and contextual representations in cultural artifacts; the different ways humans relate to non-human nature and the environment; and the philosophical underpinnings of such relations. Films and moving images of human and non-human nature convey their meanings through complex interrelations of time-space coordinates, visual and aural cues and stimuli. Moving images and associated soundscapes can therefore be seen as heightened sensory experiences of the world; complex and highly artif icial productions of thought in the development of a contemporary philosophy of nature and sees a precise risk in Heideggerian nature-culture relations: Heidegger understands the nature-culture relation as one of mythologizing, in the sense that it is only enabled in the possibility of a mythic reunion with nature as Being, understood as a “to come” not yet here. This mythologizing […] suggests that Being is a destiny towards which certain beings are directed. (pp. 140-141)

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experiences; and imitations as well as constructions of the way humans relate to phenomena, real or invented. In this view, the field of ecocinema, or ecocritical film studies or, more generally, ecomedia, has seen a proliferation of theoretical approaches in recent years. Publications in the field comprise edited collections presenting interdisciplinary work to tackle the complex ways in which moving images affect the relationship to the more than human world (Alexa Weik von Mossner) or apply findings derived from actor-network theory and ecological systems theory to media analysis (Sean Cubitt et al. Ecomedia). In a similar vein, Adrian Ivakhiv’s model of analysis seeks to understand world forming in ‘process-relational terms’ (p. 47). Ivakhiv draws on Peirce, Bergson, North Whitehead, and Deleuze, to develop a ‘synthetic triadic model’ (‘An Ecophilosophy’ 60; Ecologies of the Moving Image, pp. 64-65) through which these relations can begin to be understood. On the other hand, Scott MacDonald maintains that ecocinema seeks an empirical ‘retraining of perception—as a way of offering an alternative to conventional media-spectatorship’ (p. 108). Applying a similarly empirical framework of analysis in cognitive psychology, Joseph Anderson et al. explore ‘the ways moving images mesh with our minds’ (David Bordwell, ‘Foreword’ in Anderson et al., Moving Image Theory xi). The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of ecocinema are currently undergoing a tripartite polarisation between Deleuzian materialism, a cognitivist approach to films, and a film-phenomenological one. A fourth emergent paradigm in the field is the hybridisation of cognitivism and filmphenomenology, despite the differences between the objective and empirical epistemology of the former and the subjective and experiential epistemology of the latter. What justifies the use of such diverse methodologies in the field is a concern to understand the ways in which humans relate to the more than human world and to their environments, be they real or virtual, in ways that are ‘based on defensible philosophical principles, [and which] will account for all relevant aspects of film spectatorship, and, if possible, generate informative textual interpretations of individual films’ (David Ingram, p. 24). The cognitivist/phenomenological approach to ecological concerns in films suggests the bipolar approach to cinema as subjective art or objective and empirically measurable product of technological intentions is far from resolved in contemporary culture.7 For this reason, films, and 7 This approach to f ilm studies trough subjectivist and objectivist lenses is evident in contemporary attempts to blend film-phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience (See Jane Stadler “Experiential Realism: A Neurophenomenological Approach”) and attempts to blend Deleuzian film-philosophy and neuroscience (See Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image).

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especially Malick’s, are a productive terrain of discussion for film scholars interested in the disruption of the Cartesian subject-object divide that has dominated cultural criticism and relations to non-human nature in the Western, now global, way of seeing and conceiving art, films, and natural resources. While ecological considerations of Malick’s films will be further developed in the course of the argument, it is important to point out that current work on ecocinema is mainly concerned with spatial relations to the more than human world, whether in terms of systemic or relational-material approaches or in terms of bodily and sensual connections between spectators and films. With the notable exception of Sean Cubitt,8 ecocinema theory has given limited consideration to issues of time in films. Following a Nietzschean and Deleuzian approach that is specifically ‘ranged against the subjectively oriented environmentalism’ of film-phenomenology, Cubitt argues that: films can help us understand the role of affect in cinema, the specificity of time as the native dimension of affect, and the relation between affect and environment which the moving image, the audiovisual moving image as the art of time par excellence, is uniquely fitted to express (‘Affect and Environment’, p. 251).

As I shall argue in detail, Benjamin’s philosophy not only offers a novel and non-mythical approach to nature-culture relations in Malick’s films, it offers a substantial contribution to contemporary ecocinema theory interested in the audiovisual moving image as the art of time par excellence. While current approaches to subjectivity in film-phenomenology and subsequent applications to ecocinema tend to approach the film experience and the spectator’s body in spatial terms, this book claims that Benjamin’s philosophical work engages with space-time coordinates in ways that overcome what Cubitt calls ‘the dangers of a subjectively oriented environmentalism in film studies’ (251). In order to support this claim through analysis of nature-culture relations in Malick’s films in the rest of the book, I turn to the notion of figurality in film studies and its correspondences with Benjamin’s concepts of time, art and technology. 8 In Finite Media Cubitt argues that finitude is a key issue in Ecomedia studies and develops his arguments around the notion that: Media are finite, in the sense both that, as matter, they are inevitably tied to physics, especially the dimension of time; and that their constituent elements—matter and energy, information and entropy, time and space, but especially the first pair—are finite resources in the closed system of planet earth. (p. 7)

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The Figural Approach to Analysis in Film Studies There is no concept of the aesthetic that does not ground itself in an ontology that projects a form of time, or rather timelessness, where Art must shore up its Being over the erosions of history. (David Norman Rodowick, Reading the Figural, p. 30)

The figural in film studies emerged to complement structuralist and semiotic approaches to art and texts through seminal works by Jean-François Lyotard (Discours, figure) and Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation). Contrary to Gilles Deleuze’s books, widely disseminated in English-speaking academe through several translations over the past 40 years, the existing work on the figural has received limited attention. The English translation of Lyotard’s Discours, figure (Discourse, Figure) was published in 2011, 40 years after its publication in France, and it is only recently that non-Francophone film scholars have begun to engage with Lyotard’s writings on film (Ashley Woodward). The first book-length work on the figural in relation to film and media studies in the English language is Rodowick’s Reading the Figural: or, Philosophy after the New Media. Rodowick’s work presents compelling readings of both Lyotard’s and Deleuze’s notions of the figural, and sets on ‘a philosophical journey where I seek out allies both for deconstructing the opposition of word and image and for creating new concepts for comprehending the f igural as a transformation of discourse by recent technologies of the visible’ (p. 2). In approaching the f igural ‘in recent technologies of the visible,’ Rodowick also clarifies that the figural is not at all a new approach to artistic practices; rather, the figural, he says, ‘is both new yet very old’ (p. 4), with ramifications in both the history of philosophy and the history of art: Lyotard himself readily admits that the figural has an autonomous existence with a long history. The history of art, or more deeply the history of representation, is full of ‘authorless’ examples of figurative text and textualized figures. Simply recognizing their existence already pushes the limits of modern philosophy’s distinction between the arts of succession and those of simultaneity […] Nonetheless, in their own peculiar transformation of discourse, perhaps the new media help us challenge in new ways the ontological gesture that separates the arts of time from the arts of space. In so doing, the visible is no longer banished from the realm of discourse, which is reserved for linguistic sense as the site of

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rational communication, and the articulable, or enonçable, can regain its powers of plastic transformation. [emphasis added] (p. 4)

Mules’s review article on Reading the Figural (‘The Figural as Interface’) points to the important potential of the figural in film analysis and welcomes Rodowick’s text as timely for two main reasons: the consequence of this re-reading of the f igural away from signif ier effects and towards the torqued image of the plastic material of film, is significant. It overcomes the limitations of a critical analysis always cast in the mode of resistance, where film structure is placed in question by the destabilizing force of figurality […] it also reaffirms the film in its f ilmness, thereby paving the way for a positive engagement with the film text, bringing into view new forms of connections and modes of becoming that f ilms in their specif ic technological formats, make happen. (n.p.)

While the literature on the topic does not provide ready and straightforward definitions of what the figural is,9 it is very clear on what the figural is not. Not only does the figural represent a break from semiotics and signifier/ signified structures in film analysis, it also presents challenges to subjective, bodily, and sensorial approaches to films.10 For example, Philipe Dubois (‘Au 9 For example, Nicole Brenez explains her use of the term ‘figural’ in her introduction ‘Letter to Tag Gallagher’, in a marginal note on Siegfried Kracauer’s essay on photography. Brenez writes: [r]ather than tracing the historical notions of the ‘figural’ (you have read Erich Auerbach’s Figura, it suffices to extend it with Jean-François Lyotard Discours, Figure, and above all with Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon. The logic of sensation), I’ll give you a practical definition, which borrows from the propositions of Kracauer or Jean Epstein: ‘the figural implies the usual fragmentation which society infers to its natural world. The figural itself would imply an articulation—seized or produced—of the visible world, or of a constructed visible universe whose parts are not yet “arranged” into [ne sont pas encore”appretées” aux] Figures of the natural world.’ [my translation] (De la figure, p. 12) Brenez’s definition is quoted from semiologist Jean-Marie Floch. 10 As William Routt puts it, despite acknowledging Erich Auerbach’s essay ‘Figura’ in the genealogy of the term (see previous footnote), Brenez’s attention to the body in her book titled On the Figure in General and on the Body in Particular [my translation] complicates ‘f igural’ approaches to film images. Following Routt, it is perhaps important to point out that Auerbach’s seminal essay ‘Figura’ provides a detailed philological account of the term and traces figural interpretation back to historical and hermeneutical approaches to biblical exegesis and sacred iconography. Auerbach writes: Figura is something real and historical which announces something else which is also real and historical. The relation between the two is revealed by an accord or similarity[…] Often

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seuil’, pp. 143-144) maintains that Lyotard’s figural aesthetics differ from semiological and structural approaches to texts and distances itself from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: ‘when Lyotard conceives the figural in his notable and always intense Discours, Figure, he does so starting from a critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology’ [my translation]. To be sure, Lyotard addresses the problem of phenomenology, and in a passage worth quoting at length states: [Merleau-Ponty] wanted to introduce the gesture, the mobility of the sensory, even into the invariance characteristic of the system of language, to articulate what is constitutive of saying, to restore the act that inaugurates the possibility of speech: the ultimate attempt on behalf of transcendental reflection. To no avail. The system is always already there [emphasis added], and the gesture of speech that supposedly creates signification can never be grasped in its constituting function, for it is always and can only be grasped as deconstruction [original emphasis]. What one can show to reach this order sought by Merleau-Ponty is how the beyond-Logos dwells in language, how it invades it to transgress the invariances—the keys to signification—and arouse in it the lateral meaning that is surreality. But if this meaning is indeed surreality, this is because the energy of deconstructing is not only on this side of the Logos, but also on this side of the real, or of perception, and because this sensory, or rather this visible [original emphasis] with which we will have to deal is not that which surrenders to the utilitarian or scientific eye […] not even the visible seized by the eye trained to wait, to see the invisible (which is Cézanne’s, according to Merleau-Ponty). No, it is the visible of a subject-less gaze, the object of nobody’s eye [emphasis added]. (Discourse, Figure, pp. 54-55) vague similarities in the structure of events or in their attendant circumstances suffice to make the figura recognizable; to find it, one had to be determined to interpret in a certain way [emphasis added]. (p. 29) This ‘certain way’ of interpreting is not empirical and objectively defined but always historical and contingent. While Nicole Brenez acknowledges Auerbach’s essay ‘Figura’ in the history of the term, Brenez’s own definition of the figural (quoted above in previous footnote) draws from a semiologist (Jean-Marie Floch). Brenez focuses on signs: non-historical, Classic, symbolic signs in films. In this, Bill Routt’s review essay duly notes that Brenez’s work does not account for Auerbach’s historical hermeneutics: the recurrence of similar figures in texts as continuous (not fulf illed) promise of their fulf illment. Contrary to Brenez’s approach, ‘[t]he alternative offered by Auerbach [for film theorists] […] would seem to suggest that film does indeed have a significant […] relation to some kind of profilmic reality [emphasis added]’ (Routt n.p.). The prof ilmic reality Brenez’s work on the f igural does not account for is f ilm’s unique relation to time.

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This passage is important in distinguishing the f igural approach from both structural linguistics and phenomenology. Indeed, Lyotard’s position, as John Mowitt’s introduction to the English translation asserts, is provocative for its time and Lyotard does in fact begin his discussion by saying: [t]his book protests [that] the given is not a text, it possesses an inherent thickness, or rather a difference, which is not to be read, but rather seen; and this difference, and the immobile mobility that reveals it, are what continually fall into oblivion in the process of signification (p. 3).

Later, Lyotard specifically addresses this thickness or opacity of objects (and world’s mobility): [t]he thickness of the world and its very possibility as always incomplete synthesis, as horizon hollowed out behind its sensory presence, are in this way a function of language [langage] […] But this observation should not lead us to the absurd conclusion that there is nothing but text, for if the world is a function of language, language possesses a world function, as it were: out of what it designates, every utterance makes a world, a thick object waiting to be synthesized, a symbol to be deciphered, but these objects and symbols offer themselves in an expanse where showing is possible. This expanse bordering discourse is not itself the linguistic space where the work of signification is carried out, but a worldly type of space plastic and atmospheric, in which one has to move, circle around things, make their silhouettes vary, in order to utter such and such signif ication heretofore concealed. [emphasis added] (p. 82)

Lyotard makes clear that the ‘beyond-Logos [surreality] dwells in language,’ that is, in appearance, which is always historical: ‘Words are not signs but the moment a word appears, the designated object becomes sign’ (p. 82). For Lyotard, however, the process of designation is not arbitrary: arbitrariness must be supported by an intrinsic property that would allow the linguistic term to escape the attraction of motivation. Such a property does exist: it is that of double articulation, characteristic of articulated language; its function is easy to grasp from a discussion of the sign’s temporality [original emphasis] (Discourse, Figure, pp. 82-83).

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It can be seen that the ‘plastic and atmospheric expanse,’ for Lyotard, is the ground of appearance, of perception, def ined in terms of the sign’s temporality. While Lyotard uses the language of structural linguistics,11 his theory of figural language and signs in Discourse, Figure is not structural at all. For example, while Lyotard’s approach to language does not consider the relation between signifier and signified as naturally determined, it is important to stress that he does not even consider this relation as arbitrary, which is one of the foundations of structural linguistics. More importantly, however, Lyotard’s thinking distances itself from phenomenology as well. Lyotard does not concede the body and sense perception a prelapsarian and prelinguistic state of unity with the world, an a priori comprehension of sense perception. Words and world cannot be fully grasped and continually fall into an inherent ‘thickness’ and opacity of signification. Going back to an application of the figural discourse to film analysis, we are now better equipped to understand why the literature on the figural consistently points to a certain mobility, plasticity, and fluidity of sense construction in our relation to films. Rather than the work of pictorial composition, for example, Jacques Aumont likens the work of the figural in films to the economy of the musical motif. A motif can be analysed autonomously, is repeatable and is always variable, plastic and mobile. Most of all, it is always recognisable although disguised, changed, or reinvented in new ways throughout the composition. Going back to images, for Dubois (‘La tempête et la matière temps’, p. 269), looking for figural gestures in films means looking for the fleeting ‘matter of visual thinking’ [pensée visuelle] (p. 269). While the literature on the figural is dense and suggestive, it is important to ask: what are the philosophical specifications of this ‘matter’ of visual thinking? The ‘matter’ of visual thinking is, precisely, time; the pro-filmic, time-based spatial reality that is at the very foundation of the film experience. The importance of time in film studies has already been established by Deleuze’s notion of the time-image (Cinema 2) and the connection with the figural has been amply explored in Rodowick’s work. For example, Rodowick maintains that the advent of film and photography in modernity signals the beginning of what he terms ‘time-based spatial media,’ triggering a new set 11 The term ‘double articulation’ in Lyotard derives from the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev. Hjelmslev’s concept is also used by Deleuze and Guattari in a Thousand Plateaus to designate the work of “strata” (p. 48). For the importance of Hjelmslev’s concept in Deleuze and Guattari, see Jeffrey Bell (pp. 218-226).

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of ethical questions related to experiences of time rather than experiences of space in films: Aesthetic questions of medium specificity have continually turned into ethical questions. This is the deep value of the kind of ontological evaluation that Cavell and Barthes exemplify […] Throughout the history of film theory, film aesthetics has concerned itself primarily with the analysis of space. Here, I want to suggest that what most powerfully affects us in film is an ethics of time. (The Virtual Life, p. 73)

For Rodowick, the explicitly ethical questions about medium specificity concern human relations to the passing of time: ‘what we have valued in film are our confrontations with time and time’s passing’ (p. 73). In this, one of the main preoccupations of Reading the Figural is establishing a non-Hegelian conception of historicity and time. For example, Rodowick draws important commonalities between Lyotard’s and Deleuzel’s philosophies: they are united in an attempt to move away from ‘philosophies of representation,’ and more importantly, do so by ‘unremitting hostility to Hegel and Hegelianism’ (Reading the Figural, p. 17). This attempt at moving away from Hegelian conceptions of time and history is a constant preoccupation of Rodowick’s contribution to a figural aesthetics. In the introduction to After Images of Gilles Deleuze’s FilmPhilosophy, Rodowick sketches the following film-philosophical premises to his work on the figural: In Reading the Figural, I suggest that the movement-image and the timeimage are not historical concepts and that it is misleading to conceive of the latter as following the former along a chronological time line. The two concepts do suggest, however, divergent philosophies of history owing to their different relations to the Whole and to their immanent logics of image and sign […] The movement-image has a history in a dialectically unfolding teleology. It progresses to a point where it logically completes its semiotic options […] But the time-image pursues another logic altogether. Expressed as eternal return, the recurrent possibility in each moment of time for the emergence of the new and unforseen. (pp. xvii-xviii)

Nietzsche is already central to Rodowick’s Deleuze’s Time-Machine, along with his reading of the influence of Bergson, Kant and Spinoza (pp. xvi, 122-38) in Deleuze’s writings. This centrality is then reiterated in After Images, where Rodowick claims that the ‘direct image of time,’ what Deleuze

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calls the crystal-image,12 ‘occurs or recurs in the form of [a Nietzschean] eternal recurrence’ (After Images, p. xvii). To further reinforce this Deleuzian position, in the introductory remarks to After Images he writes: as soon as the cinema becomes possible, the direct time-image subsists within the logic of cinema as pure virtuality, and this virtuality is not historical because it is unencumbered by the empirical or chronological forms of time […] here [in the time-image] the whole is in relation to an outside expressing as possibility or virtuality that has existed since the beginning of cinema but only rarely finds the conditions for appearing as such, and then only infrequently on ‘pure’ examples […] [emphasis added] (pp. xvii-xviii)

Rodowick’s invocation of Deleuze’s time-image as a ‘pure virtuality’ that has always existed and ‘only infrequently finds expression in “pure” examples,’ translates in a ‘non-historical’ view of the time-image and the crystal-image.13 For Rodowick, as for Deleuze, actual and virtual lives (bodies, images, dreams, worlds) are inscribed within a larger Whole constantly opening up through its parts, the plane of immanence.14 It can be seen that while moving 12 Deleuze’s crystal-image is central to an understanding of the time-image. Drawing from Bergson, Deleuze suggests that the structure of the crystal-image is irreducible: ‘the structure consists in the indivisible unity of an actual image and “its virtual image”’ (Cinema 2, p.78). For Deleuze, just as a seed contains the potential plant, the virtual image structures the actual image: The crystal is expression. Expression moves from the mirror to the seed […] In fact, the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallize an environment which is at present [actuellement] amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallizable, in relation to which now the seed plays the role of actual image. Once again the actual and the virtual are exchanged in an indiscernibility which on each occasion allows distinction to survive. (Cinema 2, p. 74) 13 In Cinema 2, Deleuze characterises the crystal image in relation to the Whole with the following terms: [t]he little crystalline seed and the vast crystallizable universe: everything is included in the capacity for expansion of the collection constituted by the seed and the universe. Memories, dreams, even worlds are only apparent relative circuits which depend on the variations of this Whole. They are degrees or modes of actualization which are spread out between these two extremes of the actual and the virtual. (p. 81) 14 Deleuze’s notion of the ‘plane of immanence’ is his major ontological category of the ‘virtual continuum,’ which is consistently defined in Deleuze’s oeuvre as: a pre-extensive, non-qualified ‘milieu’ or ‘space stratum’ enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual […] field assembling the conditions of real—and not merely possible—experience [emphasis added]. (Louise Burchill, p. 155)

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away from questions of representation, teleology, and Hegelian historicity,15 Rodowick’s subsequent use of Deleuze in Reading the Figural and in his later film-philosophical work privileges a thoroughly non-historical conception of time. In expanding on Rodowick’s film-philosophical claim that the figural methodology intersects with Hegelian and Nietzschean notions of time and history in films, Benjamin’s shape of time is a suitable alternative to the Deleuzian route. This alternative Benjaminian route not only enables an historical conception of the time-image, but it provides interesting and original ways to deal with questions of language and subjectivity in film analysis. Here, it is important to point out that Deleuze’s work does not engage with the problem of subjectivity at all, whether in terms of linguistics, psychoanalysis or phenomenology. As widely recognised, this is a problem that Sobchack’s film-phenomenology has explicitly foregrounded and dealt with. For Sobchack, a Deleuzian film-philosophy ‘neglects the embodied situation of the spectator and of the film’ (The Address of the Eye, p. 31). As Darlene Pursley further elaborates: Deleuze distinguishes his approach to cinema from a phenomenological one by arguing that cinematic images emerge from action-reaction encounters between images, rather than from a perceiving subject situated in space. By detaching consciousness from both the anchoring of the subject [Husserl] and the horizon of the world [Heidegger], however, as Sobchack points out, Deleuze risks the disembodiment of both the spectator and the film (Sobchack, p. 31). Thus in order to ground the film, its meaning, and the spectator’s lived-body situation, Sobchack roots cinema and spectatorship in spatial terms. She identifies the dichotomy of space and time as the distinction between her phenomenology of film and Deleuze’s reading: It is not time, but space, Sobchack explains, that grounds the question of cinematic signification in her study. (Pursley, p. 1196) These def initions and characteristics of the virtual continuum or plane of immanence are important to differentiate Deleuze’s thought from ‘empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects)’ and from an ‘undifferentiated “depth” or groundlessness … identified as pure chaos’ (p. 155). For Deleuze (and Félix Guattari) there are no subjects, but ‘only hacceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages’ (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 266). In this view, life is constituted of assemblages and rhizomatic networks (p. 266) and the plane of immanence is an ‘abstract machine’ or a ‘machinic assemblage’ where ‘there are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds’ (p. 266). 15 In Chapter 5 of Reading the Figural, Rodowick engages at length with the work of Siegfried Kracauer (History, the Last Things Before the Last) in relation to a historical conception of the image and duly references its indebtedness to Benjamin and Adorno.

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Despite some attempts to bridge the philosophical gap between Sobchack’s embodied phenomenology and Deleuze’s time-image in film studies (Laura Marks), the incompatibility between Deleuze’s plane of immanence and current film-phenomenological conceptions of subjectivity and intentionality is irreconcilable in film theory.16 As will be further discussed, Benjamin’s shape of time fills the gap that Sobchack rightly identifies in Deleuze: the detachment of consciousness from both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world is a possibility enabled by Benjamin’s conceptions of time, history and language. This anchoring has nothing to do with spatiality and subjective intentionality but is a function of Benjamin’s ‘shape of time’ itself.17 16 Elsaesser and Hagener critique some uses of Deleuze’s philosophy in contemporary filmphenomenology, pointing to the incompatibility of the two because: ‘the notion of intentionality, so central to phenomenology, is alien for Deleuze’ (p. 126). See Claire Perkins’ review of Marks’s work: Deleuze […] genuinely privileges the cinematic work beyond any conception of subject or object […] The image exists in itself as matter, not as a sign for matter which is hidden behind the image. For Deleuze, following Bergson, consciousness is on the outside or surface of things, rendering the image and the ‘thing’ indistinguishable. Marks, despite her concern with the surface of the image, relies upon the phenomenological subject to perceive this surface and thereby bring into being the notion of embodied spectatorship. For Deleuze, the privileging of bodily perception subordinates movement itself by replacing it with either a subject to carry it out or an object to submit to it. For Marks the works examined are made for a viewer to feel out and constitute—they highlight the act of perception. For Deleuze, the set of movement-images which make up cinema are definitively not addressed to anyone—they are an Appearing in which there is ‘not even an eye.’ (‘This Time It’s Personal’ cited in Elsaesser and Hagener, p. 125) 17 The use of Benjamin’s philosophy in figural criticism finds precedence in Adrian Martin’s work Last Day Every Day, in which Martin presents a suggestive account of the figural by linking different sources in a particular constellation of meaning (Paul Ricoeur on Freud; Brenez on Abel Ferrara; Erich Auerbach on Dante; Siegfried Kracauer on the detective story, Le roman policier) and citing Benjamin’s ‘World and Time’. The resulting picture of the figural, in Martin, points to films’ ‘ability’ to be named and interpreted in always-new ways: Here I am reminded of Andrew Benjamin’s presentation […] where he entered sympathetically into what he (following Walter Benjamin) described as the quality in an artwork to call out for its own naming, or rather its nameability: its potential or capacity to be named, and its invocation, directed at the critic or viewer, to assume this (by no means easy) task. Of course, neither of the Benjamins (Andrew or Walter) mean to say there is one, simple, flat name that we can affix to an artwork like a label, once and for all; the task assumed is more arduous, more labyrinthine than that. And it is potentially infinite, open. It certainly opens the door to a more detailed discussion of criticism, to be had at another time […] (pp. 27-28) This capacity and ‘ability’ to name is certainly creative but never arbitrary; the film’s contingency guides its nameability according to specific questions that the film itself poses through its figural economy. In her book on figural film criticism, Brenez articulates the film’s capacity of posing questions in terms of ‘figural logic’ and ‘figural economy’ (De la Figure, pp. 10-17). For Benjamin’s use of the suffix ‘ability’ (Barkeit) see Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities.

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Benjamin’s Concept of Time in Film Studies A non-teleological philosophy of history that accounts for subjectivity, language, and nature is possible via Benjamin’s idea of the shape of time. In order to prove the relevance of Benjamin’s thought in contemporary ecocinema studies, it is important to return to the image of the apple seller in Malick’s Days of Heaven and the f igural notion of ‘fallenness’ that it entails. In his early essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ Benjamin provides an explanation of ‘fallenness’ as the moment in which human beings have lost an immediate relation with the world and ‘fell into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle’ (p. 72). In his seminal book Benjamin’s Abilities, Samuel Weber starts the chapter on Benjamin’s theory of language with the title ‘Impart-ability: Language as Medium’ (pp. 31-52), working with an explicit parallel between Benjamin’s philosophical position on language and theories of the medium in media studies.18 Weber starts the chapter with a detailed reading of mediality as it is commonly understood and taught in media theory. The medium, for Pierre Sorlin, is ‘the instrument’ in between a sender and a receiver, this instrument is not neutral, but, after Marshall McLuhan, modifies and contributes to the message being sent (p. 3). Weber’s argument is that contemporary notions of mediality are based on Aristotelian and Hegelian premises, and that most of them still seem to accept: the notion of ‘medium’ as an ‘instrument’ that ‘modifies our hold of the world’—and hence, the notion that assisting ‘us’ to get a ‘hold’ on the world constitutes the primary object of this instrumentality. This notion, however, was problematized long before McLuhan, at the culmination of Western philosophy, in the dialectics of Hegel. For the dialectical process by which conceptual thinking determines itself, according to Hegel, proceeds through a dynamics that he designates, as […] ‘mediation’ […] The medium qua mediation is already, for Hegel, the ‘message’ and indeed much more: it quite literally in-forms the object […] by having turned it inside out [original emphasis]. (‘Impart-ability: Language as Medium’, p. 36)

Weber’s details a reading of the temporal and syntactical implications of Hegel’s use of the past perfect tense in the conception of mediation points 18 Weber refers to Benjamin’s essay on language, where Benjamin asks ‘what does language “communicate” or impart?’ (‘On Language as Such’ cited in Weber, p. 41).

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to Hegel’s conception of mediation as ‘a circle returning to itself’ (pp. 36-37). This is no abstract rhetorical use of language: the image of the circle indicates the two properties of the Hegelian conception of medium as mediation: it is infinite and it is self enclosed. In the context of such mediation ‘virtuality’ is […] ‘here and now’ insofar as the unmediated present is always only a ‘moment’ on the way to becoming what it ‘virtually’ will always have been: a future perfecting itself as the presence of the past (perfect) […] For the Hegelian notion of mediation as infinite process of becoming other in order to become the same, presents a strategy of safeguarding finitude from an alterity and from a future that would not come full circle [emphasis mine]. (p. 37)

Hegelian dialectics with its implied conciliatory idea of synthesis in a ‘future perfecting itself’ (p. 37) is thus at the base of a conception of mediality that informs a certain way to view the world; a world in which one can ‘reasonably’ hope to ‘get a hold’ on the future, or ‘in which reason is defined precisely in terms of such project, which in turn depends on the control of the media (subjective and objective genitive)’ (p. 38). Weber then discusses Benjamin’s possible alternative to the Aristotelian and Hegelian notions of mediality by acknowledging the global nature of the twenty-first century’s media landscape, a globalising and unifying process that was in its infancy when Benjamin wrote his ‘Work of Art’. Implicitly referring to the complexities of fragmentation, convergence and issues of global media ownership in the twenty-first century, Weber suggests that paradoxically the media seem to be ‘losing their grip’ in their drive to reach global control in a process ‘involving greater power and greater vulnerability’ (p. 38). A Benjaminian notion of the medium and his concept of impart-ability are therefore important for two reasons: not only do they differ from Aristotelian and Hegelian conceptions of mediality, they also present challenges to Deleuze’s notion of the virtual continuum (pp. 37-39). Whether one agrees or not with Weber’s readings of Deleuze, the current film-philosophical usage of Deleuze’s time-image as a non-historical, ‘pure virtuality’ that has always existed and ‘only infrequently finds expression in pure examples’ (Rodowick, After Images, p. xvii) does indeed rest on non-historical conception of the virtual, which runs the risk of incurring in a ‘disembodied’ (Sobchack) view of ‘media theology in which “mediation” takes over the function of “creatio ex-nihilo” (Weber, p. 37) in a future (perfect) that will always have been the same. Despite Deleuze’s incommensurable distance from Hegelian and teleological thinking, Weber maintains that Deleuze’s virtual continuum is

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problematic in contemporary material philosophy. For example, after a careful reading of Difference and Repetition, he argues that ‘Life,’ for Deleuze, ‘is conceived from the perspective of unity, wholeness and “global integration”’ (Weber, p. 33).19 The consequences of a persistent, universal and combined-into-one view of the virtual continuum are that: as long as ‘local differentiation’ can be said to operate in the service of ‘global integration,’ the concept of the virtual remains dependent on a notion of the whole that is traditionally associated with the privileged status of ‘man’ whose image reflects and embodies the unity of the Creation deriving from a single Creator (p. 33).

While Weber is clearly not saying that Deleuze endorses the existence of a single creator, his reading of the virtual continuum suggests that Deleuze’s thinking appears obliterated by a Spinozian unifying and totalising view of the universe and that this vision informs Deleuze’s notion of the crystalimage.20 For, if on the one hand Deleuze conceives the crystal-image as ‘visible time’, what is visible for Deleuze is ‘the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time’ intended as an irreducible, structural (however virtual) reality. Such a notion of time, for Deleuze, ‘is the powerful, non-organic 19 The full passage from Weber reads: In regard to the transmission from the virtual to the actual, Deleuze writes, four terms must be considered synonymous: ‘Actualising, differentiating, integrating, resolving. The nature of the virtual is so constructed that actualisation signifies differentiation for it. Each differentiation is local integration that converges with others in the entirety of the resolution of the global integration.’ In the context of this definition of the actualisation of the virtual as the global resolution of a problem, Deleuze invokes the notion of the living organism as being exemplary [original emphasis]. (Benjamin’s Abilities, p. 32) The analogy with the living organism, in Deleuze, as Weber acknowledges in footnote 6 (331), derives from Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Matter and Memory. The enormous influence of Bergson’s work on Deleuze’s concept of the time-image is certainly acknowledged in Rodowick’s work (see Darlene Pursley ‘Gilles Deleuze’s’ and Keith Ansell-Pearson); nevertheless, Rodowick opts for the Nietzschean route. As this book sets out to demonstrate, Benjamin’s philosophical project remains underestimated in media theory seeking to explore the concept of time beyond Nietzschean nihilism and Bergsonian vitalism. Weber is quoting from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, pp. 270-274. 20 For another notable critique of Deleuze as a philosopher of ‘the One,’ which runs similar to Weber’s critique, see especially Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: Deleuze’s fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One. What must the One be, for a multiple to be integrally conceivable therein as the production of simulacra? Or, yet again: in what way should the All be determined, in order that the existence of each portion of this All-far from being positioned as independent or as surging forth unpredictably-be nothing other than expressive profile of ‘the powerful, nonorganic Life that embraces the world?’ (p. 10)

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Life which grips the world’ [emphasis added] (Cinema 2, p. 81). Despite the importance of Bergson’s notion of time for both thinkers,21 Benjamin’s material philosophy differs from Deleuze’s Spinozism.22 Benjamin’s shape of time presents striking similarities with Deleuze’s notion of the virtual continuum, with one crucial difference. Benjamin’s notion of time is precisely capable of undoing and destroying the univocal conception of the virtual continuum, thus liberating the full potentiality of Deleuze’s time-image as upsetting the unifying, globalising process rather than integrating it. In order to define a Benjaminian time-based image23 in ecocinema, I now turn to current work on Benjamin’s conception of mediality, virtuality, and 21 See Keith Ansell-Pearson ‘The Reality of the Virtual’ (p. 1117). Ansell-Pearson points to Bergson’s use of the analogy of the body ‘as the center of real action’ whose ‘activity will appear to illuminate all those parts of matter with which at each successive moment it can deal’ (Bergson, Matter and Memory 23). In Cinema 2, Deleuze clarifies Bergsonism with the following words: Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life […] But increasingly he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its [perpetual] foundation, and it is we who are internal to time […] Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we move, live and change. (p. 82) In this view, Deleuze’s time-image remains trapped, so to speak, in a ‘perpetual,’ non-chronological whole that constitutes the ‘outside’ of things, their ‘constitutive AND’ (p. 180). For Benjamin, there is no perpetual foundation of time, the ‘now’ of cognisability imparts itself turning and folding time in all possible directions. 22 It is perhaps opportune to mention here that the different cosmogonies (the universe as one substance or multiple substances) informing Deleuze’s and Benjamin’s material philosophies can be traced back to the differences between Spinoza and Leibniz. In this view, it is perhaps useful to quote a passage from a recent study comparing and contrasting Spinoza and Leibniz on free will, causation and substance: in summation, we might concisely appraise the extent to which Leibniz provided an acceptable counterargument to Spinoza’s necessitarian determinism. Spinoza’s system is, taken on its own terms, theoretically impregnable. If one agrees to his definitions and axioms, it is difficult to see any other way of construing things. One quickly sees that his system is based principally upon the notion of a single, all-encompassing Substance constrained by an efficient species of causation. Conversely, Leibniz’s system takes for its point of departure the notion of a plurality of simple substances (monads) which ultimately obey a teleological or final order of causation. Commonalities surely exist between the two philosophers’ conceptions of Substance. But Spinoza’s definition in The Ethics permits of no diversity; Leibniz’s claim to the contrary in his Monadology indicates a significant redefinition of the term.” (Ross Wolke, p.19). 23 The Benjaminian time-image rests on the concept of the dialectical image and ‘dialectics at a standstill’ that Benjamin proposes in his unfinished Arcade Project (p. 462 [N2a,3]). I use the term time-image because the term dialectical is loaded with misleading Hegelian connotations. The non-Hegelian temporal trajectory of Benjamin’s ‘dialectics at a standstill’ is clear and detailed in Weber’s ‘Genealogy of Modernity’. For the def inition of Benjamin’s dialectical image as a temporal problem see, especially, Max Pensky. For a comprehensive study of the ‘dialectical image’ in The Arcade Project, see Susan Buck-Morss The Dialectics of Seeing.

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time. Exploring a number of philosophical influences on the young Benjamin (including Kant, Husserl, Bergson, and the Marburg School), Peter Fenves (The Messianic Reduction) composes a coherent philosophical constellation informing Benjamin’s conception of the ‘turn of time’ as ‘the inner plasticity of existence’ (Benjamin, ‘Two Poems’, p. 30): [t]he course of time [in Benjamin] is captured by a curve that is everywhere continuous yet nowhere differentiable: it is so sharply ‘turned’ at every point that it proceeds without direction, neither progress nor regress, and every one of its stretches is not only like every other but also like the course of time as a whole. For the same reason, every time recapitulates—without exactly repeating—the whole of time. In this way, Benjamin responds to the Nietzschean idea of the eternal return of the same. (Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, p. 243)

This ‘course of time’ moves in a non-linear, plastic trajectory turning and folding time on itself. Benjamin’s turn of time and its ‘recapitulations’ not only proceed without direction, but every ‘stretch’ or ‘sharply turned’ point (although re-proposing a similar shape of the course of time as a whole) is a fractal-like, ‘imparted’ and interpolated fold. Although Fenves argues that Benjamin (like Deleuze) draws on Bergson’s notion of duration,24 the difference from Bergson’s universe as an integrated living organism is significant. Benjamin’s cosmogony is a potential pluriverse where every single recapitulation can alter and change the whole. For Fenves, Benjamin’s whole is a very fragile, fluid and malleable virtuality investing the singular reality of the ‘stretch’ and ‘turn of time’ with the capacity to recapitulate the whole in a tremendous abbreviation and in every possible direction (The Messianic Reduction, pp. 243-244). This capacity of the shape of time can be translated in terms of a material cosmogony where temporal realities are free to impart themselves, continually altering a non-integrable virtual whole in a ‘now’ of cognisability. For Fenves, ‘every time recapitulates without ever exactly repeating all of time. The circular or cycloid character of the eternal return of the same is thus broken up—without time taking on a telos in the process’ (p. 243) because ‘the appearance makes “the now” of time—which is to say, its shape—recognizable’ (pp. 243-244). This capacity and freedom 24 ‘Not only is time, for Bergson, indivisible; it is also malleable-elastic, if not exactly plastic-for depending on a range of factors, duration can be longer or shorter’ (Fenves, Messianic Reduction, p. 31).

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(the freedom and implied responsibility of recognition, recapitulation, and separation) is very difficult to see in Deleuze in a material conception of life where realities and virtualities are parts of a virtual continuum that will ultimately integrate and combine all differences into one. In Benjamin, every now of re-cognisability is potentially free to impart itself in a new, non-repeatable now. The notion of plastic time provides the philosophical premise for a Benjaminian contribution to a film-phenomenology of time. Fenves’ reading of Benjamin’s philosophy of time opens new avenues in the understanding of Benjamin’s relation to phenomenology and is significant for contemporary film-philosophers seeking to expand the limits of spatial relations to films in the form of spectators’ cognitive and embodied perceptions. Fenves’ study clearly reveals and proves Benjamin’s relation and distance to Husserl’s phenomenology. To fully appreciate this relation and difference between Benjamin’s ‘reduction’ and Husserl’s, Fenves clarifies that: ‘[t]he premise of Husserl’s initial enquiry under the rubric of phenomenology is that expression owes its origin to a living subject, who, by animating certain sensible complexes, lends them meaning’ (p. 135). This explains Husserl’s non-linguistic philosophy because, ‘whenever an expression enters into communication, regardless of the situation, it gets caught up in indication’ (p. 135). By way of contrast, after a detailed and rigorous reading of Benjamin’s essay on language, Fenves (as does Weber) comes to the conclusion that for Benjamin ‘there is language disentangled from designation’ [emphasis added] (p. 151). This language, Fenves explains, is not a monologue or ‘soliloquy’ of a perceiving subject but ‘“a panlogue” deriving from things, not from “proper speakers”’(p. 141). Things (that is, all phenomena and manifestations) for Benjamin, communicate their proper language immediately; however, they communicate themselves in an original, temporal split of perception that is always ‘parted’ and ‘turned’ on itself. Space, for Benjamin, is a thoroughly temporal and historical ground25 generated by time. Time generates and disrupts space; it constantly renews its grounds as time turned on itself: [i]f the course of time can be captured by a curve of this kind, its concept can be aptly described as ‘highly enigmatic,’ for every time, down to the smallest unit, would be similar to every other time and to time as a whole […] History interpolated in the form of a ‘constellation’ acquires the monadic character of time by virtue of an epoche whose unity is of a 25 The historicity of space-time in Benjamin counters the ahistorical groundlessness of Deleuze’s views exposed in previous sections of this Introduction.

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higher power than that of an activity of thinking that directs itself toward immanent objects of thought. [emphasis mine] (Fenves, p. 243)

Such a non-teleological and, indeed, non-dialectical, conception of time and history, for Fenves, requires the ‘arresting’ of the thinking subject, the suspension of a subjective ‘reduction’ and the recognition of a constellation of meaning ‘[w]here thinking suddenly halts [einhalt] in a constellation saturated with tensions, it imparts to this constellation a shock through which it crystallizes as a monad [or new turn of time]’ (Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ [Thesis XVII] cited in Fenves, p. 243). What distinguishes Husserl’s from Benjamin’s reductions, then, is that for Benjamin phenomena and experiences cannot be grasped in ‘pure receptivity’: What ultimately separates Benjamin’s mode of thought from Husserl’s is this: from its title onwards, Ideas [that is, Husserl’s work Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy] proceeds as though the philosopher is fully capable of ‘turning off’ the attitude that bars access to phenomena and can thus enter into the sphere of ‘pure phenomenology’ on the strength of will; Benjamin, by contrast, makes no such concession to the profession of philosophy (p. 3).

In this context, it is clear that the only ‘higher power’ capable of receding from subjective intuitions (p. 243) is the shape of time itself: A particular phenomenon will be identified in the course of this study that nevertheless guarantees the existence of a fully ‘reduced’ sphere […] And a name will emerge from this sphere: time. The term time in this case refers neither to the time of ‘inner-time consciousness’ (Husserl) nor to time as ‘possible horizon for any understanding of being’ (Heidegger), but rather, to a ‘plastic’ time, which is shaped in such a way that its course is wholly without direction, hence without past, present and future, as they are generally understood. (p. 3)

Benjamin’s shape of time contributes to the development of a f ilmphenomenology that does not elect subjectivity as the locus of irreducible sensory perceptions.26 Benjamin’s shape of time brings ‘time into speech 26 Recent Benjamin scholarship (Sami Khatib Teleologie Ohne Endzweck; Carlo Salzani) increasingly recognises that Benjamin’s thought prefigures the possibility a non-individualist

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without conforming to the idolatry of language’ (Fenves, p. 31) and without conforming to the idolatry of the senses of a temporal living subject.27 Language and subjectivity are instead reconfigured as temporal medialities capable of imparting themselves in free life-contexts of re-cognition and re-interpretation. In ‘The Program of the Coming Philosophy’ Benjamin writes, ‘there is a unity of experience that can by no means be understood as a sum of [singular, individual and subjective] experiences, to which the concept of knowledge as teaching is immediately related in its continuous development’ (p. 109). As will be elaborated in concrete terms, this ‘unity of experience’ is the experience of time-based, fallen, aesthetic experiences of art and nature, to which knowledge, in its continuous development, is immediately recognisable. Benjamin’s revolutionary ideas provide a fitting framework to understand Malick’s specific use of the film medium to deal with human-nature relations in contemporary culture.28 Via Benjamin’s philosophy, films and other stance in contemporary culture. For example, Daniel Mourenza maintains that Benjamin’s Einmensch, in particular, with its anticapitalist and anti-individualist stance, provides ‘a better posthuman model to oppose to the humanist prototype of the human as white, male, individual, liberal self than Nietzsche’s Übermensch’ (p. 44). 27 As will be elaborated, this book uses Benjamin’s ‘shape of time’ (Fenves, Messianic Reduction) as a precise effort to contribute to the reframing of human relations to the world of nature beyond postmodern nihilism in contemporary culture. In his appraisal of Anthony Jensen’s recent study on Nietzsche’s philosophy of history, Fenves (‘From Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History to Kant’) rightly notes the connection between postmodern thought and nihilism and rightly adds: ‘Whatever “postmodern” may mean, it generally does include Kant’ noting that ‘the philosophy of history Jensen uncovers in Nietzsche’s late writings is not only comparable to certain strains of nineteenth century neo-Kantianism; it is thoroughly Kantian’ (p. 283). Benjamin’s work is particularly relevant here. As widely noted, the young Benjamin was certainly familiar with certain strains of nineteenth century neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School (Rickert, Cohen and others), see Peter Osborne (pp. 86-87). Nevertheless, Fenves’ philosophical work convincingly argues that Benjamin’s philosophy of time is not simply neo-Kantian, but works with the ‘irreconcilable’ (‘An Idea in Combat with itself’, p. 282) projects of the Marburg School and Bergsonian vitalism. This crucial point of argument is then reiterated in The Messianic Reduction: ‘[a]n artistic task can thus be established in the context of Bergson’s version of vitalism: the task of bringing time into speech without conforming to the idolatry of language […] and this is where the real daring of Benjamin’s endeavor lies, for in the concept of temporal plastics he combines—without synthesizing—the antithetical philosophical programs undertaken by Bergson on the one hand and the Marburg school on the other’ (p. 31). Fenves maintains that Benjamin’s ‘non-synthetic’ philosophical project builds on the antinomies produced by Marburg neo-Kantianism (with its accent on critique) and Bergson’s markedly non-linguistic vitalism. 28 The importance of Benjamin’s writings in material culture and film theory is well established (William Brown; Miriam Hansen Cinema and Experience; Susan Buck-Morss; Koch) and Benjamin’s work is undergoing significant reevaluations in environmental philosophy (Beatrice Hanssen; Mules, With Nature; Catriona Sandilands).

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time-based spatial media can be recognised as an unprecedented force29 in culture capable of opening up and transforming meanings beyond subjective and individual intentions. As will be argued in the ensuing chapters, a timebased ecocinema ultimately enables the reconfiguration of the conditions of apperception of nature-culture relations in the present of our dysfunctional and commodified relations to art and nature in the twenty-first century. Benjamin’s complex, but extremely coherent philosophical position will help conceptualise non-subjective and non-logocentric aesthetics of play30 that bear much potential in contemporary environmental film criticism.31 As will be seen in detail, Benjamin’s notion of plastic time enables a reframing of the gap between subjects and objects and guarantees what Benjamin sees as another relation other than synthesis between antithetical positions.32 In this, Benjamin’s notion of a messianic reduction provides the temporal, material, and historical ground that grants a non-empirical and equally non-subjective relation to film analysis. This temporal ground not only enables what Benjamin calls the nameability of biblical tropes, in Malick films, but also a positive engagement with human technological ‘self-alienation’ as ‘interplay’ (‘Work of Art’, p. 113) between human and non-human nature in contemporary culture.

Terrence Malick’s Work: Time-Based Ecocinema The explicitly ecocinema approach of this study looks at the aesthetics of Malick’s f ilms as a precise intervention in modern conceptions of 29 As is demonstrated in greater detail in the course of the argument, Benjamin’s conception of plastic time is understood as the force at the base of the torquing and plasticity of images and discourses in films. Lyotard understands this ‘force’ in terms of Freudian desire, whereas Rodowick opts for a Nietzschean route. 30 Such a Benjaminian aesthetics of play in media theory and aesthetics would translate into ‘a shift from the cultivation of semblance (Schein; auratic artworks, technologically enhanced phantasmagoria) to an aesthetics of play [Spiel]’ (Miriam Hansen, ‘Why Media Aesthetics’, p. 393). On semblance [Schein], Benjamin writes, ‘the significance of beautiful semblance for traditional aesthetics is deeply rooted in the age of perception that is now nearing its end. The theory reflecting this was given its last formulation by German Idealism’ (‘The Significance of Beautiful Semblance’, p. 137). As this books sets out to demonstrate, the concept of the ‘shape of time’ (Fenves The Messianic Reduction) is particularly relevant in articulating Malick’s time-based ecocinema. As will be further detailed in the course of analysis Benjamin’s concept of time helps articulating a contemporary ecocinema operating in Malick’s films. 31 The overcoming of logocentrism is one of the central preoccupations of ecological criticism and non-anthropocentric approaches to nature and culture (see Kate Soper, What is Nature). 32 On the possibility of certain non-synthesis between subject and object, see Benjamin ‘On the Program for the Coming Philosophy’ (p. 106).

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nature-culture relations. In each film, Malick’s cinematic relation to the marked nature-culture divide that figures prominently in the films’ narrative and formal elements provides a new way to look at nature in films—a way that disrupts symbolic and mythic interpretations of ‘fallenness’ in natureculture relations and opens narrative teleology to figural presence and disruption of causal relations. This disruption of causal relations certainly finds full formal expression in the experimental aesthetics and folded editing style of Malick’s works of the mid-2010s. As each chapter shows in greater detail, a film-philosophical intervention in modernist conceptions of nature-culture relations has always characterised Malick’s oeuvre. From Kit and Holly’s tree house in Badlands, to the lost paradises of the indigenous communities of The Thin Red Line and The New World, to the way of nature and the way of grace in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time, the contemporary wastelands of To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song, this book analyses the ways in which Malick’s aesthetics intervenes and reframes the marked nature-culture divide so present in the films’ narrative and formal elements. In this effort, Malick’s films are grouped into early narratives (Badlands and Days of Heaven), mid-career narratives (The Thin Red Line and The New World), evolutionary narratives (The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time), and contemporary settings (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song), as a way of showing the development of Malick’s groundbreaking, ecocinema intervention in contemporary nature-culture relations. Chapter 1, ‘From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory, Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven,’ redirects scholarly attention to the film-philosophical aspects of Malick’s early-career films. Drawing on Benjamin’s concept of second technology, Malick’s films are seen as self-reflexive meditations on the renewed affectivity of time opened up by media technologies in modernity. The chapter shifts critical attention from characters’ visions and subjectivities to the films’ oblique presentation of recurrent biblical allusions in conjunction with modern film technologies. In particular, the sequence in which Holly (Sissy Spacek) looks at the stereopticon in the forest in Badlands and the scene in which Linda (Linda Manz) attentively watches the projection of Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1918) in Days of Heaven are reframed as disclosing a distinctively Benjaminian relation to time-images in modernity. Chapter 2, ‘Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World’ looks at the marked nature-culture dichotomy that plays out in these historical narratives and reframes them in non-mythic terms. The chapter illuminates Malick’s mid-career films as revealing two visions of finitude and materiality in nature: a mechanistic and organicist vision, where parts are

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reciprocally connected; and another vision of nature, where parts are totally disassociated from laws of causality and reciprocity. Through close analysis of Corporal Fife’s (Adrian Brody) and Rebecca/Pocahontas’ (K’Orianka Kilcher) gestures, the chapter argues that the films reveal a poetic looking of camera work and cinematic disruption of mythical approaches to nature, time, and storytelling. Chapter 3, ‘Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time,’ extends the non-mechanistic and non-organicist vision of Malick’s cinematic looking to a precise material-theological approach to evolutionary narratives and discourses in present culture. Malick’s cinematic relation to progressive, evolutionary visions of life intervene in current debates about the role of ‘secular natural theologies’ in evolutionary sciences. Both films engage with concepts of deep time in ways that foreground a cinematic articulation of meanings and the disruption of dualistic thinking and structural binaries. The films’ relation to time deeply affects myth and the binary logic on which the scientific and religious discourses of the films’ narratives elements are predicated. Chapter 4, ‘The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song’ illuminates Malick’s mature works of the mid-2010s as important articulations of ecocritical meanings in contemporary culture. Contrary to predominant religious-theological readings in the critical literature, the chapter performs a figural interpretation of the films’ many religious and esoteric references and allusions. It argues that Malick’s use of cinema deeply affects the underlying mythic structures of traditional religious interpretative frameworks and opens thought to a phenomenology of time that directly calls into question viewers’ ethical actions in the present of our dysfunctional relations to art and nature. Through analysis of images belonging to latest early twenty-first century’s space technology disguised as early twentieth century’s cinema aesthetics in Song to Song, the chapter looks at Malick’s consistent meditation on the role of technology in contemporary nature-culture relations. As argued, Malick’s relation to time-based images and technologies exemplifies that ‘interplay’ between nature and humanity that Benjamin so clearly foreshadowed in the increasingly mediated and alienated world of second technologies. Malick’s films articulate a new ecocinema stance on nature-culture relations in contemporary culture. The book expands ecocinema concerns from the analysis of space, narrative drive, and characters’ subjectivities in films, to viewers’ relation to ethical action in historical time and finitude. From the explicitly self-reflexive meditations on second technologies in Badlands and Days of Heaven to the complexities of mythical and historical

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narratives in The Thin Red Line and The New World, and the disruption of progressive and teleological conceptions of the evolution of life in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time, I argue that Malick films foreground a consistent preoccupation with the role of what Benjamin would call ‘messianic’ time. As I show in detail in the course of the argument, such Benjaminian notion of time is non-mythic and precludes both Hegelian and Nietzschean visions of history and nature in present culture. Malick’s sophisticated use of cinematic language and disruption of traditional narrative conventions in the contemporary settings of To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song push the temporal possibilities opened up by film technologies to an unprecedented level of experimentation in twenty-first century culture. From this temporal approach to language, subjectivity, and historical figural complexities, the book explores the beginning of a time-based, non-religious and non-transcendental relation to the messianic in twenty-first century culture.

Works Cited Anderson, Joseph, Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Ansell-Pearson, Keith, ‘The Reality of the Virtual: Bergson and Deleuze.’ MLN, 120 (2005), 5, pp. 1112-1127. Auerbach, Erich, ‘Figura’, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 11-78. Badiou, Alain, Deleuze, trans. by Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). ——, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. by Norman Madarasz (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). Barnett, Christopher B., and Clark, J. Elliston, Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick. (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017). Bell, Jeffrey, Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). ——, ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Stanley Corngold (2004), pp. 18-36.

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——, ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, Vol. 4 1938-1940, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Harry Zohn (2006), pp. 389-400. ——, ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott, (2004), pp. 100-111. ——, ‘The Significance of Beautiful Semblance’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 3 1935-1938, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by edmund Jephcott (2006), pp. 137-138. ——, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott (2006), pp. 101-133. ——, ‘World and Time’, Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2004), pp. 226-227. Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (London: Dover Publications, 1988). ——, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Dover Publications, 2004). Bordwell, David, ‘Foreword’ in Anderson, Joseph et al., Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Burchill, Louise, ‘The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium’, Philosophy Today, 51 (2007), pp. 154-160. Brenez, Nicole, De La Figure En Général Et Du Corps En Particulier. L’invention Figurative Au Cinéma. (Paris: De Boeck Université, 1998) Arts et Cinéma. Brown, William, ‘Man without a Movie Camera - Movies without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema?’ Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, ed. by Warren Buckland (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 66-85. Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Camacho, Paul, ‘The Promise of Love Perfected: Eros and Kenosis in To the Wonder’, Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, eds. by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston, (New York: Routledge, 2017) pp. 232-250. Campbell, Neil, ‘The Highway Kind: Badlands, Youth, Space and the Road’, The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 40-51.

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Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Clewis, Roger, ‘Heideggerean Wonder in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.’ Film and Philosophy, 7 (2003), pp. 22-36. Cubitt, Sean, ‘Affect and Environment in Two Artists’ Films and a Video’, Moving Encvironments. Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film, ed. by Alexa Weik von Mossner (Waterloo ON: Wilfried Lauriel University Press, 2014), pp. 249-265. ——, Finite Media: Environemntal Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Cubitt, Sean, Monani, Salma and Stephen, Rust, Ecomedia: Key Issues (London: Routledge, 2016). Davies, David, ‘Introduction’ The Thin Red Line (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1-9. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005). ——, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2003). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2004). Donougho, Martin, ‘“Melt Earth to Sea”: The New World of Terrence Malick’. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 25 (2011), 4, pp. 359-374. Dreyfus, Hubert and Camilo, Salazar Prince ‘The Thin Red Line: Dying without Demise, Demise without Dying’, in The Thin Red Line, ed. by David Davies, (London: Routledge, 2009) pp. 29-44. Dubois, Philippe, ‘Au Seuil Du Visible: La Question Du Figural’, Limina/le soglie del film film’s thresholds, eds. by Veronica Innocenti and Valentina Re, Dipartimento di Storia e Tutela dei Beni Culturali Università degli Studi di Udine DAMS/ Gorizia (2004), pp. 137-150. ——, ‘La tempête et la matière-temps, ou le sublime et le figural dans l’œuvre de Jean Epstein’, Jean Epstein: Cinéaste, Poète, Philosophe ed. by Jacque Aumont (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1998), pp. 267-323. Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener, Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses (London: Routledge, 2015). Fenves, Peter, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). ——, ‘From Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History to Kant’s—and Back’, History and Theory, 54 (2015), pp. 277-286. Floch, Jean-Marie, ‘Images, Signes, Figures: L’approche Semiotique De L’image’, Revue d’esthétique, 7 (1984), pp. 109-114. Furstenau, Marc and Leslie MacAvoy, ‘Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in the Thin Red Line’, in The Cinema of Terrence

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Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 179-191. Garrard, Greg, ‘Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 17 (2010), 2, pp. 251-271. Hansen, Miriam, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). ——, ‘Why Media Aesthetics’, Critical Enqury, 30 (2004), pp. 391-395. Hanssen, Beatrice, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Benings and Angels. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Hoggard, Creegan Nicola, ‘The Tree of Life’, Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, 19 (2012), 1, pp. 46-47. Handley, George B., ‘Faith, Sacrifice, and the Earth’s Glory in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life’, Angelaki, 19 (2014), 4, pp. 79-93. Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Collins, 1982) pp. 115-154. ——, Being and Time: a Translation of Sein Und Zeit, trans. by Joan Stambaugh New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). ——, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001) pp. 15-86. ——, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Collins, 1982). Hjelmslev, Louis, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Hodge, Joanna, ‘Against Aesthetics: Heidegger on Art’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 23 (1992), 3, pp. 263-279. Hoggard, Creegan Nicola, ‘The Tree of Life’, Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, 19 (2012), 1, pp. 46-47. Ingram, David, ‘Emotion and Affect in Eco-Films: Cognitive and Phenomenological Approaches’, Moving Environemnts. Affect, Emotion, Eology and Film, ed. by Alexa Weik von Mossner (Waterloo ON: Wilfried Lauriel University Press, 2014) pp. 23-40. Ivakhiv, Adrian, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo ON: Wilfried Lauriel University Press, 2013). ——, ‘An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image: Cinema as Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine’, Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. by Stephen Rust and others, (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1-87. ——, ‘Green Film Criticism and Its Futures’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 15 (2008), 2, pp. 1-28. Jensen, Anthony, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Khatib, Sami, Teleologie Ohne Endzweck. Walter Benjamins Ent-Stellung Des Messianischen (Antwerpen: Tectum, 2013). Koch, Gertrud, ‘Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” Essay’, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Kracauer, Siegfried, History: The Last Things before the Last, ed. by Paul Oskar Kristeller (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995). ——, Le roman policier, (Paris: Editions Payot et Rivages, 2001). Leithart, J. Peter, Shining Glory. Theological Reflections on Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013). Lyotard, Jean-François, Discours, figure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). ——, Discourse, Figure, trans. by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2011). MacDonald, Scott, ‘Toward an Eco-Cinema’, ISLE, 11 (2004), 2, pp. 107-132. Malick, Terrence, A Hidden Life, Studio Babelsberg, 2019. ——, Badlands. Pressman-Williams-Badlands Ltd., 1973. ——, Days of Heaven, Paramount Pictures, 1978. ——, The Thin Red Line, Phoenix Pictures, 1998. ——, The New World, New Line Cinema, 2005. ——, The Tree of Life, Icon Film, 2011. ——, To the Wonder, Film Nation Entertainment, 2012. ——, Knight of Cups, Film Nation Entertainment, 2015. ——, Voyage of Time, Wild Bunch, 2016. ——, Song to Song, Film Nation Entertainment, 2017. Marks, Laura, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Martin, Adrian, ‘Last Day Every Day’: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (Goleta: Punctum Books, 2012). McWhorter Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Philadelphia: The Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1992). Mottram, Ron, ‘“All Things Shining”: The Struggle of Wholeness, Redemption, and Transcendence in the Films of Terrence Malick’, The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) pp. 14-26. Mourenza, Daniel, ‘On Some Posthuman Motifs in Walter Benjamin: Mickey Mouse, Barbarism and Technological Innervation’, Cinema: the Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 7 (2015), pp. 28-47. Mules, Warwick, ‘How Film Can Carry Being: Film Melodrama and Terrence Malick’s the Tree of Life as a Post Religious Film’, Cinema: the Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 4 (2014), pp. 133-163.

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——, ‘Mise-En-Scène and the Figural: A Reading of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life’, The Cine-Files, 4 (2013), pp. 1-19. ——, With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy (Bristol: Intellect, 2006). Osborne, Peter, Walter Benjamin: Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2005). Orr, John, ‘Terrence Malick and Arthur Penn: The Western Re-Myth’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) pp. 63-76. Peebles, Stacey, ‘The Other World of War: Terrence Malick’s Adaptation of The Thin Red Line’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 152-163. Pensky, Max, ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’, in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Canbridge University Press, 2004), pp. 177-198. Perkins, Claire, ‘This Time It’s Personal: Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media by Laura U. Marks’, Senses of Cinema, 33 (2004). (accessed 1 June 2013) Pisters, Patricia, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). Plate, Brent S., ‘Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Other Visions of Life in the Universe’, American Academy of Religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80 (2012), 2, pp. 527-536. Pursley, Darlene, ‘Moving in Time: Chantal Akerman’s Toute Une Nuit’, MLN, 120 (2005), 5, pp. 1192-1205. Rhym, John, ‘The Paradigmatic Shift in the Critical Reception of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the Emergence of a Heideggerian Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27 (2010), 4, pp. 255-266. Rybin, Steven, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, (Idaho: Lexington Books, 2011). ——, ‘Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick’s Characters’, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. by Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker (London: Continuum, 2011) pp. 13-39. Rodowick, David Norman, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). ——, ‘An Elegy for Theory’, October, 122 (2007), Fall, , pp. 91-109. ——. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Duke UP, 1997. ——. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Duke UP 2001. ——. The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University Press, 2009. Routt, William D., ‘For Criticism, Parts 1 and 2: A Review of Nicole Brenez, De La Figure En General Et Du Corps En Particulier: L’invention Figurative Au Cinema’,

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Screening the Past, 2000, (accessed 1 October 2012). Sandilands, Catriona, ‘Green Things in the Garbage: Ecocritical Gleaning in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades’, Ecocritical Theory. New European Approaches, eds. by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011) pp. 30-42. Salzani, Carlo, Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). Silberman, Robert, ‘Terrence Malick, Landscape and “What Is This War in the Heart of Nature?”’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) pp. 164-178. Silverman, Kaja, ‘All Things Shining’, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. by David Kazanjian and David L. Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 323-342. Sinnerbrink, Robert, ‘Cinematic Belief: Bazinian Cinephilia and Malick’s The Tree of Life’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretica Humanities, 17 (2012), 4, pp. 95-117. ——, ‘A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line’, FilmPhilosophy, 10 (2006), 3, pp. 26-37. ——, ‘Heidegger and the “End of Art”’, Literature and Aesthetics, 14 (2004), pp. 89-109. ——, ‘Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Terrence Malick’s The New World’, in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. by Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 179-196. Stadler, Jane, ‘Experiential Realism: A Neurophenomenological Approach’, Studia Phænomenologica, XVI (2016), pp. 439-465. Sobchack, Vivian, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). TePaske, Bradley, ‘“Tell Us a Story from before We Can Remember”: Gnostic Reflections on Terrence Malick’s the Tree of Life’, Psychological Perspectives: a Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought, 55 (2012), 1, pp. 118-125. Urda Kathleen E., ‘Eros and Contemplation: The Catholic Vision of Terrence Malick’s to the Wonder’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thouht and Culture, 19 (2016), 1, pp. 130-147. Vattimo, Gianni, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992). Weber, Samuel, Benjamin’s Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). ——, ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth, Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play’, MLN, 106 (1991), 3, pp. 465-500. Weik von Mossner, Alexa, Moving Environemnts: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film, ed. by Alexa Weik von Mossner (Waterloo ON: Wilfried Lauriel University Press, 2014).

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Wolke, Ross, ‘Substance, Causation and Free Will in Spinoza and Leibniz.’ Arché, 2 (2008), 1, pp. 11-24. Woodward, Ashley, ‘A Sacrif icial Economy of the Image. Lyotard on Cinema’, Angelaki, 19 (2014), 4, pp. 141-154.

1.

From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory, Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven Abstract Chapter 1, ‘From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory, Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven,’ redirects scholarly attention to the self-reflective aspects of Malick’s early-career films. Drawing on Benjamin’s concept of second technology, Malick’s films are seen as effective meditations on the renewed affectivity of time opened up by media technologies in modernity. The chapter shifts critical attention from characters’ visions and subjectivities to the films’ oblique presentation of recurrent biblical allusions in conjunction with modern film technologies. In particular, the sequence of the stereopticon in the forest in Badlands and the scene of the projection of Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1918) in Days of Heaven are reframed as disclosing a distinctively Benjaminian relation to time-images in modernity. Keywords: aura; second technology; time-image; modernity; natureculture divide.

In Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick makes a rare appearance on screen. He plays the role of a visitor to the rich man’s house where Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) are hiding, keeping the man and his maid as hostages. Whatever the visitor’s message is, it will be lost in the depth of a big jar where Kit throws it, with a certain care, as soon as the visitor leaves. Malick is well known for his reticence in publicly commenting on his films’ meanings and messages.1 On the occasion of Badlands’ premiere 1 Malick released two official interviews on Badlands in 1975, one with Beverly Walker for Sight and Sound and one with Michel Ciment for Positif (Lloyd Michaels, p. 100). In addition to these two reported interviews, other interviews with Malick on Badlands appear in After Dark in 1974, and in the AFI Report Newsletter in 1973. A further interview on Days of Heaven

Blasi, G., The Work of Terrence Malick. Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989108_ch01

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at the New York Film Festival in 1973, Malick said, ‘I don’t really like to be asked opinions on my own film because they are feelings I have right now I wouldn’t trust’ (Malick in Maher, p. 5). He seems to acknowledge that films become separate and distinct entities from their authors’ creative intentions, a distance that has been amply theorised in literary and cultural studies but more difficult to accept in complex films that present such strong visions, personal styles and authorial signatures as in the case of Malick’s films.2 In his study of Fritz Lang’s oeuvre, Tom Gunning articulates this problem in similar terms: In film studies, it was often assumed any treatment of the author must follow the naïve trajectory Barthes denounces: the author as god, as first cause and ultimate meaning of the text to be discovered through the biographical author’s person, his history, his taste, his passions […] The possibility of a modern author dedicated not to self-expression but to the play of discourse […] remains largely unexplored. (Allegories of Modernity, p. 5)

As Gunning’s work entails, this largely unexplored possibility of a contemporary author dedicated not to self-expression but to a play of discourses can be seen as ‘allegorical’ in a Benjaminian sense, and as a precise vision on human relations to nature in modernity. Benjamin’s vision of allegory is not simply a scholarly investigation into a narrative device used in sixteenth and seventeenth century German appears in Le Monde, 17 May, 1979 (Paul Maher, pp. 5-23). In 2013 and 2014 a number of shots of the director on the sets of Knight of Cups and Song to Song have appeared on the Web and social media. In March 2017, after 43 years of shying away from public appearances, Malick has joined a panel discussion with Michael Fassbender and Richard Linklater after the projection of Song to Song at SXSW Conference and Festivals in Austin, Texas. The discussion was captured on mobile phones and uploaded on video platforms and social media via the Internet by members of the public in situ. 2 According to Peter Biskind, Malick belongs to the second wave of New Hollywood directors, in what he terms ‘the f ilm school generation’ and includes ‘[Martin] Scorsese, [Steven] Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Paul Shrader, Brian De Palma’ (p. 111). Malick’s work has always been considered anomalous in Hollywood, always shying away from the major trends of his time. For example, Badlands and Days of Heaven could not be further removed from the emerging mythological paradigm in scriptwriting and storytelling of the time. See Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler. Campbell’s mythical structure deeply influenced directors and producers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg who played a pivotal role in transforming Hollywood screenwriting and production practices in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For a detailed historical rendition of Campbell’s influence on Lucas and the Hollywood scene of the 1970s and early 1980s, see David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It.

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mourning plays (Origin). The study of allegory in Benjamin is a deep meditation on the relation between art and philosophy, between artistic expressions and their underlying philosophical stances over the world of nature. For example, Benjamin argues that Trauerspiel cannot be analysed using classical and romantic frameworks of analysis, because they are based on symbolic visions of nature that deeply affect the way these plays are seen and interpreted: whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical proportions, all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also to the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing. (Origin, p. 166)

This allegorical way of seeing nature beyond classical and romantic visions pervades Badlands’ and Days of Heaven’s mise-en-scène and can be used as a philosophical key to understanding characters’ relation to nature and temporality in Malick’s early-career work.

Symbolic and Allegorical Nature in Badlands Badlands consistently presents an oblique system of signs as part of a figuration of images that pulls away from the narrative, opening up existential questioning on human relations to freedom in finitude. For example, in the initial phases of their love story, viewers see Kit and Holly walking in Fort Dupree’s central streets. Behind them, a series of shop windows are carefully displayed in the mise-en-scène. One of them is an anonymous ‘shoppe’ sign with a peculiar poster, presumably an advertisement.3 The poster on the window shows an image of idyllic nature with two human 3 On the poster, there is a small blue and red corporate logo, suggesting that it is an advertisement.

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figures under a tree near a river, with one of them carrying wood. The use of a pastoral scene as an advertisement can be seen to signify that a certain vision of symbolic nature is inherently commodified, marketed and sold in Kit and Holly’s world. The poster identified here prefigures the Maxfield Parrish print that the young couple will take from Holly’s paternal house and leave in the tree house in the forest. As Morrison and Schur note, the Maxfield Parrish is famous: [i]t has even been claimed that by 1925, one in four American middle-class homes displayed a reproduction of the painting. This phenomenal success raises the question about what may account for such wide appeal. The scene represents a pastoral scene that evokes antiquity. (p. 72)

The Maxf ield Parrish and the pastoral scene in the shop window both point to a symbolic vision of nature that is commodif ied and sold in Holly’s and Kit’s world. More importantly, the pastoral scene and the vision of idyllic nature resonate with important locations that will serve as a backdrop to Kit and Holly’s delusional escape and journey.4 The young couple’s dreams of escape are inscribed within a pre-existent structure of being in which nature is commodif ied through powerful symbolic and idealised visions. The visual lexicon of the film conveys a direct sense of existential enclosure and entrapment. Images of confinement pervade the whole narrative: cages, pens and enclosures that symbolize Kit and Holly’s limited [encoded and defined] lives […] from the circling shots around her bed 4 Visual reminders of the poster’s and the Maxf ield Parrish’s idyllic vision of nature are: Holly and Kit’s tree house near the river, but also the ‘nice’ place where the young couple play cards and make love rather unsatisfactorily, as Holly’s disappointed comments suggest (‘Is that all there is to it?’ ‘Gosh, what was everybody talking about?’). In the ‘cards’ moment, which comes first in the montage sequence, Kit and Holly are sitting under a tree, playing cards on a blanket: HOLLY: What a nice place. KIT: (absorbed in game) Yeah, the tree makes it nice. HOLLY: And the flowers […] Let’s not pick them. They’re so nice. KIT: It’s your play. Here, Kit’s cold and rational approach to the card game and nature operates as a sharp contrast to Holly’s naïve, idyllic approach. Kit’s cold rationality reminds Holly’s naivety that nature is subject to ‘rules’ of f initude. Yet, the unsatisfactory love scene also suggests Kit and Holly’s inability to be satisfied immersed as they are in their respective rational and naïve approach to nature and finitude.

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in the opening scene, to his work at the feed lot penning cattle, to the traps and cages that echo through the film, including one taken from the father’s house and another at Cato’s where he also keeps a spider in a bottle (Campbell, p. 42).

A similar sense of enclosure in a predetermined and finite order of life is rendered in one of the most visually striking scenes of the film, in which Kit asks Holly’s father, Mr Sargis (Warren Oates), for permission to see his daughter. In the scene Mr Sargis, wearing a white Panama hat, is seen working on a billboard advertisement; low camera angles show him in a dominant position compared to Kit. Mr Sargis’s refusal of Kit’s request is the inciting event that will escalate into the young couple’s murders and escape into the forest and the badlands, away from civilisation and accepted social conventions of their time. While the critical stance on the nascent individualist-capitalist milieu of American culture is certainly one of the features that make Badlands such a compelling film,5 a figural reading illuminated by Benjamin’s allegorical vision of nature opens the billboard scene to another set of ecocritical meanings beyond postmodern critique. In this scene, Malick’s direction emphasises the figural importance of the billboard with a long shot that lingers on the screen for a few seconds at the end of the sequence. On the billboard, we see domesticated nature in the form of an idealised farm where a smiling man emerges from the void of the surroundings—not a road, not a tree, just Mr Sargis’s Jeep, sky, a few clouds and a stretch of fields lying fallow. Like a static tableau of early cinema, the image of the billboard gestures towards the f ilm’s allegorical and disjunctive relation to its narrative elements.6 The meanings conveyed in the billboard scene exceed narrative action and are part of an oblique play of discourse or system of figuration on nature-culture 5 For a poignant gender analysis of Holly as embodiment of the 1950s female adolescent and consumer of popular culture, see Anne Latto (pp. 91-94). 6 On the relation between the cinematic tableau and cinematic action, see Tom Gunning ‘The Cinema of Attraction’ and Thomas Elsaesser’s ‘Introduction’ to Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Elsaesser. For a sustained application of Gunning’s and Elsaesser’s insights on the tableau of early cinema, see Michelle Langford: the cinematic tableau is not simply a pictorial space, as it is in painting, but forms a spatiotemporal segment: any event or action that occurs within it is determined by the spatiotemporal frame that surrounds it. It is the frame that gives rise to the action; performance, or event, becomes a function of the tableau and the tableau does not imply that space or action continue beyond the frame. The tableau is not a diegetic space, as it does not require causal relation to be carried between shots. (p. 96)

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relations that pervades the film in its entirety. The distant billboard, so small, frames Kit’s puerile rebellion à la James Dean and Holly’s father, as a sign painter, can be seen as the demiurge of the invented, artificial world of patriarchal fantasies that Kit’s rebellion endorses in the rest of the f ilm.7 In embracing the mythic freedom of the badlands and the American dream, Kit and Holly’s vain escape signif ies the delusional consequences of seeking freedom in symbolic visions of nature. In this view, the emptiness of the billboard’s surroundings suggests that nature is, indeed, an empty signifier open to other visions beyond the naturalisation of capitalistic and patriarchal views. The advertisement operates as a sign of a commodified idea of nature that produces affect and abstract fantasies of happiness in capitalist modes of existence;8 however, the importance of the scene lies in its interpretive possibilities beyond a simple signifier/ signified structure. While the semiotics of the scene suggests dominant conditions of human-nature relations are always historical and certainly not naturally determined, looking at the billboard moment as a cinematic tableau illuminates the allegorical function of the billboard scene. The billboard qua tableau suggests that narrative action becomes a function of this moment. Consistent with Langford’s definition of the cinematic tableau as 7 The ‘new life’ Kit has in mind reproduces the same values he left behind and burnt down in Holly’s paternal house: ‘Kit made me get my books from school, so I wouldn’t fall behind. We’d be starting a new life, he said.’ The constraints of the Midwestern 1950s’ gender roles are in fact re-enacted and imitated in the forest. As Holly says in voice-over: ‘We had our bad moments, like any couple. Kit accused me of only being along for the ride, while at times I wish he’d fall in the river and drown, so I could watch. Mostly though, we got along f ine and stayed in love.’ As one of Malick’s rare interviews suggests, Kit’s and Holly’s characters do not show maturity; rather, as mimics, Kit and Holly behave like children. In the forest and in the badlands, Holly mimics the role of the 1950s housewife and Kit of the patriarchal provider and defender, although in a strange, childlike fashion. Holly seems to play when she wears curlers and puts make-up on in the forest; similarly, Kit seems to play war games. This process can be understood in terms of Benjamin’s ideas on mimicry presented in ‘Doctrine of the Similar’ and ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’: for Benjamin, ‘Nature produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry’ (pp. 694; 720). Following Benjamin’s ideas, Kit and Holly’s escape exposes the consequences of remaining in a state of mimicry predetermined by capitalist structures. 8 In the scene of the billboard, Malick’s film openly highlights the brutality of the capitalist dream behind the ‘friendly’ appearance of a commodif ied idea of nature. The artif icial and almost disturbing effect of the billboard is heightened by the fact that the viewer has already experienced, in previous scenes, the otherwise multifaceted and complex reality of the livestock feed in modes of mass production. After losing his job as a garbage collector, Kit is shown working at the local feed lot penning cattle, with images of unattended sick and dying cattle, and Kit gratuitously kicking one of the animals he just fed.

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a spatio-temporal segment that determines the action (p. 96), Kit and Holly, as subjects within the action, are a function of the historical and naturalised spatio-temporal conditions of the tableau. For example, Campbell notes Kit’s ‘increasingly “fatherly” attitudes and comments’, and even ‘his adoption of a white Panama hat’ (p. 45) like Mr Sargis. To further confirm this vision, there are two other important hat scenes that should be considered in Kit’s narrative. The first is after Kit’s capture, when the Sheriff throws Kit’s white Panama hat out of the police car as a sign of victory of the state, the ultimate patriarchal power over the individual.9 The second comes in the very final sequence of the film, in the airplane that will take Holly and Kit back to South Dakota. Here, Kit’s attention is fixed on the military hat in the trooper’s lap: ‘Where’d you get that?’/ ‘State’ / ‘Boy, I’d like to buy me one of those’/ ‘You’re quite an individual, Kit’ / ‘Do you think they’ll take that into consideration?’ As prefigured in the billboard scene, the ultimate freedom for Kit is complete adherence to the structure that regulates and paradoxically prevents it from happening. Kit’s ultimate goal is the attainment of individual freedom and power, the freedom and power that in the narrative only pertains to state authority. In his impossible pursuit, Kit imitates ideals of individual affirmation: even in captivity Kit seeks the power of the state through a desire to ‘buy’ the hat as the ultimate emblem of patriarchal, capitalistic fantasies. Indeed, Kit is admired and celebrated because, in ironic-tragic mode,10 he plays out the same values of freedom and self-affirming choices at others’ expenses (other people, countries or species) that define capitalist values of individual freedom put into practice.

Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Days of Heaven Just as the figural trans-historic arrangement of pictorial references points to an impossible transcendentalism in nature-culture relations in Badlands, so too in Days of Heaven the figural is not simply a constellation of motifs or tropes, but a spatio-temporal framework that determines diegetic action. The story follows Bill (Richard Gere), Abby (Brooke Adams) and Linda’s (Linda Manz) journey from exhausting labour in a steel mill in Chicago, 9 This important moment is shown through a dedicated external shot, with the hat rolling along the road, before cutting back to the car’s interior. 10 The next section further explicates and contextualises the concept of ‘ironic tragedy’ (‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, p. 56) through the analysis of Days of Heaven.

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to exhausting labour in a wheat farm in the Texas Panhandle, where the trio momentarily enjoys a better life when Abby marries the rich and terminally ill Farmer (Sam Shepard). Things, however, complicate when Abby develops affection for the Farmer and the story ends with the death of both the Farmer and Bill in tragic circumstances. Meaghan Morris notes that Days of Heaven is a film about motion in all its manifestations, be they human, natural or mechanical.11 The film shows the constant movement of migrant workers to and from the panhandle, the cyclical movement of the seasons in the wheat fields—including the otherwise-imperceptible sprouting of a seed captured in time-lapse photography—and the incessant movement of the machineries of new industries. Within Days of Heaven’s narrative, the underground time-lapse photography shot clearly signals the new seasonal cycle of life in the fields. However, the sprouting of the seed is placed as a concluding shot of two montage sequences that show Abby and the Farmer gradually falling in love. Both montages convey a sense of grace with images of Abby writing, drawing and receiving the Farmer’s family jewels. All images display some imitations of classical art and beauty in the mise-en-scène, making a parallel between a better life and classical cultural elevation in Abby’s life. With the sprouting seed at the end of the sequence, however, Abby’s cultural elevation and her being accepted as a new woman in the lineage of her predecessors in the house is part of an already lived and now repeated course of events, just as the sprouting seed (although beautiful) is somehow a biologically mechanical act of nature. This organic unfolding of events in the name of perpetuation is mirrored in Abby’s and in Bill’s behaviours throughout the film. Their love story and plan to take the Farmer’s house can be seen as mechanical self-preservation at work and the love triangle between Abby, the Farmer and Bill does indeed end in tragedy, with the Farmer’s mad jealousy manifesting when he would have the least to fear. In this, the f ilm is ambiguous about what constitutes the opposition between nature and culture, an ambiguity that is mostly conveyed aesthetically: ‘while we might first be tempted to interpret the film as naturalistic tract on the evils of industry or capitalism or both, we cannot settle on this interpretation without distorting the overall balance of elements in the film’ (Kendall, p. 159). Despite the film clearly pointing to the era’s class and gender inequalities, the Farmer is far from being portrayed as the evil and harsh rich oppressor; he genuinely falls in love with Abby and 11 For this specific reference to Morris’s review article, I am indebted to Adrian Martin’s notes on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of Days of Heaven.

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he is the victim of Bill’s puerile machinations. So what other meanings can be derived from Malick’s deliberate ambiguities in the portrayal of nature-culture relations in Days of Heaven? While there are numerous references to religious-biblical themes,12 Days of Heaven’s characters do indeed seem to proceed with what Michaels terms a ‘dark fatality reminiscent of Greek drama’ (p. 46). For example, when the Farmer’s jealousy manifests itself, Malick’s direction emphasises this ‘dark fatality’ through a careful use of visual and aural cues. In the scene, the Farmer watches Abby and Bill from a distance; Abby is actually declaring her changed emotions towards Bill and his plan but from the Farmer’s point of view, Bill’s and Abby’s ambiguous gestures confirm his suspicions. The shot cuts to a low angle medium close-up of the Farmer breathing heavily, accompanied by the diegetic sound of the windmill 13 spinning more furiously and loudly, which is associated with the rather uncanny sound of the Farmer’s heartbeat. The scene effectively conveys the Farmer’s consuming emotions through a cacophony and crescendo of sounds: the Farmer’s heavy breathing, the spinning windmill and the heartbeat all contribute to a sense of inevitable, mechanical progression towards these characters’ tragic ending. In ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ and other writings, Benjamin argues that the mourning play subverts the mythic structure of the Greek tragedy from which it originates. Weber notes that the most striking difference between tragedy and Trauerspiel: relates to the significance of the subject: in tragedy […] everything is centered around the fate of the tragic hero, isolated precisely as a ‘self.’ The mourning play, by contrast, ‘knows neither heroes nor selves, but only constellations’ [Origin, p. 132]—not simply of persons, but also things. If tragedy heralds the dawn of a new age as that of a new Humanism, [in the Trauerspiel] the sinful state of the fallen world places humans and things on the same level. Humans are treated as things and things as human. (Benjamin’s Abilities p. 152) 12 See Hubert Cohen’s reading of Genesis and Stuart Kendall’s detailed account of biblical references. Michaels (p. 46) notes that the title derives from Deuteronomy 11:21 ‘that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord swore unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.’ 13 The image of the windmill spinning furiously on the roof of the house and producing a distinctive, almost disturbing noise recurs in the f ilm and punctuates signif icant turning points in the course of the tragic narrative, such as ominous changes of wind before the locusts’ invasion.

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While in tragedy we follow the events on the stage from the perspective of the hero qua subject seeking individual fulfillment, the allegorical mode of the mourning play is ‘non-individual’ (Benjamin, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, p. 57); characters and things on stage are allegorical and ‘whatever is represented allegorically has no being apart from its being represented’ (Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities, p. 154). Benjamin’s Trauerspiel brings forth interpretive possibilities beyond symbolic and mythic conceptions of narrative and characters in film analysis.14 Both tragedy and Trauerspiel deal with the same unavoidable destiny, namely a series of events ending in death, but what changes is their respective approach to time and temporality. For Benjamin, in tragedy death is ‘fulfilled time’: When the tragic development suddenly makes its incomprehensible appearance, when the smallest false step leads to guilt, when the slightest error, the most improbable coincidence leads to death, when the words that would clear up and resolve the situation and that seem to be available to all remain unspoken—then we are witnessing the effect of the hero’s time on the action, since in fulfilled time everything that happens is a function of that time. (‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, p. 56)

This fulfilled time of the tragic hero is the fulfillment of nature’s course towards death coming full circle: ‘in tragedy the hero dies because no one can live in fulfilled time. He dies of immortality. Death is an ironic immortality; that is the origin of tragic irony’ (p. 56). Here it is important to stress that while Benjamin describes the tragic hero’s fulfillment in death with the 14 Malick’s films consistently present interpretive difficulties that evade a formalist method of analysis. For example, Lloyd Michaels notes that Badlands displays a series of poetic couplings that are strangely devoid of repercussions in the characters’ story and narrative trajectory: Two dances (‘Love is Strange’ and ‘A Blossom Fell’), two testaments (the record left at the fire and the Dictaphone message at the rich man’s house), two boxes of relics (one sent aloft and the other buried), two white hats (Holly’s father’s at the billboard and the rich man’s Panama, which Kit appropriates) […] In most narratives, such repetitions serve as markers for critical changes in the characters and their circumstances […] however, these motifs seem to measure only the director’s sensibility and say nothing about any heightened consciousness in the two protagonists. (pp. 28-29) Michaels looks for symbolic meanings that can be recognised in the characters’ narrative arc as indication of a subject’s ‘heightened consciousness’. Moreover, Michaels’ comparison of Malick’s use of repetitions with ‘most narratives’ seems to privilege narratives with a precise, but very limiting, heroic and mythic structure informing story and character development.

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image of the clock 15 and as a ‘magic circle’ (p. 56), in the mourning play death is described in very different terms: Death in the mourning play is not based on the extreme determinacy that individual time confers to the action. It is no conclusive finality; without the certainty of a higher existence and without irony it is the metabasis of all life eis allo genos [transformation into another type or sort]. The mourning play is mathematically comparable to one branch of a hyperbola whose other branch lies in infinity […] the time of the mourning play is not fulfilled but nevertheless it is finite. [emphasis added] (pp. 56-57)

While from the perspective of subjectivity, characters and narrative action may fulfill a tragic-ironic destiny coming full circle in both Badlands and Days of Heaven, another vision and possibility of time opens up if critical attention shifts away from individual subjectivity. In this vision, in Days of Heaven the unnamed Farmer becomes a modern ruler of the court, Bill a modern plotter and, as in a modern version of a mourning play, in Days of Heaven locations, characters and things are equally significant: The exemplary site of the baroque mourning play is, first of all, the court of the local ruler, and secondly, the theatre of that court. What characterizes both is that they are local, hence without the cosmic claim to universality of the Greek amphitheatre. (Weber, p. 154)

Despite Malick’s clear concern with characters and deep knowledge of storytelling, I argue that Malick’s early films can be seen as film-philosophical statements about the novel relation to time opened up by the cinematic viewing experiences in modernity. This novel relation to time opens the circle of the films’ tragic-ironic narratives to the hyperbolic possibilities of Benjamin’s allegorical16 viewing. 15 In ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ and other writings Benjamin distinguishes between historical and mechanical time: Historical time, however, differs from this mechanical time. It determines much more than the possibility of spatial changes of a specif ic magnitude and regularity—that is to say, like the hands of a clock—simultaneously with spatial changes of a complex nature […] We may assert that the determining force of historical time cannot be fully grasped, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical process. (p. 55) The image of the clock, as detailed and expanded upon in Chapter 3, derives from Schelling and is an important figural trope in Schelling and German Idealism. See Ernst Behler. 16 For a conceptualisation of allegory as an expression of a particular function of time, see Jonas Rosenbrück, who builds on Fenves’ insights on the ‘shape of time’ (The Messianic Reduction).

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Prehistory and Second Technologies in Badlands and Days of Heaven The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay. This applies especially to f ilm. The function of film is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily [original emphasis]. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity’s whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free. (Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 107-108)

In ‘The Work of Art’ Benjamin claims the reproduction of objects through modern technologies leads to a crisis of the traditional way of conceiving the arts. Just as allegory opposes the symbol countering the classical and romantic visions of nature, so the reproducibility of works of art shatters classical and romantic approaches to art as capturing the aura—the ritualised presence of the original art object enclosing a unique and original moment in time. With the advent of film technologies and reproducibility, ‘art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive’ (p. 113). For Benjamin, the advent of f ilm technologies in modernity primed a profound and undetected process of destruction. In dissipating the aura, and the illusion of immediacy with the world and nature, films have started ‘the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage’ (p. 104).17 Myths, legends and religions become historical phenomena: they materialise and automatically unfold on screen, producing ‘shock effects’ (p. 119) on viewers’ senses, regardless of their individual intentions. As Arendt points out: ‘this paradox, the wonder of appearance, was always at the center Scholarly work on the temporal dimension of Benjamin’s theory of allegory is established (see, for example, Robert S. Lehman). 17 In ‘The Work of Art’ Benjamin reflects on the enthusiastic reception of film technologies at the beginning of the century, and makes the following observation: ‘In 1927 Abel Gance fervently proclaimed: “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films […] all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all the founders of religion, indeed, all religions […] await their celluloid resurrection, and the heroes are pressing at the gate’, he was inviting the reader, no doubt unawares, to witness a comprehensive liquidation. (p. 104)

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of all his concerns’ (p. 12).18 In this, cinema and moving images become allegories of the power of aesthetic experiences, and just as allegories ‘are ruins in the realm of thought’ (Origin, p. 78), films are ruins in the realm of auratic representations of the world. This ruination of beautiful semblance is, for Benjamin, linked to an auratic loss in technologically mediated encounters with the world. The aura is: a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch. (Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 104-105)

Miriam Hansen interprets auratic experience as an embodied mode of perception: ‘[t]he aura is a medium that envelops and physically connects—and thus blurs the boundaries between—subject and object, suggesting a sensory, embodied mode of perception’ (‘Benjamin’s Aura’, p. 351). Nevertheless, Benjamin describes the auratic moment as a ‘unique apparition of a distance’ [emphasis added] (p. 104), where breathing the aura of nature (the mountain or branch) always implies a non-homogenous and mediated perception of the world, however ‘near’, embodied or sensory this perception may be. Benjamin claims that the reproduction of objects through modern technologies leads to a crisis, a ‘shattering’ of the traditional way of conceiving the arts as capturing that true, original and unique weave of space and time enclosed in the original, embodied encounter with life and nature (or the work of art capturing it or representing this encounter). Thus, to read the aura as ‘a medium that envelops and physically connects’ (Hansen, p. 351), does not resolve the fundamental split that seeing, feeling, hearing and all other sensorial modes of processing experiences imply. This open and unresolved gap of perception is an important and neglected aspect of Benjamin’s aura. Perception and cognisability, for Benjamin, are predicated on an ‘original’ and irremediable split: the very act of recognising the ‘strange weave of space and time’, (p. 104) the aura of the mountain and the branch, implies 18 Arendt quotes Benjamin: ‘What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears’ (Benjamin in Arendt, Illumination 12). The paradox is that in appearing, and thus becoming phenomena, all beautiful things become subject to death: sheer materiality that keeps piling up before the allegorical angel of history (Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’), foretelling its dissolution.

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a distance from the unique, original moment of contact through sensory perceptions. In this light, it is helpful to repropose the meaning of ‘origin’ in Benjamin, because it constitutes one of the key terms giving coherence to his conceptions of art, language, allegory and technologically mediated experiences: Origin is a Sprung, a leap, an offspring that springs from the alternation of becoming and passing-away, of coming and going. Origin, the original leap, as it were, thereby emerges as a kind of cast-off: an Ent-springendes, an abrupt jump. Temporally, it is no more a beginning than it is an end, no more coming to be than passing-away. Its leap seems instead to be suspended between the two poles of coming and going, past and future. (Weber, ‘Genealogy of Modernity’, p. 469).

Following Weber’s reading of the term, this suspension between two poles, this coming and passing away of an original perception is not ‘dialectical’; that is, perception does not follow a process of thesis and antithesis, because coming and passing away are simultaneous.19 Going back to ‘The Work of Art’, it can be seen that the aura of the mountains, their ‘breath’ or figural life20 is always removed from the original moment of perception, even in non-technologically mediated encounters with the world. For Benjamin, the relationship between humans and the world is intrinsically mediated and parted from itself: perception is predicated upon a leap, an irremediable gap between cognition and experiences of life. However, the split between life and perception becomes particularly evident with the advent of technologically mediated encounters with the world. Despite film’s apparent mimetic power (the perceptual realism of film images), the reproducibility of an original moment in time virtually enhances the temporal split of perception to the point that films, ‘rehearse the interplay between nature and humanity’ and ‘shatter’ the traditional 19 Despite Benjamin’s invocation of the term ‘dialectical’ to designate the ‘forehistory and afterhistory’ of the image as ‘phenomenon’ and ‘historical object’ (Arcades, pp. 470 [N7a, 1]; 475 [N10, 3]), Benjamin’s thought is distinctively non-teleological and non-Hegelian. Weber writes that, [t]he conception of history to which he [Benjamin] resorts here [in the Trauerspiel] and in other writings of this period is incompatible with at least one prominent aspect of Hegelian thought: the dialectical resolution entailed in the notion of “conciliation” […] And this holds even if Benjamin employs the term ‘dialectic’ in describing the notion of origin. (‘Genealogy of Modernity’, p. 468) 20 In the history of art and iconography, the breath (pneuma) is figuratively associated with life (see Kuehn, p. 208).

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way of conceiving the arts as thriving on ‘beautiful semblance’ (‘Work of Art’, p. 113). Films historicise mythic nature; they resist any attempt to transcend material conditions of presentation drawing themselves back to the historical conditions from which they speak.21 This speaking is thereby removed from its source and origin, simultaneously coming and passing away. At this point it is perhaps clearer why for Benjamin, ‘[t]he function of film is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily’ [emphasis added] (p. 107). The vast apparatus whose role is expanding almost daily is nothing more than historical, non-homogenous, non-immediate relations and experiences of the world and nature; that is, all experiences that human beings have lived in history after pre-historical times and the advent of technē, art and language. Benjamin’s position on film can offer a contribution to deepen a filmphilosophical understanding of Malick’s peculiar use of the film medium to deal with nature-culture complexities. Gertrud Koch’s reading of Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ already points to Benjamin’s thought on film as prefiguring contemporary debates on film theory: in contrast to more recent apparatus theory which locates the ideological function of film squarely in the naturalisation of the technically produced impression of reality, Benjamin discovers amid the collapse of artifice and immediacy precisely the Kairotic constellation: the proverbial ‘orchid in the land of technology’. In this construction of a constellation, a notorious Benjaminian concept flashes brightly, that of ‘prehistory’, of the ‘primeval moment’, which he attempts to capture in historical phenomena as a ‘mirage’ which spreads its roots into the present of the new medium. (p. 212)

In ‘The Work of Art’ Benjamin refers to the ‘orchid’ or Blue Flower when discussing the difference between theatre and film’s illusion of reality: in cinema the viewer’s point of view is that of the camera and editing choices; ‘the illusory nature of film is of the second degree’ (p. 115). Benjamin not only anticipates by some 30 years the insights of apparatus theory’s second identification,22 but speaks directly to film-philosophers of the twenty-first 21 This speaking can be understood in terms of language (figural and visual language included) ‘impart-ability’ or ability to be there as a collapse of ‘saying’ into the act of speaking itself (see Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities, pp. 31-52). 22 Drawing on Lacan’s psychoanalytical insights, apparatus theory (Christian Metz; Jean-Louis Baudry) compares the cinematic screen to the mirror’s ability to split the subject into its own object as it recognises and identifies with the reality projected or reflected on the screen/mirror.

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century. He writes: ‘The equipment free aspect of reality has become the height of artifice and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology’ (p. 115). Here, it is important to reiterate that immediate and pure visions of reality are precluded, especially in films; human beings have ‘fallen’ into the mediateness of all communication: figural, visual, sensorial, and haptic communication included. I claim that such a complex film-philosophical position on second technologies is epitomised in two key scenes in Badlands and Days of Heaven. The montage sequence with Holly and Kit in the forest is exemplary and representative of Badlands’ sustained reflection on mediated human-nature relations. In the sequence, viewers see Kit and Holly in a tree house reading a book. Holly reads aloud from Thor Heyerdahl’s account of his Kon-Tiki expedition, the experiment to prove the theory of human migration from South America to Polynesia following oceanic currents in prehistoric times.23 A few sequences later, Kit reads the National Geographic magazine while eating an apple. The moment is shot from a very low camera angle with In this split, the viewer identifies with an objectified version of reality (primary identification with one’s image or characters) and, in the case of film, with the symbolic and ideological order of the film’s specific way of seeing and articulating meaning, its specific visual language and register (secondary identification with the camera viewing, lighting and editing choices). These subject-effects enabled by primary identification with characters and secondary identification with the dispositif cinema: conf irmed that the cinematic apparatus imitated at the physical level what bourgeois individualism sought at the ideological level and monocular perspective accomplished at the perceptual level: the ‘centering’, as well as the ‘pinning down’ or ‘capturing of the single individual as the locus of consciousness and coherence, giving the impression of mastery when such mastery was the mere effect of the respective machineries—optical, ideological, narrative, specular—put in place by the bourgeois-capitalist world picture. The sense of self, produced by the cinema, was thus both illusory and real. Unable to take control of the forces that manipulate or guide perception, the spectator nonetheless experiences such strong (and often pleasurable) subject-effects of address. (Elsaesser and Hagener, pp. 67-68) The most important and often neglected aspect of apparatus theory is therefore the construction of subjectivity through a strong sense of mastery: the viewer’s ‘suturing’ and stitching together of meaning and a sense of identity and self. For a more strictly philosophical account of the concept of ‘apparatus’, see Giorgio Agamben (‘What is an Apparatus?’). Agamben develops the term from Michel Foucault: ‘[t]he term “apparatus” designates that which, and through which, one realizes a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being. This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectif ication, that is to say, they must produce their subject.’ (p. 11) 23 Heyerdahl’s ‘experiment’ itself can be interpreted as modern humans’ attempts to recuperate a lost, pre-historical and homogenous contact with nature through a ‘scientif ic’ approach predicated, as it is, on subject-object relations. In this, the experiment, like Kit and Holly’s urban life in their tree house, is paradoxical.

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Kit’s boots in a prominent position and Kit wearing a large brimmed hat. Kit (shot from below, reading a book that objectifies nature, and wearing the hat as a sign of patriarchal authority) embodies the attempted mastery of the dominant, rational approach to nature, while Holly embodies the deadly innocent, naïve approach (innocent because it remains ignorant of Kit’s rationality and deadly because it threatens the rational by returning it to its mortal limitation). In voice-over Holly says, ‘I grew to love the forest. The cooing of the doves and the hum of dragonflies in the air made it always seem lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone […] When the leaves rustled overhead, it was like the spirits were whispering about all the little things that bothered ‘em.’ In pursuing the scene’s semiotics for a moment, the apple that Kit is eating, as he laughs reading the National Geographic, signifies the loss of paradisiacal unity and harmony between human beings and nature, the allegorical fall in and through language and knowledge. But in the sequence, the apple symbol is allegorised as another figural saying, rather than its biblical, symbolic meaning. Kit throws the apple core down from the tree and the camera tilts down following the fall for a moment, but right where the viewer would expect to f ind the apple core on the ground, the shot cuts to the array of stereo slides on the leaves of the forest floor. The editing clearly parallels the apple and the photographs, and this association assumes particular relevance under a Benjaminian perspective on the reproducibility of images in modernity. Films, for Benjamin, cannot transcend the contingency of material expression, be it linguistic, visual or figural.24 The description or impression produced in language, film or art is always allegorically dead, cut off and parted from the unique, auratic moment of the impression. Nevertheless, contrary to conceptions of technē as the primary cause of humans’ alienation from nature, second technology for Benjamin is a concrete possibility of a productive ‘interplay’ between nature and culture. For Benjamin, film technologies expand the mediated experience of life produced through sensory perceptions. Media technologies become the metaphoric playground where temporal nature-culture interplays become visible and where humans’ self-alienation can be altered through new conditions of apperception released by films as second technology: ‘The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between 24 In his interpretation of Benjamin’s work on language, Weber writes: ‘Human beings are thus the only living beings that are not entirely homogenous and whose distance from language remains the sign of this irremediable heterogeneity’ [emphasis added] (Benjamin’s Abilities, p. 45).

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nature and humanity’ (‘Work of Art’, p. 107). Here, it is important to point out that Benjamin differentiates films and photographs (second technology) from other forms of art in human history (first technology) in terms of their relation to time. For example: the Greeks had only two ways of technologically reproducing works of art: casting and stamping. All others were quite unique and could not be technologically reproduced. This is why they had to be made for all eternity. The state of their technology compelled the Greeks to produce eternal value in their art. To this they owe their preeminent position in art history—the standard for subsequent generations. Undoubtedly, our position lies at the opposite pole from that of the Greeks […] Film is the first art form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility. [original emphasis] (‘The Work of Art’, pp. 108-109)

Benjamin’s reference to the ‘eternal value’ of artworks belonging to classical antiquity points to a changed ethics of time opened up by films and photographic images: second technology enables a novel aesthetics of play in nature-culture relations by shifting the ethical value of time from the eternal value of first technology to the ‘time-based’, impermanent, finite value of reproducibility of second technology. It is exactly this renewed ethics and value of time that affects the viewer the most in the scene of the stereopticon.

The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology: Splinters of Messianic Time in Badlands and Days of Heaven In the midst of oppressive images of confinement in Badlands, there is a paradoxical moment of solace and enigmatic openness to possibilities in the forest, when Holly looks into the images of the stereopticon. In the montage sequence that occurs in this scene, the viewer sees glimpses of Holly and Kit’s rather conventional daily life in their tree house. But in the sequence of the stereopticon, the viewer sees, like Holly, an artificial canal in Brazil, a camel boy in front of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, some cows standing in a fjord with a steamship in the distance, a mother with her child, a Victorian woman playing the piano as another woman looks on, a family on a lawn, and a soldier in a wheat f ield whispering something into his girlfriend’s ear. Here, the distance and disjunctive

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relation between Holly’s voice-over narration and the images presented points to a chronological impossibility: One day, while taking a look at some vistas in dad’s stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter and who had only just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment […] If my mom had never met my dad? If she’d of never died? And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?

Holly’s repeated ‘this very moment’ and ‘right this minute’ point to the gap between the images of the past and their (im)possible contingency in Holly’s present and future life. The enigmatic openness and affectivity of the sequence lies in its non-teleological chronology and temporality: in new encounters with images and worlds removed from their original context and meaning, and thrown into a new historical contingency as simultaneously past, present and future. Going back to Benjamin’s use of the enigmatic Blue Flower in the land of technology, it is important to detail the significance of this figure of speech within the context of a precise philosophical position on time beyond mythic, transcendental and romantic visions of it. Benjamin’s ‘Blue Flower’ refers to Novalis’ unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen.25 In the context of ‘The Work of Art’, the Blue Flower in the land of technology is an exemplary image that epitomises Benjamin’s innovative philosophical position on nature-culture relations. Benjamin’s distance from Novalis’ romantic approach to nature is in fact clearly expressed in an earlier essay written in 1927: No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept. The history of the dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this subject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural necessity by means of historical illumination. (‘Dream Kitsch’, p. 3) 25 As the editors of Benjamin’s Selected Writings explain, ‘Von Ofterdingen is a medieval poet in search of the mysterious Blue Flower, which bears the face of his unknown beloved’ (Vol. 4, pp. 278-279).

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In ‘The Work of Art’, Benjamin gives us a taste of this ‘historical illumination’ of the Blue Flower referring to the experience of watching a Chaplin film in modernity:26 The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film. The progressive reaction is characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure—pleasure in seeing and experiencing—with an attitude of expert appraisal. (p. 116)

Contrary to the negative and ‘backward’ attitude that the general public reserved for other forms of modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century, Benjamin observes a different disposition towards f ilms, and describes the experience of watching a Chaplin film as pleasurable, ‘with an attitude of expert appraisal’. This unique combination of sensual and rational processes is a distinctive prerogative of Benjamin’s conception of spectatorship, and is illuminating in making sense of one of the most obscure and fascinating moments in Days of Heaven: the scene with the projection of Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant.27 In the Chaplin sequence, Malick points to Chaplin’s figural gesture of freedom by presenting a film-within-a-film moment in which a silhouetted hand, presumably belonging to a member of the audience, suddenly appears on the screen, pointing to the Statue of Liberty. This open and anonymous gesture points to freedom allegorically, as a disjunctive play of discourse unfolding on the screen itself, as opposed to the mythical freedom that the real statue of liberty represents and which Chaplin’s film problematises and critiques.28 In Malick’s fragmented quotation of Chaplin, the symbolic freedom of the statue is allegorised and enacted through the possibility of a contingent and disjunctive appearance on screen, the film itself and the silhouetted hand. This contingency becomes part of Linda’s experience of the frame. In the scene, Malick’s direction emphasises Linda’s experience with a quick tracking shot and close-up of her attentive and wondrous 26 For Benjamin’s fascination with Chaplin’s films, see also the essays ‘Chaplin’, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’ and ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’. 27 While it is reasonable to speculate on Malick’s acquaintance with Benjamin’s work, it is important to stress that this book does not see Malick’s work as an illustration of Benjamin’s thought, rather, the book points to the philosophical correspondences between Malick’s and Benjamin’s aesthetic positions on art and film technologies in modernity. 28 In the excerpt of Chaplin’s film shown in Malick’s scene, the immigrants who are about to arrive in New York look at the iconic statue in awe, but in the following shot they are held back and cornered with a rope, as preparations for disembarking from the ship begin.

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seeing. Here, the montage points to a complex association between screen and curtains: Linda’s close-up is followed by a shot of Abby and Bill behind the curtains of a gazebo in the garden, in an ambiguous play of shadows as seen by the Farmer, who begins to have suspicions about Abby and Bill’s relationship. This association between screen and curtains is emblematic of an ambivalent position on cinema as both illusion and possibility and will be fully explored in Malick’s films of the 2010s.29 For a comprehensive analysis of Malick’s early narratives as a complex but coherent play of discourse on the temporal possibilities opened up by film technologies, it is important to point out that both Badlands and Days of Heaven present strong biblical allusions in connection to self-reflexive meditations on second technologies in modernity. Linda’s voice-over narration associates early cinema’s experiences to the biblical temptation of knowledge in the Garden of Eden: The devil’s just sitting there laughing. He’s glad when people does bad. Then he sends them to the snake house. He’s just sits there and laughs and watch while you’re sitting there all tied up with snakes and eating your eyes out. They go down your throat and eat all your systems out. I think the devil was on the farm.

The buffo comedians crashing at the farm and the projection of Chaplin’s film can be seen as temporary breaches and interruptions of the cyclical and tragic progression of the events unfolding on screen. In a non-dualistic and allegorical perspective, and consistent with a Benjaminian interpretation of biblical gestures, the ‘devil on the farm’ points to art and cinema technologies as ‘apparatus’ with the ability to generate self-reflexivity.30 Here, it is important to insist on the parallel between the notion of fallenness and communication, as it provides a crucial point of divergence with symbolic interpretations of art, nature and the numerous biblical references present in Malick’s f ilms.31 In this light, the f igural apple that 29 As we shall see in later chapters, this non-dualistic (non-Platonic) view of the world is an important thread that consistently runs throughout Malick’s oeuvre. See, in particular, the analysis of Knight of Cups in Chapter 4. 30 This line of argument will be fully developed in subsequent chapters and in the analysis of Song to Song in which Malick uses images and sounds of Saturn sent back to earth during the Cassini space Mission (2004-2017) in association with the ‘evil’ influence of Michael Fassbender’s character. See Chapter 4. 31 Biblical references are recurrent figural gestures in Malick’s films and are often interpreted literally, rather than allegorically, as providing the ultimate religious meaning of his films. In

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Abby is offered at the end of Days of Heaven operates as a time-image that Abby cannot process in subjectivity, in the immediacy of her everyday life and diegesis. While Abby is shown as following a cyclical and tragic flow of events, the f ilm emphasises Linda’s very different ‘experience’ through Chaplin’s The Immigrant. Linda is shown as living an unspeakable moment of recognition, a Blue Flower or ‘utopian sediment of experience’ (Hansen, p. 190) that is then offered to the film’s viewers32 in the apple moment. Just as in Linda’s experience of The Immigrant in Days of Heaven, in Badlands the temporal disjunction of the stereopticon scene opens a space of possibility in Holly’s life that is simply precluded in all other mirror images and self-reflexive moments33 of the f ilm. Holly’s looking at the stereo slides conveys other possibilities of time, other than enclosure in subjectivity, narcissism and death. As Hansen has it, Benjamin’s allegorical Blue Flower, in the context of his ‘Work of Art’ essay, entails that the catastrophic progression of history can only be interrupted and grasped in fragmentary forms. As Koch also sees it, ‘revolutionary pathos and eschatological motive walk hand in hand during Benjamin’s trip through the pile of rubble which the cinematic technologies have blown open’ (p. 213).

Conclusion: from Mythic to Figural Temporal Relations in Films Benjamin’s theory of allegory and his writings on tragedy and Trauerspiel illuminate the circular and closed narratives of Malick’s early f ilms Badlands and Days of Heaven. At a time in which the mythic and heroic approaches to storytelling started dominating Hollywood screenwriting line with Benjamin’s de-mythologizing position, any religious or dogmatic reading of biblical references in Malick’s films can be countered through the analysis of the specific role of film technologies in ‘shattering’ (Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 104) traditional mythical approaches to art and nature. 32 This line of argument will be developed throughout the book, and fully explained in the analysis of Malick’s contemporary narratives, in Chapter 4. 33 Holly and Kit’s journey is punctuated by reflected images on mirrors at significant turning points in the narrative. These include: the reflected image of Holly’s father as Kit is taking Holly’s possessions from her bedroom; Holly’s reflected image as she puts make-up on in the forest, just before Kit senses the bounty hunters’ arrival; Cato, Kit’s former colleague and friend, looking at himself in a mirror as he is slowly dying, having been shot in the stomach by Kit; and, finally, Kit looking at himself in the rear view mirror and adjusting his hair like ‘James Dean’ as if to get ready for the final phases of his staged capture.

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practices, Malick’s work distinguishes itself as particularly ‘anomalous’ (Michaels) in the Hollywood scene of the time. A reframing of Malick’s Badlands away from the nascent mythical paradigm of Hollywood films is particularly significant in relation to this book’s focus on nature-culture relations in Malick’s films. Malick’s first long feature film displays a clear distance from pastoral and idyllic visions of nature in a number of scenes. From the Maxfield Parrish print left in the tree house in the forest, to the advertising billboards that pervade the figural economy of the film, the chapter points to the inherent commodif ication of a specif ic symbolic and mythic vision of nature operating in Badlands. This commodif ied vision of idyllic nature pervades characters’ immersion in the nascent postmodern culture of 1950s America and is an important aspect of Malick’s first feature film. Benjamin’s theory of allegory provides the theoretical framework to articulate a historicised rather than mythic approach to nature in Malick’s early f ilms. This historicised vision of nature-culture relations proves important to counter the tendency to read Malick’s films as expressions of a renewed romantic and religious thought in contemporary culture. The allegorical vision of nature in Badlands clearly illuminates the significance of Kit and Holly’s delusional escape in their tree house in the forest. The film critiques the paradoxical act of seeking a pre-historical unity with the world of nature in modernity, a delusional approach epitomised in the mediated and allegorical act of reading Heyerdahl’s book, followed by the scene in which Kit reads the National Geographic eating an apple. The use of Benjamin’s allegorical and historicised vision of nature, in conjunction with Benjamin’s insights on film and language, uncovers Malick’s cinematic reframing of nature-culture relations that does not revert to pre-modern and unmediated visions. In an application of insights from Benjamin’s Tragedy and Trauerspiel, the chapter shifts critical interpretations from the faith of characters and subjectivities to a hyperbolic notion of time on the action. Coherently, Benjamin’s reflections on second technologies provide the conceptual tools to analyse Days of Heaven’s narrative away from mythic, classical notions of storytelling. Auratic experiences of nature are reframed as manifestations of the original split and distance between the subject and the object in historical, human-nature relations in modernity. This distance is a precondition of all aesthetic experiences of art and nature in contemporary culture, a distance that cannot be transcended by a pre-historical understanding of sense perception, especially through films. Under a Benjaminian perspective,

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any pre-historical, pre-lapsarian state will already have been allegorised by the linguistic, historical mediation of its cinematic representation. Badlands’ self-reflexive scene in which Holly looks at her father’s stereo slides in the forest mobilises a shift from the ‘eternal value’ of classical art to the transient and playful temporality of second technology. In this, the stereopticon scene in the forest is exemplary of the enigmatic affectivity of time opened up by second technologies. In Badlands, Holly’s non-linear speculations about the future affecting the past (‘And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?’), point to a renewed affectivity of time opened up by second technology. This renewed affectivity is not associated with narrative action and characters’ identities and subjectivities in the film (Kit and Holly will not find freedom in a higher state of life), but is associated with the interruption and opening up of the narrative in a now of visibility that opens time to its other, allegorical and hyperbolic possibilities of ‘messianic’ time. Through an application of Benjamin’s distinction between Trauerspiel and tragedy the chapter supports a reading of Days of Heaven as an allegory of the hyperbolic possibilities of time opened up by second technology. The figural approach to the film uncovers a common destiny and progression of nature and culture towards death, an inescapable tragic circularity of both nature and culture. For example, Abby’s cultural elevation and her presence as a new woman in the Farmer’s house is associated to the sprouting of a wheat seed in the f ields. This association parallels human culture and non-human nature as part of the same mechanical/cyclical vision of temporality, and clarifies the non-subjective approach to characters and narrative of a figural approach to film analysis. This decentering of the critical stance from the fate of individual characters and subjects towards the film’s relation to finitude is a distinctive feature of Malick’s oeuvre. While characters follow a tragic and cyclical destiny in nature, the film opens itself into another vision of time and nature not related to individual fate and causal relations. In this view, the figural presence of the apple seller disrupts viewer’s relation to narrative causality, opening the film to a Benjaminian reading of the scene in which Abby, Linda, and the Farmer watch the projection of Chaplin’s The Immigrant. As in a modern Trauerspiel, the vaudevillian night at the Farmer’s is interpreted as the theatre of a new, non-subjective relation to aesthetic experiences in modernity. As in the scene in which Holly, in Badlands, looks at the stereoscopic photographs in the forest, in Days of Heaven there is an

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enigmatic moment of recognition and openness to possibilities during the projection of Chaplin’s film. Benjamin’s notion of plastic time provides the material ground to interpret Linda’s seeing as the unspeakable experience of what Benjamin calls the Blue Flower in the land of technology. In Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’, the reference to Novalis’ Blue Flower well illustrates the complex philosophical position beyond myth and romantic idealism in nature-culture relations operating in films. In this view, ‘The equipment free aspect of reality’ (Benjamin, p. 115) revealed by film is, precisely, the plasticity of time: a non-teleological approach to time that opens the catastrophic progression of narrative action, as well as progressive visions of history, to a now of hyperbolic possibilities excessive to narrative action and causal relations. In this, Benjamin’s distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel and reflections on second technologies support a critical approach to Malick’s early-career films that shifts attention from the fate of individual characters and subjectivities towards the pro-filmic reality (time) that the films themselves bring into appearance as an ‘equipment free’ aspect of reality. A Benjaminian conception of mediality and second technologies opens Malick’s early-career films to new and unforeseen possibilities of time on the action, opening up finitude to an unpredictable allegorical alterity that will not come full circle. In the following chapter I will expand on the notion of historical, mechanical and messianic time in the analysis of The Thin Red Line and The New World.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio, What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Arendt, Hanna, ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin 1892-1940’, Illuminations, ed. by Hanna Arendt (London: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp. 1-55. Baudry, Jean-Louis, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly, 28 (1974), 2, pp. 39-47. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). ——, ‘Chaplin’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927-1930, eds. by Michael W. Jennings and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2005), pp. 199-200. ——, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 1 19271930, eds. by Michael W. Jennings and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2005), pp. 222-224.

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——, ‘Dream Kitsch’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 1 1927-1930, edited by Michael W. Jennings and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Howard Eiland (2005), pp. 3-6. ——, ‘Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 2 1931-1934, eds. by Michael W. Jennings and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Howard Eiland, (2005), pp. 792-793. ——, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009). ——, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott (2006), pp. 101-133. ——, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2004), pp. 55-58. Behler, Ernst, Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi, an Schelling (London: A&C Black, 1987). Biskind, Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘N’ Drugs ‘N’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury Puplishing, 1999). Bordwell, David, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Chaplin, Charles, The Immigrant, Mutual Film Corporation, 1917. Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology, (London: Souvenir Press, 2001). Campbell, Neil, ‘The Highway Kind: Badlands, Youth, Space and the Road’, The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 40-51. Cohen, Hubert, ‘The Genesis of “Days of Heaven”’, Cinema Journal, 42 (2003), 4, pp. 46-62. Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990). Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener, Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses (London: Routledge, 2015). Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author?’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press), trans. by Donald Bouchard and Simon Sherry (1977), pp. 113-138. Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde’, in Early Cinema, Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser, (London: BFI Publishing, 1990).

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——, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI Publishing, 2000). Hansen, Miriam, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp. 179-224. ——, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Enquiry, 34 (2008), pp. 336-375. Kendall, Stuart, ‘The Tragic Indiscernibility of Days of Heaven’, in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. by Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 148-164. Koch, Gertrud, ‘Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” Essay’, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 205-215. Kuehn, Sarah, The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Iconography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011). Langford, Michelle, Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2006). Latto, Anne, ‘Innocents Abroad: The Young Woman’s Voice in Badlands and Days of Heaven’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) pp. 88-102. Lehman, S. Robert, ‘Allegories of Rending: Killing Time with Walter Benjamin’ New Literary History, 39 (2008), 2, pp. 233-250. Maher, Paul Jr., One Big Soul. An Oral History of Terrence Malick (San Bernardino, CA: Lulu Press, 2015). Malick, Terrence, Badlands, Pressman-Williams-Badlands Ltd., 1973. ——, Days of Heaven, Paramount Pictures, 1978. Martin, Adrian, ‘Last Day Every Day’: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (Goleta: Punctum Books, 2012). Metz, Christian, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982). Michaels, Lloyd, Terrence Malick (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Morris, Meaghan, ‘Days of Heaven’ Cinema Papers, 23, (1979), Sept./Oct., pp. 565-566. Morrison, James and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (London: Praeger Publishers, 2003). Rodowick, David Norman, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media, (Durham: Duke University Press 2001). Rosenbrück, Jonas, ‘“Intriguing Ideas, Plotting Bögen”: Thinking the Limit of Allegory in Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 91 (2016), pp. 126-146. Vogler, Christopher, The Writer’s Journey. Mythic Structure for Writers (Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 1998).

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Weber, Samuel, Benjamin’s Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). ——, ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth, Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play’, MLN, 106 (1991), 3, pp. 465-500.

2.

Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World Abstract Chapter 2, ‘Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World’ looks at the marked nature-culture dichotomy that plays out in these historical narratives and reframes them in non-mythic terms. Malick’s mid-career films reveal two visions of finitude and materiality in nature: a mechanistic and organicist vision, where parts are reciprocally connected; and another vision of nature, where parts are totally disassociated from laws of causality and reciprocity. These visions articulate the complexities of what Benjamin calls legal violence, mythic violence and messianic violence. Corporal Fife’s (Adrian Brody) and Rebecca/Pocahontas’ (K’Orianka Kilcher) gestures reveal a poetic looking of camera work as pure mediality and cinematic disruption of mythical approaches to nature, time, and storytelling. Keywords: mechanic time; violence; pure means; messianic time; nature; time-image. ‘This space for play is widest in film’ (Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 127)

At the beginning of The Thin Red Line, we observe the unfolding of life in a Melanesian community in the Solomon Islands, as witnessed by Witt (Jim Caviziel) an American soldier gone absent without leave (AWOL). Images of Melanesian people living in their twentieth century Christian ways and customs are shown on screen. One of these images is of children intently playing a game with rocks. The children just move the rocks displayed in a circle, rhythmically and in unison, in a circular movement that never ends and under the absorbed gaze of two other children waiting for their turn in the game. The shot cuts as soon as one of the two waiting children lifts his eyes towards the camera and looks at us. Similarly haunting gestures of play and immersion in nature occur in The New

Blasi, G., The Work of Terrence Malick. Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989108_ch02

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World, when Captain John Smith is held captive in the Powhatan village, gradually admitted to the village’s customs and rituals, and falls in love with one of the Chief’s daughters. The sequence shows children playing, men and women gathering and preparing food, attending traditional ceremonies, games and dances, interspersed with images of the unfolding and overwhelming attraction, proximity and love between Smith and Pocahontas. The crescendo ends with an emblematic and ambiguous call directed to the future Rebecca, and Smith’s voice-over explaining his imminent return to James Town. In both instances, Malick’s editing and direction emphasizes the artif icial, cinematic relation with the events narrated. Conventional editing work would have cut the frame before the child looks at the camera in The Thin Red Line. Similarly, in The New World the editing skillfully works against the immediacy of the action disrupting the illusion of temporal continuity.1 Both films are rewritings of the historical events depicted therein; namely, the decisive battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, between the Allied and the Japanese troops in the Solomon Islands; and the arrival of Captain Newport and John Smith in Virginia in 1607. The Thin Red Line is an adaptation of James Jones’s novel, presenting substantial departures from its literary source (Peeble, p. 157), whereas The New World is strikingly similar to Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and narrates the (in)famous story of John Smith, one of the foundational myths of American exceptionalism (Macdonald).2 Both films represent the encounter between indigenous communities and the violent forces of war and colonisation in history. Rather than a cathartic experience of World War II in The Thin Red Line, or a contemporary post-colonial take on the mythologised and romanticised vision of history in The New World, Malick offers very large philosophical questions about the nature of violence and the meaning of life and nature. Such voice-overs have become a hallmark of Malick’s cinema with increasingly diminished appeal on contemporary film critics, reviewers and the general public. Malick’s mid-career films are interpreted as allegorical renditions of a deeper investigation on nature-culture relations in scholarly literature. 1 In the sequence here considered, Pocahontas is still in the Powhatan village and has not yet received her ‘new name’ Rebecca. Nevertheless, we hear a surreal call ‘Rebecca, Rebecca’ in voice-over. The call is followed by a long shot of one of the Powhatan warriors gesturing to come. Next, is Smith’s hand and leg entering that shot and walking towards the warrior (suggesting he is the object of the call), followed by a medium close-up of Pocahontas.. 2 As Macdonald points out, it deliberately draws on Disney’s 1995 version of the story, casting Irene Bedard, the model and voice of Disney’s Pocahontas, as the mother of Malick’s unnamed Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), thus making the Disney version the metaphoric source of Malick’s rewriting.

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Warwick Mules argues that Malick uses the theatre of war and Guadalcanal to allegorise Schelling’s idea ‘that nature grounds the possibility of both good and evil by withdrawing from them (as indifferent nature)’, and that the film allegorises the war by ‘meditating on human life and its relation to death, nature, good and evil’ (With Nature, p. 172). Mules further articulates that: the film bears witness to the battle, not by recalling its historical or ideal truth, but by announcing that ‘man’s subjection to nature’ at war with itself destroys idealism and places the human in a state of mourning outside its own idealized self-image, yet open to a glorious otherness (pp. 172-173).

Nevertheless, if The Thin Red Line is an allegorical meditation on human ‘subjection to nature’ (Benjamin, Origin, p. 166), there are many different ways of looking at nature in the film. Bersani and Dutoit argue that characters are ‘individuated not as personalities but as perspectives on the world’ (p. 146). In this way, the film clearly presents viewers with allegoricalphilosophical confrontations so that the pairings and couplings that Pippin, following Bersani and Dutoit, sees between characters (Pippin, p. 251), can be seen as philosophical debates between dramatis personae embodying different perspectives on the world of nature. For example, the dialogues between Sergeant Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) and Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), and between Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Tall (Nick Nolte) and Captain Staros (Elias Coteas), can be seen as philosophical confrontations between Tall’s classic heroic ethos and Staros’s Christian ethos, and between Witt’s dialectical/Hegelian relation to history and nature and Welsh’s Nietzschean/ nihilistic approach. Similarly, scholarly literature on Malick’s The New World recognises that the film poses philosophical questions about the nature of nature and human place in it. For example, Sinnerbrink argues that The New World ‘provides the opportunity to develop the allegorical significance of the theme of marriage and the possibility of reconciliation between cultures or, more deeply, between human culture and nature’ (p. 195). Nevertheless, Sinnerbrink’s work on The Thin Red Line strongly suggests that film-philosophers should move beyond philosophical readings and interpretations of the film’s formal and narrative elements and consider ‘the question of the nature of the cinematic image and its capacity to provoke thought’ (‘A Heideggerian Cinema?’ p. 36). Critical work on Malick constantly points to the importance of focusing on the cinematic and poetic aspects of his films as opposed to philosophical

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or even allegorical interpretations of his narratives. Martin Donougho argues that Malick’s turn from teaching philosophy in American academia to enrolling in the American Film Institute in the 1960s can be interpreted as his way of exploring the possibilities offered by the new cinematic medium, ‘a way of allowing things to emerge into significance—to let their showing up itself be shown up […] while retaining a certain obliqueness of presentation and interpretation’ (p. 361). Similarly, Elisabeth Walden points to Malick’s filmmaking as a way to avoid philosophical and linguistic impositions of ideas over the world, ‘by turning to filmmaking, he is able to explore the world as something that shows itself, as something of value that cannot be reduced to what can sensibly be said about it’ (p. 206). As these examples suggest, the general consensus is that films cannot be closed into philosophical systems, and in relation to ‘ecocritical concerns’, ecocinema or conceptions of ‘nature’ in films, this axiom is particularly problematic and interesting at the same time: what is film, then? How does film distance itself form linguistic, philosophical work, exactly? As will be discussed in detail, Benjamin’s ideas provide original conceptual tools to help further articulating the material, historical ground of the cinematic image and its capacity to provoke thought. In this view, and for the purpose of a comprehensive analysis of a Benjaminian allegorical ‘subjection to nature’ (The Origin, p. 166) in films, it is important to describe how nature is presented in Malick’s cinematic vision. In what follows I claim that The Thin Red Line and The New World consistently offer two visions of nature: an organicist and vitalist vision in which humans and nature are part of a larger whole and all parts are connected and interrelated; and another vision of nature where parts are totally disassociated from laws of causality and reciprocity that characterise organicity in general.

The Thin Red Line Between Historical and Mechanical Nature In ‘Renewed Question: Whether a Philosophy of History is Possible’, Fenves quotes Schelling’s proposition, ‘Wherever there is mechanism, there is no history, and conversely, where there is history, there is no mechanism’ (p. 517), which Schelling illustrates with the image of the clock. The entire passage is worth quoting at length here: The image of the clock […] can be generalized in relation to clock-like aspects of human beings, such as eating, drinking, having sex, and dying. In the broader context of transcendental idealism circa 1798 and even more

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so, in relation to Schelling’s own writings of the period, this proposition and its attending illustration are characterised by a striking absence: no mention is made of a non-mechanistic mode of causality, specifically organic causality in which each part of the living thing is reciprocally connected to the whole, and the whole thus precedes its parts […] There are a number of ways to interpret the absence of any reference to organic causality, but one is particularly suggestive—not that Schelling somehow forgot about it, or perhaps suppressed it in his defence of the Fichtean program, but the inclusion of Naturphilosophie in a philosophical system changes nothing in relation to the question at hand [whether a philosophy of history is possible and how]. (pp. 517-518)

For Fenves, Schelling’s omission of an organic conception of nature implies that an organic mode of causality (in which each part of the living thing is reciprocally connected to the whole) would still be a mechanistic mode of nature; that is, mechanic time linked to the clock-like aspects of life (eating, drinking, having sex and dying). The omission is, indeed, particularly striking considering that within the context of transcendental idealism, Schelling would have certainly held to an organicist, as opposed to a mechanistic, Newtonian concept of nature (Grant, pp. 68-69). Fenves’ renewed question can thus be posed in these terms: can nature and history evade the clock-like mode of being and becoming? Fenves points out that this is the central question of Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties. For Kant, who distinguishes between the lower faculty of philosophy and the higher faculty of positive law, nature and history can interrupt the clock-like mode of being and becoming as long as positive law is grounded in (pure) reason, and as such, it interrupts the mechanic flow of events by way of a revolutionary advancement of reason in history. On the other hand, for Schelling, historical time cannot be enforced by reason; it is still a ‘function of time’ and thereby must be captured by a ‘time function’ (Schelling cited in Fenves, ‘Renewed Question’, p. 517). For Schelling, a philosophy of history must not follow Kant’s, but rather Leibniz’s lead: ‘for it must develop its own version of higher analysis […] such that “everything that is” can be immediately presented as a “function of time”’ (p. 517). The paradox for Schelling seems to be that the goal of history is the same as its origin, namely freedom, and ‘any progressive step forward is also its very inception’ (p. 518). Thus, if mechanical time is ‘periodic’ or, ‘a movement in which goal and origin converge’ (p. 519), how can historical time progress any better than mechanical time towards freedom? Historical time does not progress or regress (as in a line between points or tangents) but is

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simply ‘gressive’ (p. 518).3 For Schelling, without a mathematical function that captures the ‘gressive’ character of history, no philosophy of history is possible because reason cannot transcend, so to speak, the periodicity of events in mechanical time (pp. 518-519). Having defined the problem of an impossible philosophy of history based on reason, Fenves reads Hölderlin, and Benjamin’s own work on Hölderlin (‘Two Poems’) as new articulations of Schelling’s problem in modernity. In this view, Benjamin’s philosophical project can be understood as operating within the complexities of a material philosophy that is not based on post-Kantian reason and would not fall back into transcendental idealism. Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ can also be seen as operating within the same philosophical trajectory of ‘Two Poems’ and other early essays. In ‘Critique of Violence’ the Kantian problem of the difference between natural law and positive law is formulated in similar terms to Schelling’s: all laws are violent. No distinction is made between natural law and positive law, because if natural law sees violence as a ‘natural datum’ and positive law ‘sees violence as a product of history’, then: the misunderstanding in natural law by which a distinction between violence used for just ends and violence used for unjust ends must be emphatically rejected. Rather, positive law demands of all violence a proof of its historical origin, which under certain conditions is declared legal, sanctioned. (pp. 237-238)

This prompts Benjamin to declare that, ‘the Critique of Violence is the philosophy of its history—the “philosophy” of this history because only the idea of its development makes possible a critical, discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data’ (p. 251). Thus, contrary to Schelling, for Benjamin a philosophy of history is possible, it is precisely a critique of violence, where critiquing violence means the ability to see and recognise its development, because ‘only the idea of its development makes possible 3 From Fenves’ writings, the ‘gressive’ character of time can be described as sharply turned on itself, or folded, so that every fold recapitulates the whole in a similar, interpolated shape. Fenves’ hypothesis is that Benjamin and Gerhard Scholem discussed the shape of time in relation to a continuous, but non-differentiable mathematical function discovered and published by Karl Weierstrass in the late nineteenth century. See ‘Renewed Question’ (pp. 522-524) and The Messianic Reduction (pp. 106-112). For Fenves’ work on Benjamin’s connection to Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical thought (as an alternative to Kantian transcendental reason, via Hölderlin and Schelling), see also Arresting Language and ‘Of Philosopical Style-from Leibniz to Benjamin’.

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a critical, discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data’ [my emphasis] (p. 251). From this reading of a possible philosophy of history comes the question: how is it possible to see and recognise the development of violence and gain a ‘critical, discriminating, and decisive approach’ to it? Benjamin’s early essays evade the structured thinking of binary logic. To paraphrase his ‘Coming Philosophy’, Benjamin’s thinking does indeed require another relation between subject and object, a reconfiguration of the modern subject-object relation which is neither based on binary thinking and opposition, nor based on progressive or regressive thinking, reconciliations, and synthesis. In ‘Critique of Violence’, Benjamin introduces another concept that is neither natural law nor positive law, but a ‘divine’ or messianic law. While the literature on Benjamin’s difficult essay is itself complex and divided,4 in what follows, I claim that Malick mid-career films not only are suitable case studies to exemplify the complexities of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ but are also important cinematic contributions to a possible philosophy of history. In the course of analysis, I understand the violence of each manifestation of ‘law’ as the violence of mechanical time, historical time, and messianic time. The Thin Red Line and The New World can be seen as ‘critiques of violence’, in that they present violence as such, in their natural and positive manifestations of law. In critiquing violence, however, the films offer a philosophy of history through a cinematic approach to time and temporal data that is completely disassociated from mechanical time. This possibility is not encumbered by individual intentionality, but is predicated on a ‘messianic’ conception of time that the cinematic experience brings forth as pure mediality.

Critiquing Violence in Nature and History The war film genre provides the setting to show the various instances in which the problem and paradox of natural law and positive law play out in history. Indeed, ‘Militarism is the compulsory, universal use of violence as a means to ends of the state’ (Benjamin, ‘Critique’, p. 241). One of the most obvious moments where the justification of violence as a means to ends of the state is seen in The Thin Red Line is when Doll (Dash Mihoc) kills a man for the first time and in voice-over says, ‘I killed a man, worst thing you can do, worse than rape and nobody can touch me for it’. The violence is justified 4 Alison Ross has recently articulated these difficulties arguing against Fenves and Werner Hamacher. Among other notable critical engagements with Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ it is important to mention Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Simon Critchley and Slavoj Žižek.

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as a means to the ‘ends’ of the state that the film, through the nihilist eyes of Sean Penn’s character Welsh, unmercifully sanctions as ‘Property. The whole fuckin’ thing’s about property’. Nevertheless, the most interesting and perplexing instance where the film shows the paradox of natural and positive law at work is in the ‘only narratively significant event of the film’ as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call it: ‘the refusal on the part of Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) to obey Colonel Tall’s (Nick Nolte) order to send his men directly up the hill in an attack on the Japanese bunker at the top’ (p. 128). As Pippin’s reading suggests, this conflict is not only crucial in narrative terms, but is also emblematic of a deeper conflict between different versions of humanism in nature-culture relations. While Colonel Tall follows the heroic ethos of an archaic code of nobility and courage,5 and uses nature to justify the application of this code to the battlefield, Captain Staros embodies the ethos of a later, Christian humanism. Staros counters Tall’s uncompromising commitment to winning the battle by showing prudence and temperance and demonstrating his ‘love’ to his soldiers as a father to his children. While Staros demonstrates Christian love and compassion and embodies the ethos of human individual intentions and rationality against the mechanisms of nature in history, the film itself critiques Staros’ act of rebellion by showing viewers that the same ethical values proceed undisturbed in the film. For example, the film shows the fatherly and patriarchal attitude of military life continues undisturbed in the metaphors used by the captain replacing Staros at the end of the film.6 Following the logic of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, while Staros’ conscious act of rebellion is a demonstration of human compassion and rationality, Malick’s film shows that the same violence is at the root of both positive and natural law. Captain Staros, who is a lawyer in civilian life, refuses to follow the orders based on the natural law of war and, through his act of conscious rebellion, uses what could be called the positive, revolutionary law of history. While this is certainly a powerful act of human individual intentionality in the film, the film itself critiques 5 Colonel Tall cites Homer’s Odyssey in Greek and refers to the relevance of this epic in his military formation. 6 Captain Bosche (George Clooney) says: We are a family. I’m the father. Guess that makes Sergeant Welsh here the mother. That makes you all the children in this family. Now, a family can have only one head, and that is the father. Father’s the head, mother runs it. That’s the way it’s gonna work here. The parallel between Welsh (Sean Penn) as ‘the mother’ in the sustained metaphor of Welsh as emblem of nihilist views on nature, is interesting in light of Nietzschean takes on feminism in late twentieth-century culture (see Paul Patton). Welsh’s nihilism is further referred to and explored in the analysis of Sean Penn’s character Jack O’Brien in The Tree of Life in the next chapter.

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the act’s paradoxical nature by showing viewers that violence is at the root of both positive and natural law. Despite his demonstrated rationality and compassion, Staros is in a war and cannot evade the fact that violence is—de jure—sanctioned and legalised in those circumstances. Indeed, ‘the Captain’s humanistic defence of life is absurd’ (Bersani and Dutoit, p. 140) in the battlefield or seen to be ineffective in what it is supposed to do: save the lives of his men. However, despite the absurdity of Staros’ defence of life in war, his decision and choice do not remain without consequences in the film. Captain Staros’ mutiny marks a narrative turning point in The Thin Red Line. From that moment onwards, through a series of resonant sequences of love—embodied by Private Bell’s (Ben Chaplin) fantasies and recollections about his wife at home as he climbs the hill—Charlie Company finds the courage, cohesion and strength to conquer the hill and bring success to the mission. In this, Malick not only critiques the historical origins of violence and positive law but, more importantly, shows how the love, courage, and compassion that motivate Charlie Company’s success remain part of violent acts of nature in a mechanical flow of events. In this, it is important to note that good and evil are equally questioned in the film’s voice-overs, with the same language: Private Train (John Dee Smith) asks, ‘This great evil. Where does it come from?’; and Private Bell asks, ‘Love. Where does it come from?’ Both good and evil, positive law and violence, are shown as mechanical possibilities of nature. Such a complex position on the ambivalence of nature is evoked in the film’s initial questioning in voice-over: ‘is there an avenging power in nature, not one power, but two?’7 As Bersani and Dutoit argue using Freud’s words, The Thin Red Line shows both violence and love are part of the same destructive and ecstatic pleasure of the drives. In Benjamin’s words, however, the thought could be completed to say that human history progresses mechanically towards life’s freedom in the form of death, entropy, and destruction (‘On the Concept of History’, p. 392). But can nature be reduced to mechanism8 in The Thin Red Line? 7 Malick’s work consistently complicates Manichean and dualistic positions on nature as good and/or evil. I will return to this important point in the analysis of the ways of ‘Grace’ and ‘Nature’ in the next chapter. 8 Here, mechanism is intended in the Kantian sense of principles of causality operating in the natural world. For a study on mechanism and causality in Kant, see Angela Breitenbach: In particular, in the second part of the Critique of Judgment the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’, Kant is concerned not with causality as the transcendental conditions of experience in general but with the possibility of causally explaining concrete parts of nature and, more specif ically, corporeal nature. Kant phrases this discussion in terms of the mechanical explicability of the natural world, where the mechanism of nature, as he tells us, is the determination of nature ‘according to the laws of causality.’ (p. 201)

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The film repeatedly shows Charlie Company as a whole, an interconnected body without organs—or ‘machinic assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 79)—where parts are constantly opening up through unpredictable behaviours and lines of flights, as in the flock-like movements of the soldiers moving together, like birds, in the jungle as one body. To further reinforce this vision of Charlie Company as an interconnected ‘abstract machine’,9 it is important to point out that in the first phases of the battle, chaos and madness predominate, lines of command are not clear, and the soldiers appear lost. It is only after Captain Staros’ act of rebellion—which in the story is preceded, and almost motivated by, the unpredictable line of flight of Welsh’s run through the battlefield in a selfless attempt to save a soldier who does not want to be saved—that the company becomes itself again. The point I want to stress here, following the lines of argument introduced via Benjamin, is that the mechanical vision of life is not restricted to the progress of the oppressors (embodied by Colonel Tall’s egoistic motivation and furious determination)10 but includes rationality (embodied by Captain Staros’ Christian ethos and Private Bell’s memories of an idealised love) and unpredictability (the lines of flight). Love, too, proceeds in this ‘machinic’ and unpredictable sort of way. In this process, Bell’s wife (Miranda Otto) replaces Bell with another man back home and asks Bell to help her leave him. The same mechanism drives and haunts Captain Staros’ Christian values and compassion. Staros—contrary to Welsh’s striking refusal of the Silver Star because war is ‘all about property’—does not turn down Colonel Tall’s deal and leaves Charlie Company with the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. Characters in The Thin Red Line are indeed perspectives on life, they are philosophical perspectives on nature as violence and positive law; however, the film shows that not one single philosophical perspective, embodied by the confrontations of its four principal characters, can escape (or transcend) a sort of mechanical circularity of time, the clock-like mode of being and becoming, as Schelling and Benjamin (‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, p. 55) would call it. In what follows I claim that in Malick’s film the possibility of a critique of violence and consequent philosophy of history, resides in its cinematic vision of time and nature, a distinctively poetic seeing of camera work that opens the theatre of history and nature to other possibilities of time. 9 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari liken the abstract machine to ‘the plane of consistency of Nature’ (280). This abstract machine is ‘abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations’ (p. 280). 10 On history as catastrophic progress, as expression of the dominant vanquishing the dominated, see Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’.

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Timidity and Courage in The Thin Red Line and The New World In an application of Fenves’ insights offered in ‘Renewed Question’ and other writings on Benjamin’s philosophy of time, my claim is that Corporal Fife can be seen as expression of a poetic, rather than philosophical looking in the film: A striking feature of Hölderlin’s poems is the peculiar passivity that can be ascribed to the poet, a passivity that finds its paradoxical security in defenselessness as supreme vulnerability. For the young Benjamin this vulnerability cum security is the counter-mythological traits par excellence. (Fenves, ‘Renewed Question’, p. 521)

Fife is the only character who does not project mythological or philosophical views on the violent events of war. He is the witness of the battle who does not talk, but sees everything, and his facial features communicate the power of looking in aesthetic, almost physiognomic terms. Like the owl’s big eyes, Fife’s eyes see everything, but unlike the owl’s eerie detached participation, Fife’s facial features, body and gestures communicate a profound distress. This point differs from Bersani and Dutoit who claim that: the close-ups of Witt’s looking defines a cinematic aesthetic and ethic of implicated witnessing, of a witnessing identical to total absorption [emphasis added] […] it is an illusion to think that we can look at nature the way it appears to look at us: as a spectacle distinct from the looking. That appearance is eerily represented in the sequence preceding Witt’s death by the shots of an owl sitting in a tree, looking. (pp. 160-161)

The problem of Witt’s ‘witnessing identical to total absorption’, is that it falls back to a mythical vision of nature; an impossible, prelapsarian vision of the world that cannot be recuperated in aesthetic experiences, especially complex, highly artificial productions of experiences such as films. More importantly, the witnessing Bersani and Dutoit advocate does not move away from witnessing a mechanical flow of events in nature coming full circle. Following the insights offered in Benjamin’s ‘Two Poems’, it is worth exploring the different looks of Witt and Fife. The former’s facial features communicate a beautiful, ennobling courage in his acceptance of death, while in the latter’s timid11 gaze and body language there is something 11 ‘Courage’ [Dichtermut] and ‘timidity’ [Blödigkeit] are the two qualities associated with the poet in Hölderlin’s two poems (Benjamin, ‘Two Poems’, pp. 21-22). Benjamin’s analysis of

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arresting and compelling, something that remains significantly muted and silenced throughout the narrative, which elicits a variety of affective responses in the viewer, without closure. In ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ Benjamin writes: ‘in tragedy the hero dies because no one can live in fulfilled time. He dies of immortality’ (p. 56). In ‘Two Poems’, Benjamin continues the thematic exploration of a non-heroic and non-Hellenic vision of life and death with the notion of the ‘poetized’: ‘the contemplation of the poetized […] leads not to the myth but rather—in the greatest creations—only to mythic connections, which in the work of art are shaped into unique, unmythological, and unmythic forms’ (p. 35). While Witt dies in fulfilled time and mythic immortality, Fife’s unfulfilled and mute gestures open the narrative to unexplored, unmythic, interpretive possibilities. Fife’s look defines a cinematic ethic and aesthetic that takes into account the fleeting unreliability and fallibility of human subjectivity. Fife is a supremely vulnerable witness. His vulnerability is especially evident in the scene where a very young soldier (Nick Stahl) is dying under the compassionate and participative gaze of Staros’ Christian values and the soldier repeatedly asks for Fife. The young dying soldier wants Fife to be there, to just be there and witness his death, ‘I’m dying Fife.’ Malick’s direction does not even give Fife a close-up, he is simply there, shot from behind, juxtaposed along the plane of the camera’s viewing. In the scene, Fife’s neutral and discrete witnessing (like the witnessing of Malick’s camera work) is very different from the emotionally charged perspective of Captain Staros’ gaze. In all his appearances, Fife looks but does not speak, yet he testifies to something. He is one of the ‘two witnesses’ of Captain Staros’ mutiny and, significantly, he is the one Witt wants to save when he volunteers to go on the final mission that will lead to his courageous (somehow heroic) and calm death. On the other hand, Fife is also the one that, while utterly terrified, follows Witt’s orders to go back to Charlie Company and warn of imminent peril up-river—although he does not actually say anything. Fife’s looking is the looking of a vulnerable subject that sees and witnesses the inevitability of both love and violence in nature. Rather than ‘making himself superfluous in order to multiply his being’—as Witt does in Bersani and Dutoit’s attentive reading (p. 165)—Fife makes himself necessary in order to allow that seeing. Hölderlin’s poems is especially relevant in distinguishing a mythic and a messianic approach to ‘violence’ as the expression of unavoidable death, finitude and temporality in nature and history. The poet epitomises artistic work within the constraints of language and finitude, and the ‘timid’ approach to finitude and death counters the ‘courageous’ and mythic one.

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In the remainder of this chapter I contend that Fife in The Thin Red Line and Rebecca in The New World stand for the witnessing of Malick’s cinema divested of inner subjective intentions; a receptive poetic seeing aligned with camera work that gives the viewer access to images of nature, love, and violence as a spectacle distinct from the looking; it gives access to a vision of nature and time that is simply precluded in the immediacy of everyday life. Following Benjamin’s reflections on pure mediality, the possibility of a critique of violence, and consequent philosophy of history, resides in Malick’s cinematic vision of history and nature. The possibility of looking at nature as nature ‘looks back at us’,12 not only is possible, but is a messianic, non-mechanical function of time rendered possible in aesthetic experiences, and this is precisely what Malick’s seeing advocates in the enigmatic last three shots of The Thin Red Line and in Rebecca’s equally enigmatic ‘reconciliation’ (Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies, p.189) with her husband Rolfe in The New World. Just as in the philosophical confrontations between Witt and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, Malick’s narrative elements in The New World can be seen as reproposing a philosophical confrontation between Hegelian and Nietzschean positions on nature.13 For Sinnerbrink, Malick’s Pocahontas stands for a spiritual reconciliation of opposed visions of nature and a renewed possibility of life. For example, Sinnerbrink reads the repetition of the Wagnerian score14 as signifying a conciliatory transfiguration of the mythic in the film: Wagner’s Prelude is transfigured in this third rendering, which gives sublime musical expression to Pocahontas/Rebecca’s acceptance of death, 12 For the first association between Malick’s last three shots in The Thin Red Line and Benjamin’s conception of a nature ‘looking back at us’, see Kaja Silverman (p. 341). In the essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ cited in Silverman, Benjamin articulates this ability of the art work and nature to ‘look back’ in terms of the object’s aura: ‘To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us’ (p. 338). Benjamin provides his own explanatory footnote to the phrase: This conferred power is a wellspring of poetry. Whenever a human being, an animal, or inanimate object thus endowed by the poet lifts up its eyes, it draws him into the distance. The gaze of nature, when this awakened, dreams and pulls the poet after its dream. Words, too, can have an aura of their own. This is how Karl Kraus described it: ‘The close one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back’. (‘On some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 354) 13 Witt repeatedly states he believes in another world, contrary to Welsh. Similarly, Smith in The New World remains blocked in a dialectical antithesis between this and another world. See note 31 in this chapter. 14 Wagner’s Rheingold recurs three times in the in the extra-diegetic score: it accompanies the initial sequence of the arrival of the British ships; it is repeated when Smith and Pocahontas fall in love in the forest; and it accompanies Rebecca’s last images of renewed joy in the estate’s gardens.

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affirmation of life, and reconciling of Old and New Worlds in a no-longer human world. This swelling, intensifying musical crescendo suggests nothing less than the self-expression of nature that is momentarily allowed to ‘sing’, to bear witness to Pocahontas/Rebecca’s spiritual reconciliation and her return to (mother) earth […] Malick’s visual symphony combined with Wagner’s overture reveals the transformation of the (Western) desire for conquest and domination, transfigured through love, the overcoming of opposition, and the need to acknowledge a deeper (spiritual) unity with nature. (New Philosophies, pp. 190-191)

On the other hand, for Macdonald The New World does not present spiritual reconciliations at all, but a very unromantic Nietzschean ‘will to power’, the origin and mother of all life. In a compelling reading of the images associated with Pocahontas’ last voice-over in the estate’s gardens (‘Mother, now I know where you live’), Macdonald concludes that the camera answers for viewers: As the angle changes from the topiary hedges and trees that dominate the last part of the film, stressing the attempted mastery of nature. In an explicit shift of perspective, an orderly hedge gives way to its sinuous branches and one kind of order yields to another, deeper order of which it is part. (p. 106)

Here, Macdonald argues that Malick shows his answer to Pocahontas’ questioning through camera viewing, and explains the image in question through a Nietzschean vision of ‘nature coalescing into history’ (p. 99).15 My claim here is that Malick’s cinema articulates philosophical meanings in ways that evade both nihilistic and romantic interpretations of nature. Through a Benjaminian account of mythic, historical, and messianic time, a new vision of The New World opens up, a vision that resists the process of a simple illustration of philosophical ideas in cinema.

Camera Work as Pure Mediality In Malick’s mid-career films camera work reframes the dualistic subjectobject positions upon which modern aesthetics and modern conceptions 15 For Macdonald, Pocahontas’ and Smith’s worlds are no different. Pocahontas asks: ‘Mother, where do you live?’ Smith asks: ‘Who are you, whom I so faintly hear? Who urge me ever on? What voice is this that speaks within me, guides me towards the best?’

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of subjectivity are based. Malick’s cinematic approach to the Melanesian and Powhatan cultures complicates the humanist and dualistic view on nature and culture at the base of this and other binaries in modernity.16 Starting with The Thin Red Line and The New World, camera work in Malick is increasingly mobile and untethered from human perspective. Elsaesser and Hagener note that in The New World ‘a weightlessly floating camera glides over land and water, not bound to any anthropomorphic point of observation’ (p. 114), to the point that the film presents a contemporary deadlock of theoretical positions on films: when approached with the tenets of narratology, The New World slides away time and time again since its plot links are extremely loose. Also, the structure of looking is undermined when the film evokes the classical logic of continuity, but then withholds the reverse shot or the eyeline match. (p. 114)

As a consequence of withholding reverse shots and eyeline matches, the film upsets the viewer’s expected suturing into a familiar structure of looking and interpreting meanings. In this, the film does indeed suggest a fluid and sensorial relation with its content and a shift from ‘eyes’ to ‘skin’ and from ‘gaze’ to ‘touch’ as ‘an alternative set of agendas rather than merely complementing the visual with the haptic’ (p. 115). However, as Elsaesser and Hagener also indicate, a ‘bodily’ approach to the film is not exhaustive: ‘the continuous rhetorical invocation of the body as a central element of any given theory does not automatically undercut the distance between film and spectator in terms of phenomenology’ (p. 119). In the analysis of Badlands, I articulated the distance between film and spectator in terms of Benjamin’s conception of aura in ‘The Work of Art’, further explicating this distance as a temporal disjunction, and in terms of what Weber identifies as a simultaneous ‘coming and passing-away’ 16 Dualistic views on the world of nature and ‘another’ world of spirit find philosophical roots in Platonism, Manichean Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. These views are very influential in cultural and artistic practices of Renaissance humanism (and on later German thinkers and mystics such as Jakob Böhme, who greatly influenced Hegel, Schelling and the Romantics, see Cyril O’Regan). While the next chapters specifically counter humanist and Platonic interpretations of Malick’s work, it is important to note that it is precisely during Renaissance humanism that the subject-object perspectival gaze is theorised and apparently demonstrated through the first experiments and uses of the camera obscura, laying the foundations of Descartes’ successive studies on optics and subjectivity. For the influence of Descartes’ studies on the development of cinematic technologies, see Anne Friedberg (pp. 25-50) and Christian Quendler.

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(‘Genealogy of Modernity’, p. 469) of the ‘original’ moment of perception.17 Here I wish to further explore Benjamin’s notion of messianic violence in relation to this phenomenological distance in the experience of watching films. In the ‘The Work of Art’ essay Benjamin reflects on the difference between the presentation of a scene in a painting and the presentation of a scene in a film. Benjamin uses two heuristic metaphors to articulate this difference. Where the painter is a ‘magician’, the cinematographer is a ‘surgeon’: The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue. The images obtained by each differ enormously. The painter’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law. (‘Work of Art’, pp. 115-116)

The cinematic vision is inherently fragmented: the piecemeal vision of 24 frames per second, for instance; and the piecemeal editing process that matches shots, sequences, and scenes in a particular order of time and following the particular logic of the film’s vision. Following Benjamin, if all laws and all images are violent,18 the ‘new law’ (116) and new order of space-time coordinates according to which films’ conditions of apperception are shared, is far more violent and intrusive than the mythic approach of the painter qua magician (115). Following on Benjamin’s heuristic metaphor of the cinematographer qua ‘surgeon’ (116), far from being bloodless,19 the new spatio-temporal law of film seems as violent and possibly even bloodier 17 See Chapter 1 for the association between Benjamin’s conception of the aura and the ‘distance’ produced in the original split of perception in aesthetic experiences of art and nature. 18 As Buck-Morss’ work on ‘Work of Art’ attests, Benjamin not only theorizes the violence of the cinematic image in modernity, but makes a case on the long term effects of cinema on the human sensorium: ‘the technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physical shocks that have their correspondence in psychic shock’ (‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, p. 16). While the effects of these physical and psychic forces and shocks on the human sensorium are the object of empirical research in contemporary cognitive and neurological approaches to film studies, what is of most concern here is the philosophical grounding of Benjamin’s ‘new law’ of film (p. 116). On the ‘violence’ of images, see also Jean-Luc Nancy who argues that: [v]iolence always completes itself in an image. If what matters in the exercise of a force is the production of the effects that one expects from it (the triggering of a mechanism or the carrying out of an order), then what matters for the violent person is that the production of the effect is indissociable from the manifestation of violence. (p. 20) 19 In ‘Critique of Violence’ Benjamin describes the violence of messianic law as striking and bloodless, explicitly referring to the absence of ‘blood’ as indicative of its disconnection from ‘mere life’ (p. 250).

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and more intrusive than the mythic, total image of the painter. Following this logic, this new law of film in modernity is the bloodshed of positive law and historical violence, which for Benjamin, is identical to the bloodshed of immediate, natural law and mythic violence: Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythic manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function, the destruction of which thus becomes obligatory. This very task of destruction poses again, ultimately, the question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythic violence. (‘Critique of Violence’, p. 249)

This crucial point, the definition of natural/mythic and historical/positive law as ‘identical’, is one of the complexities expressed in Benjamin’s thought and provides the essential philosophical and theoretical key used in the present analysis of Malick’s vision of history and myth in his mid-career films.20 So, ‘the question of a pure, immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythic violence’ remains open. What is messianic violence? Can we see it in Malick’s The Thin Red Line and The New World? As posited at the beginning of this book, a central tenet of the present methodological approach to Malick’s films is linked with Benjamin’s notion of the fallenness of all communication, or impart-ability. This chapter reiterates that connection in relation to Malick’s cinematic relation to nature-culture relations as an expression of pure mediality.21 My argument builds on recent scholarship casting Benjamin’s divine violence as an expression of his ‘practical faith in God’ (Ross 96), however, borrows on a more ‘practical’ concept of ‘pure means’ [reine Mittel] (‘Critique of Violence’, p. 245) in accordance with 20 As Captain Staros’ and Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Tall’s confrontations exemplify, the historical value of legal violence and positive law is as bloody and violent as the mythic violence of natural law. 21 See Weber’s Benjamin’s Abilities (pp. 31-52). To further support scholarly work on the connection between divine violence, pure mediality, and language, see Giorgio Agamben (State of Exception), whose work Weber engages with at length in the chapter ‘Violence and Gesture’: In his 1916 essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, Benjamin defines the purity of language as consisting in its ability to communicate nothing other than ‘communicability pure and simple’, which Agamben then applies to pure violence as well: ‘Just as, in his essay on language, language is pure when it is not an instrument serving the end of communication but rather communicates itself immediately, i.e. communicates communicability [Mittelbarkeit] pure and simple; so, too, violence is pure when it does not find itself in relation of means to end but rather maintains itself in relation to its very mediality.’ (Benjamin’s Abilities, p. 197)

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Fenves and Hamacher’s work.22 Messianic or divine violence, in Benjamin, is the only temporal condition capable of halting mythic and historical violence, and is strictly related to fallen, ‘lapsarian’ experiences of art and nature. A Benjaminian approach to images of nature in Malick films not only reveals the indifference of glorious life and its otherness to bourgeois good and evil, their cinematic presentation allows a reflective, temporal space to open up between the images of a world past and their contingency in the present of indifferent life. The argument here is that the space of pure mediality opened up by aesthetic, particularly cinematic, experiences of nature opens up the possibility of a (hyperbolic) recapitulation of time in receptivity.23 The last three shots of The Thin Red Line are violent images of human and non-human nature just living, as if the events of World War II never happened or belonged to another planet. We see Melanesian people peacefully canoeing in a river, a couple of lorikeets grooming and a coconut seed sprout on the beach. The images follow a sequence in which the remainder of Charlie Company leaves the shores of Guadalcanal and the soldiers return to what is left of their ruined lives. The cinematic and highly artificial interpolation of images of nature violently communicates a sort of nightmarish continuation of glorious and shining life despite the evils of war. What audiences witness is, indeed, ‘a dangerously immortal world, a world complete without me’ to use Stanley Cavell’s words (The World Viewed, p. 160). Using Benjamin’s words, however, these film images present themselves as means without ends that cut through the mythical illusion of immediacy with the world of nature and give back an even wider distance between the subject-object position, the viewer, and the viewed world of modern aesthetics.24 In the wider subject-object position opened up by film experiences, Benjamin discovers a concrete temporal space for ‘play’ through films.25 Here, it is important to go back to the problem of the ‘gressive’ character of time. Fenves specifically links the gressive character of time to a mathematical function, precisely Karl Weierstrass’ ‘pathological function’ (‘Renewed 22 See Fenves’ Arresting Language (pp. 249-268) and Werner Hamacher ‘Afformative Strike’ cited in Ross. What Ross sanctions as an ‘amorphous conception of language’ (p. 96) in Fenves and Hamacher’s work on Benjamin’s conception of divine violence is here used for a non-religious and historical illumination of modern aesthetics, and for an equally non-religious and historical illumination of Malick’s distinctive camera work. 23 This possibility is further explored through Benjamin’s concept of history. See Chapter 4. 24 As seen in the analysis of Badlands’ stereopticon and in Days of Heaven’s projection of Chaplin’s The Immigrant, this cutting through the illusory magic of reality is in the very nature of second technology. 25 See ‘The Work of Art’, p. 127.

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Question’, pp. 522-524, The Messianic Reduction, pp. 106-112), a curve which is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere (or a fractal in contemporary mathematical terminology) and links this pathological function of time to the poetic ‘turn of time’ [Wende der Zeit] in Hölderlin’s ‘Two Poems’.26 Fenves’ groundbreaking study of Benjamin’s turning of time provides the material ground to articulate what Benjamin calls a ‘widest’ space for play27 in films, a very practical ‘sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of subject and object’ (‘On the Program’, p. 104).28 Turn of time provides the possibility of an abbreviated sphere of total neutrality, that ‘unity of experience’ to which ‘knowledge as teaching can be immediately related’ [original emphasis] (‘On the Program’, p. 109). Benjamin’s poetizing assumes the relevance of a methodological approach to aesthetic experiences of time in films beyond subjective and rational intentionality. Turn of time is not the result of a prelapsarian immersion and absorption in the world of nature, but quite the opposite: the result of witnessing the (violent) historical value of poetic and linguistic work, camera work included.29 26 Fenves writes: Among the many diff icult aspects of youthful Benjamin’s inquiry into Hölderlin’s late poetry none is perhaps as difficult as the concept he proposes for the purpose of capturing the decisive characteristic of this ‘turning’: he calls it ‘zeitliche Plastik,’ which will here be translated as ‘temporal plastics’ but which may be more accurately rendered by a phrase such as ‘time-sculpting’. In any case, for Benjamin, this is the structural intention of the phrase ‘Wende der Zeit’ in the context of the ‘poetized’ generated from the poem—it moves toward a time that is ‘plastic’ in a double sense: it can be molded, and it exhibits a higher dimensionality than the point, line, or surface. ‘Turn of time’ can then be interpreted as the criterion through which specifically ‘historical time’ can be distinguished from ‘mechanical time’ and its vitalistic counterparts. What distinguishes historical time from mechanicalvitalistic time is that the latter has only periodic ‘turns’, which is precisely not a ‘turn of time’ but only a turn in the course of time. (‘Renewed Question’, p. 522) For a detailed philosophical interpretation of Benjamin’s ‘Two Poems’, see also Fenves’ ‘Substance Poem Versus Function Poem’ in The Messianic Reduction (pp. 18-43). 27 ‘This space for play is widest in film’ (Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 127). 28 In the early essay ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Benjamin lays the foundation of a philosophical project that will resonate throughout his non-linear and non-systematic work; that is, the overcoming of the Kantian divide between the perception of the empirical world and the apperception of the transcendental (or unknowable) world through what he terms a ‘continuum of experience’ (p. 105) in which ‘another relation between thesis and antithesis is possible besides synthesis’ (p. 106). 29 On the relation between camera work and linguistic mediation, see Quendler who compares the work of the camera eye to figural language: The work of the camera eye, like the work of any verbal or nonverbal metaphor, is to bridge gaps or open up and accommodate spaces that seem foreign, uncanny or cognitively impenetrable to us. We can describe the work of metaphors, figures and tropes or any given conceptual configuration as creating new mental spaces that blend elements of familiar mental frames. (p. 395)

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Going back to Malick’s camera work in the The New World and the claim that it articulates a vision beyond both romantic and nihilistic visions of the world, my argument is that Malick’s camera work points to the order of time as a cinematic answer to Rebecca’s questionings, seen at the beginning and throughout the film.30 Importantly, the image that follows Rebecca’s affirmation in voice-over (‘Mother, now I know where you live’) is not one of ‘nature coalescing into history’ (Macdonald, p. 99), but is a quick tracking shot following Rebecca’s son for a moment and ending on a sundial in the garden. While the sundial measures the mechanical cyclic existence of nature and the progression of events in history in a chronological continuum of twenty-four-hours-a-day, it is the viewing of the film itself that opens up and momentarily interrupts that cycle, offering a hyperbolic now of visibility to its viewers. Here, another tempo intervenes, which is not tethered to characters and narrative action, but is offered to viewers belonging to another time: 13th of April, 1616. Dear son, I write this so that someday in the future you might understand a circumstance which shall be but a far memory to you. Your dear mother, Rebecca, fell ill in our outward passage at Gravesend. She gently reminded me that all must die. ‘Tis enough, she said, that you our child, should live.

Significantly, the voice-over starts on images of joyful and ordinary play between Rebecca and her son in the estate’s garden and continues over the extraordinary sequence of Rebecca’s death-bed. The non-chronological order of events that follow suggests the closing sequence of The New World is representative of another time and another seeing enabled by Malick’s camera work. After Rebecca and Smith’s leave-taking dialogue and gestures in the estate’s gardens, we see Smith going back to his life on a path between two statues.31 The following image is of Rebecca on a tree, shot from below, shown 30 Rebecca repeatedly invokes the ‘spirit’ and ‘mother of all things’. As discussed in Chapter 3, this questioning and invocations are reiterated in Voyage of Time, with the exact same invocation ‘Mother’. 31 Captain John Smith’s narrative in The New World points to his imprisonment in a dream versus reality antithesis and opposition, where ‘truth’ belongs to another world—a world that must be chased by following (or looking for) utopian futures and dreams of new lands. When Captain John Smith falls in love with Pocahontas in the Powhatan village immersed in lush forest, he says, somewhat idealistically with regard to the ‘naturals’, that ‘They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy,

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contemplating something from a branch. Rather than suggesting elevation to a superior and mythical state above history, in the following sequence Rebecca returns to her material and historical conditions of existence. Rebecca goes back to Rolfe and says: ‘Shall we not go home?’ The peculiarly English construction of the sentence, with that important ‘not’, delivered with a perfectly English accent,32 is significant. It is reasonable to speculate that this ‘deliberate unreality’ (Martin, ‘Approaching the New World’, p. 241) is an important interpretive key in The New World. The retelling of Pocahontas’ story, in Malick, stands for a non-mythical, linguistic and poetic relation to nature and history. Malick’s vision of the Pocahontas story and nature in The New World does not try to transcend the violence of history and language; rather, it accepts the inevitability of historical mediation and opens it up to a non-conciliatory and unenclosed pure mediality. In this reading, the Pocahontas legend becomes a ‘mean without ends’, without personal, national or political ‘ends’. The poetizing, and consequent turn of time, would be that powerful experience of singularity (and suspension of the ‘natural attitude’ as Husserl would call it)33 that comes and happens in a flash, but without intentions, when experiencing, witnessing, and recognising the historical value of a creative act or artifact, such as Malick’s The Thin Red Line and The New World. This way, a possible ‘now’ and new turn of slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real—what I thought a dream.’ When he returns to the fort, the mise-en-scène emphasises the visual contrast between the idealised life of the Powhatans and the realities of the colonial settlement and British culture, and early James Town is shown as a filthy, horrible expression of a parasitic civilisation. In the fort, Smith’s voice-over says, ‘It was a dream, now I am awake.’ The last element of his journey occurs at the very end of the film in England, when he meets with Pocahontas, now Rebecca Rolfe, in the perfectly domesticated and assimilated nature of European gardens. Here, Smith says, ‘I thought it was a dream what we knew in the forest. It’s the only truth.’ Smith’s trajectory is closed and circular and does not escape the dream versus reality dichotomy. As the f ilm clearly shows, Smith comes to the new world metaphorically imprisoned in binary thinking and ends his ‘progressive’ journey of discovery, not finding the passage to the new indies, but only rocks. 32 Indeed, as Martin notes, ‘Pocahontas’ rapid assimilation of the English language is a deliberate unreality which many initial viewers and reviewers of the film found it hard to get past’ (‘Approaching The New World’, p. 214). 33 As explained in the introduction, contrary to Husserl, a Benjaminian epoché requires the ‘arresting’ of the perceiving and thinking subject, the suspension of intentionality and the recognition of a constellation of meaning, where ‘thinking suddenly halts [einhalt] in a constellation saturated with tensions, it imparts to this constellation a shock through which it crystallizes as a monad [or new turn of time].’ (Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ cited in The Messianic Reduction, p. 243). For Benjamin’s relation (and distance) to Husserl’s thought, see Fenves’ The Messianic Reduction (pp. 44-78).

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time is offered to the film’s viewers in receptivity, as a Blue Flower in the land of technology.

Conclusion: Time-Based Phenomenology This chapter further substantiates the validity of a Benjaminian phenomenology of time as an effective methodology to understand Malick’s complex treatment of nature-culture relations in The Thin Red Line and The New World. In particular, the application of Benjamin’s ideas derived from his essays ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘Two Poems’ reveal new interpretive meanings away from existing Heideggerian readings of The Thin Red Line, and Romantic and Nietzschean visions of The New World. Both films present marked, nature-culture dichotomous views in the form of mythic visions of indigenous societies. These films consistently critique the naïve and nostalgic vision of human-nature relations as displaying some kind of mythical oneness with the world of nature, and point to the inherent violence upon which such a view is based: a naïve and idealistic vision of human history and nature. In both films camera work disrupts the conventions of narrative continuity and articulates a novel ecocinematic stance. The analysis of Private Witt reveals his presence as expression of a precise idealistic view on nature and history that obfuscates and silences alternative visions beyond dry nihilism in contemporary culture. This alternative vision appears through the analysis of the mute, figural gestures of Corporal Fife. In a figural, non-mythical, and non-heroic approach to narrative, characters, and storytelling in films, Fife’s gestures can be seen as expression of a neutral, non-subjective vision of the violent events of nature and culture, good and evil in The Thin Red Line. The mute and discrete witnessing of Private Fife functions as expression of Malick’s discrete and mute witnessing of camera viewing, the result of an inherent and unavoidable distance from nature that cannot be overcome in linguistic, aesthetic approaches to art and nature. Rather than advocating oneness and absorption in nature, then, Corporal Fife’s gestures are exemplary of a figural stance in the analysis of nature-culture interactions through films. Benjamin’s turn of time helps articulate a vision of nature-culture relations that does not revert to a transcendental or prelapsarian overcoming of the inevitable distance between films and spectators in film analysis. This temporal reduction does not reside in subjective intentionality, but is a function of time itself: a folding and turning of time that is the act of looking and recognising the historical value of a creative act and/or technological

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artifact. In this view, Corporal Fife’s looking allows the emergence and articulation of a poetic seeing of both love and violence in The Thin Red Line as part of the same mechanical and violent order of nature. While all other characters in the film embody a set of philosophical views on the violent facts of war, Corporal Fife’s mute terror allows the emergence of a peculiarly distressed and poetic witnessing. It is, precisely, in the act of looking and recognising this alternative seeing of both love and violence that a novel and silent philosophical stance can emerge through cinema. This silent stance takes into account the inherently vulnerable, unreliable, and flawed vision of particular subjectivities. Building on the insights derived from a non-mythical, figural approach to characters and narrative drive, The Thin Red Line offers a non-dichotomous view on nature and culture, good and evil. The film reframes both good and evil as mechanical and violent possibilities of nature in the film. In this, Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ provides a novel interpretive framework to articulate the historical value of the film. As in Badlands and Days of Heaven, narrative development does not find closure in The Thin Red Line. The film’s final three shots reiterate the ineluctable cyclical and mechanical unfolding of life. As argued, the very cinematic viewing of these images opens up the supposed mythical oneness of the human and non-human nature there depicted to its otherness. The cinematic relation to these images destroys the false sense of magic and unmediated unity with nature and reveals nature as ‘pure means’, as distinct spectacle from the looking, a nature looking back at us. This ability is predicated upon a turning of time that opens the tragic and violent circle of a mythical vision of life to a possible now of visibility and ‘nameability’ that is facilitated in aesthetic, fallen, and lapsarian experiences such as films. This focus on mediation and distance from mythical images of nature in films is particularly evident in the analysis of The New World. As in The Thin Red Line, The New World subverts mythical views of nature-culture relations. Malick’s retelling of Pocahontas’ story between history and legend can be seen as removed from the vexed interests of personal and national myths and identities. Instead, The New World presents a clear concern with the cyclical, mechanical aspects of temporality in human relations to the world. Malick’s rewriting of the Pocahontas legend allegorises the non-linear and non-teleological complexities of a turn of time in aesthetic experiences. In this view, the analysis of the final sequence preceding Rebecca’s death points to the figural presence of the sundial in the estate’s gardens. The analysis of the significance of the sundial in the frame shifts critical attention from the mythical dimension of Pocahontas’ voice-overs, to the finite and temporal

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dimension of the film itself. More importantly, the figural presence of the sundial provides an enduring answer to Rebecca’s spiritual questioning beyond romanticism and nihilism. By shifting critical attention from Rebecca’s subjectivity and narrative to the film’s relation to time, the film opens the cyclical and chronological temporality of a 24-hour-day cycle, to a now of visibility and possible recognition in the present of viewers’ lives. Malick’s work interrupts mythic relations to storytelling in a direct address calling into question the historical moment of viewers’ viewing. In this, Benjamin’s work is crucial in understanding the relevance of a practical phenomenology of time in films. In the following chapter I detail what the messianic law of pure mediality entails in the context of Malick’s ecocinema approaches to questions of human evolutionary history.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). Benjamin, Walter, ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott, (2004), pp. 236-252. ——, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 4, 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Harry Zohn (2006), pp. 313-355. ——, ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, Vol. 4 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Harry Zohn (2006), pp. 389-400. ——, ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, Vol. 4 1938-1940, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Harry Zohn (2006), pp. 389-400. ——, ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott, (2004), pp. 100-111. ——, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009).

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——, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott (2006), pp. 101-133. ——, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2004), pp. 55-58. ——, ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Stanley Corngold (2004), pp. 18-36. Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, ‘One Big Soul’, in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI, 2004) pp. 124-185. Buck-Morss, Susan, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October, 62 (1992), pp. 3-41. Breitenbach, Angela, ‘Kant on Causal Knowledge: Causality, Mechanism and Reflective Judgment’, in Causation and Modern Philosophy, ed. by K. Allen and T. Stoneham (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 201-219. Butler, Judith ‘Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, eds. by Hent De Vries and Lawrence E. Sullican (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 201-219. Critchley, Simon, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. by Drucilla Corneal and Michel Rosenfeld (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 3-67. Donougho, Martin, ‘“Melt Earth to Sea”: The New World of Terrence Malick’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 25 (2011), 4, pp. 359-374. Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener, Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses (London: Routledge, 2015). Fenves, Peter, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). ——, ‘Renewed Question: Whether a Philosophy of History Is Possible’, MLN, 124 (2014), pp. 514-524. ——, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Friedberg, Anne, The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

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Grant, Iain Hamilton, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Bloomsbury Puplishing, 2006). Hamacher, Werner, ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 110-138. Kant, Immanuel, The Conflict of the Faculties, translated by Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Macdonald, Iain, ‘Nature and the Will to Power in The New World’, in The Thin Red Line, ed. by David Davies (London: Routledge, 2009) pp. 87-110. Malick, Terrence, The Thin Red Line, Phoenix Pictures, 1998. ——, The New World, New Line Cinema, 2005. Mules, Warwick, With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy (Bristol: Intellect, 2006). Martin, Adrian, ‘Approaching The New World’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 212-221. Nancy, Jean Luc, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). O’Regan, Cyril, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). Patton, Paul, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. by Paul Patton (Abingdon, UK: Psychology Press, 1993). Peebles, Stacey, ‘The Other World of War: Terrence Malick’s Adaptation of The Thin Red Line’, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. by Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 152-163. Quendler, Christian, ‘Rethinking the Camera Eye: Dispositif and Subjectivity’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9 (2011), 4, pp. 395-414. Ross, Alison, ‘The Distinction between Mythic and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” from the Perspective of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”’, New German Critique, 41, 1/121 (2014), pp. 93-120. Silverman, Kaja, ‘All Things Shining’, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. by David Kazanjian and David L. Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 323-342. Sinnerbrink, Robert, ‘A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line’, Film-Philosophy, 10 (2006), 3, pp. 26-37. ——, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011). Walden, Elisabeth, ‘Whereof One Cannot Speak: Terrence Malick’s The New World’ Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. by Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 197-210.

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Weber, Samuel, Benjamin’s Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Divine Violence’, in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (Belfast: Profile Publishing 2009), pp. 151-195.

3.

Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time Abstract Chapter 3, ‘Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time,’ extends the non-mechanistic and non-organicist vision of Malick’s cinematic looking to a precise material-theological approach to evolutionary narratives and discourses in present culture. Malick’s cinematic relation to progressive, evolutionary visions of life intervene in current debates about the role of secular natural theologies in evolutionary sciences. Both films engage with concepts of deep time in ways that foreground a cinematic articulation of meanings and the disruption of dualistic thinking and structural binaries. The f ilms’ relation to time deeply affects myth and the binary logic on which the scientif ic and religious discourses of the f ilms’ narratives elements are predicated. Keywords: structural dualism; evolutionary science; theology; material theology; now time. We may assert that the determining force of historical time cannot be fully grasped, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical process. (Benjamin, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, p. 55) […] there are no empirical grounds for distinguishing chance events in history from purposeful ones (Peter Harrison, ‘What is Historical about Natural History?’, p. 15)

The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey, released in 2011 and 2016 respectively, share a concern with evolutionary themes and narratives, with a similar approach to scientific data and current theories of the evolution of the universe and organic life on planet Earth. Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey

Blasi, G., The Work of Terrence Malick. Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989108_ch03

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is clearly a documentary film,1 while the evolution of life sequence in The Tree of Life is inscribed within the film’s bildung narrative and occupies a long central segment of the story. In both films Malick worked with the same creative team supervised by Dan Glass using mixed source material to create visually stunning imagery representing the latest scientific theories in astrophysics, evolutionary biology, paleontology, and other sciences. Both narratives make use of poetic and evocative voice-overs, effectively reconfiguring the nature-culture dichotomy so that nature (in the form of accurate filmic renditions of twenty-first century’s scientific theories of evolution) and culture (in the form of human spiritual and existential questionings) are juxtaposed in the unfolding narratives. These mature works are here analysed as powerful cinematic statements against anthropocentric, dualistic views of the nature/culture divide in modern culture. Through an appreciation of the films’ aesthetic elements, I argue that these films pose a series of complex ethical questions on the nature of good and evil and the nature of life itself. Both films articulate the inherent contradictions of an ingrained rational versus empirical relation to the world that is at the core of twenty-first century’s religious and scientific discourses.2 Rather than proposing a conceptual overcoming or reconciliation of the nature-culture opposition in modernity, this chapter looks at the ways in which Malick’s cinema alters the very structure of looking that is at the heart of modern subjectivity and modern ways of interpreting evolutionary narratives. Malick’s camera seeing (predicated, as it is, on the subject-object position of modern aesthetics) does not and cannot overcome the aesthetic regime of modernity, including its science-religion dichotomy, but instead makes use of them. It is in this methodological making ‘use’ (Benjamin, Arcade [N2,1], p. 460) of scientific and religious language, visions, and discourses that both films reveal the articulation of a cinematic philosophy of history and nature in contemporary culture. 1 There are two versions of Voyage of Time. A 45’ version narrated by Brad Pitt Voyage of Time: The I-Max Experience, released in I-Max theatres in 2016, and a longer version (90’) narrated by Cate Blanchett, presented at Venice Film Festival in 2016 and distributed in DVD and on-line by One Entertainment in 2017. 2 For a detailed analysis and reconfiguration of dichotomous views over science and religion in modernity, see Peter Harrison (The Fall of Man; ‘Science and Secularization’) who shows how the approaches to the study of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were directly informed by theological discussions about the Fall of Man. Scientific methods, Harrison’s work suggests, were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by ‘human sin’.

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While Malick’s work is certainly not mere illustration of scientific, religious or philosophical concepts, in line with other chapters in this book I claim that Benjamin’s thought helps articulate the novelty of an ecocinematic approach to nature-culture relations in Malick’s oeuvre. In particular, this chapter uses Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ to articulate a nonteleological, non-reconciliatory thinking in Malick’s cinematic rendition (and disruption) of natural history. As will be demonstrated, Malick’s cinematic language uses another temporal logic altogether, the logic of a ‘messianic’ conception of time that is enabled by a specific use of the apparatus of cinema and aesthetic, subject-object relations to the world in the present era of human technological possibilities. Malick’s use of the film medium enacts the concept of messianic time in the narratives. His work decentres the prominence of individual subjectivity as the locus of consciousness and coherence, and can be understood as a precise articulation of filmphilosophical meanings in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. From an ecocritical perspective, Malick’s use of the film medium opens new and unexplored possibilities of interpretation in which technological developments and human relations to the natural world enter a new, not antithetical relation in modern culture. This ecocritical stance facilitates a materialist-theological interpretation of religious and figural language in a post-anthropocentric age.

Replaying Life’s Tape? Competing Mythological Narratives in Malick’s The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time Peter Harrison argues that the twenty-first century’s version of the sciencereligion conflict is ‘based on competing mythological narratives’ (‘What was Historical about Natural History?’, p. 15).3 Harrison contends that a signif icant realignment of these narratives took place over time, with the initial incorporation of natural theology within the ranks of natural history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, to some degree, a persistence of elements of traditional natural history in modern evolutionary biology (especially in popular accounts of it) over the course of the 3 Harrison succinctly traces the historical arrangement of academic disciplines concerned with the study of the natural world in European early modern history: namely ‘natural theology’ over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘natural history’ before the nineteenth century; and the advent of evolutionary sciences over the course of the nineteenth century. See Harrison (‘What was Historical about Natural History’, p. 8).

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nineteenth century (pp. 8-16). Thus, for Harrison, the line demarcating the division between theology, history, and philosophy on the one hand and evolutionary biology on the other is—at least historically—very blurred. 4 He suggests the mythological aspect of evolutionary narratives in both religious and scientific discourses is Aristotelian in nature with the aim of grasping ‘universals’ and nature’s telos from the observation of the world. These, for Harrison, can be called ‘secular natural theologies that seek to derive meaning and purpose from the natural order’ ([emphasis added], p. 15) and seek to arrive at universal moral, political, and theological veritas.5 Among these secular natural theologies Harrison places the contemporary narratives of the ‘evolutionary epic’ and ‘big history’ (David Christian).6 While big history helps cast light on humans’ very marginal place in geological or deep time, the problem for Harrison lies in the mythical aspects of this new narrative, the fact that it has such a wide appeal precisely because it is presented as ‘a modern creation myth’ (Christian cited in Harrison, p. 15). Big history presents itself as a new metanarrative encompassing the history of the cosmos, evolutionary history and human history in a single story that ultimately imparts a bourgeois moral lesson; one that is in line with the dominant ideological, philosophical, and ethical conditions of early 4 This blurring of history, philosophy, theology and science can be still recognized in competing contemporary approaches to the justification of contingency and chance in evolutionary narratives and metaphors. If God’s invisible hand (John Calvin; Adam Smith cited in Harrison, p. 14) is out of the picture, then a number of other figures and metaphors emerge, like the very 80’s image of life’s tape (which, from a media archaeology perspective, certainly does not speak to twenty-first century’s digital natives). Rather than God’s hand, twenty-first century’s natural scientist use words like chance and contingency (see Gould cited in Sepkoski) directionality (see George R. McGhee Jr.), and even plain Aristotelian teleological explanations of f inal causes in nature (see Thomas Nagel; Michael Ruse). The entire issue 58 of Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences is relevant here. From an aesthetic perspective, it is interesting to observe that scientific discourses use time-bound metaphors, figures and explanations to give approximate answers to very human existential and philosophical questions. 5 For Aristotle there is a clear division between the world of truth, necessity and immutability that leads to universal causes (universals) in nature and the world of historical contingency and change that deals with particular events (particulars). See Harrison (‘What was Historical’, p. 8). 6 Big history (see David Christian et al.), is a big time-line that encompasses different phases of the planet’s geological time scale, all the way through the ‘great acceleration’ of the ‘anthropocene’ (Paul J. Crutzen). The ‘great acceleration’ designates the exponential increase in human population, gas emissions and indiscriminate consumption of natural resources starting from the 1950s onwards (see John Robert McNeill and Peter Engelke). See, also, Timothy Morton (Ecology Without Nature; ‘How I learned to stop worrying’) for a succinct rendition of the debate surrounding the ‘anthropocentrism’ of the term Anthropocene in the humanities.

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twenty-first century humans.7 When analysed as narratives, both The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey’s seem to fit Harrison’s unflattering definition of secular natural theologies. Both films clearly engage with scientific and religious language and seem to represent a state-of-the-art visual rendition of the big history epic. In line with the other chapters in this book, I show that Malick use of cinema cannot be analysed as ‘illustration’ of particular theological, philosophical, epic or scientific narratives. My preoccupation is showing how these cinematic evolutionary narratives subvert contemporary secular natural theologies and their underlying mythic structures. The evolution of life sequences in The Tree of Life and the documentary Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey represent the culmination of a life-long project in Malick’s career.8 In Voyage of Time the evolution of life narrative is central to the documentary’s aim, namely representing life’s journey, as the subtitle attests, from the dawn of time to the advent of organic and human life on planet Earth. In The Tree of Life, which tells the story of Jack (Sean Penn) coming to terms with the loss of his younger brother, the evolution of life sequence describes the movement of nature from the beginning of light in the universe to Jack O’Brien’s birth, when in voice-over he asks, ‘When did you first touch my heart?’ The sequence links the macro scale of the evolution of the entire universe to a particular life, the micro scale of Jack O’ Brien, and effectively inscribes human evolution within a grand scheme in which viewers can perhaps see that the ‘paltry few millennia’ of human civilisation on the planet are insignificant compared to the history of the universe (Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, p. 396). For this long central segment of the film Malick worked with Doug Trumbull, among others, using a variety of materials and approaches including, for the first time in Malick’s career, computer generated imagery.9 In line with the polarised reception of other recent Malick films, The Tree of Life has enthusiast admirers and angry detractors. Reviewers of 7 On a critical stance on big history, see Ian Hesketh who analyses the rhetorical and aesthetic strategies used by David Christian in his books, website and TED talk. 8 As it happens, the projects had a long gestation and underwent several transformations. It is speculated that Malick started working on some of the images used in The Tree of Life’s evolution of life sequence and on Voyage of Time in the 1980s while working on a project on the history of the universe titled Q (see Hintermann and Villa, p. 296). 9 The evolution of life sequence in The Tree of Life displays a mix of sourced and original photographic and f ilmed material from NASA and the European Space Agency, all the way through to what Dan Glass calls ‘garage band’ experimental attitudes, using smoke, liquids and paints alongside cutting edge filming technology, to visually convey the latest theories of

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Malick’s evolutionary narratives appear divided between an appreciation for the films’ overwhelming aesthetic power and little tolerance for its naïve moments, which border on Disney-style aesthetics.10 For example, The Tree of Life solicits different responses in its viewers, sometimes coexisting in a sort of schizophrenic blend of positive and negative judgments. Pfeifer epitomises this polarised response to the film’s imagery as a love-hate relationship between the twenty-first century’s ‘idealist’ and ‘analyst’ viewer: where the idealist viewer is carried away by the film’s beauty, and the analyst viewer is laughing at the idealist’s naivety. He contends: So why does the analyst laugh? He laughs at the idealist, who has been swept away by the pathos of the film’s music and images […] The analyst is terribly afraid of naïveté. Like Voltaire and other detached, ironic thinkers in his legacy, the analyst despises everything that is candid. So if he can prove that the artist’s vision is really that of his characters, the work can no longer be blamed for bad taste or for exposing a naïve perspective of the world. For instance, it cannot be described as kitsch, astrophysics, biology and paleontology at the best possible resolution on film (Glass cited in Hintermann and Villa, p. 323). For the sequence, as Glass reports: We have had several consultants: Dr Volker Bromm [Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas] […] was key; also the astrophysicist Michael Benson, who helped source and contributed a lot of the imagery that was used to develop the shots. We had Dr Donna Cox who works out of the University of Illinois and her colleague Robert Patterson, who helped connect us with a lot of the complex scientific data models that we used in some of the early cosmological stuff. Then we had Lynn Margulis, who was one of the key advisers in early cellular development. In regards to the dinosaurs, we had a famous paleontologist, Jack Horner. (p. 323) The same approach can be seen in Voyage of Time, in which Malick worked with the same collaborators, supervised by Dan Glass, producing a visually stunning rendition of early twenty-first century’s scientific theories on the evolution of the universe and life on earth. 10 Pfeifer’s article focuses on the dinosaurs’ aesthetics and on some other kitsch elements (such as Mrs O’ Brien flying under a tree and resting in a glass coffin) that appear in fleeting moments of the film. Pfeifer’s discomfort with the Disney aesthetics of some of The Tree of Life’s images is founded on long-established, contemporary postmodern critiques of the Disney cultural project. For example, Patrick Murphy and Ariel Dorfman: Disney consistently attempts to reflect a sense of ‘virginal’ innocence, promoting the ‘magic’ of childhood often through characters’ friendship or ability to communicate with animals, while at the same time reflecting the cultural drive towards the conquest of nature, through promoting capitalist work ethic among dwarfs, princes, mice, servants and heavily anthropomorphized animals. (Murphy, p. 126) Indeed, the images noted above are reminiscent of popular and fantasised narratives, the narratives that belong to many humans ‘thrown’ into a childhood dominated by Disney films, Christianity and evolutionary Darwinism. For the concept of ‘throwness’, see Heidegger Being and Time, p. 135.

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or as too-much, since the too-muchness is part of the film itself, not the spectator’s impression of it. (n.p.)

All other scholarly interpretations seem to follow a similar polarisation between idealist and ‘analyst’11 ways of seeing the film, with some notable exceptions. Sinnerbrink reads the film via Bazin and argues that it operates as ‘reconciliation’ between naturalism and scientism, with Malick’s use of religious language as illustration of the relevance and currency of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s theology in contemporary culture (‘Cinematic Belief’, pp. 110-111). For Sinnerbrink, The Tree of Life restores faith in this world, ‘celebrating its beauty and its darkness, its history and its memory, in numinous images of gravity and grace’ (‘Cinematic Belief’, p. 111). On the other hand, Mules sees the entire film as a struggle to break free from the constraints of dominant narratives and maintains that the film evokes and transforms the cultural logic of film melodrama12 and its attending religious ethics and capitalist ideology (‘How Film can Carry Being’, pp. 142-145). Mules argues that The Tree of Life opens to a ‘faith in nothing […] the beyond of the non-cinematic real’ (Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, cited in Mules, pp. 140, 149). This ‘beyond’: cannot be seen through the will to power of the masculinized way of evolved human being, predicated as it is on discipline and patriarchy. Rather, it can only be seen through the way of grace carried by the feminine principle, as the other way that the film presents but in a blocked state. (p. 159)

Nevertheless, the cosmic13 dimension of the film complicates a clear-cut gender approach to the film’s narrative elements. After the long sequence of the evolution of matter in the universe and life on Earth, the film shows a poetic and, at times, surreal evocation of 11 Following Pfeifer’s reference to Voltaire in his article, the ‘analyst’ view is a rational, postenlightenment vision. 12 Mules argues that The Tree of Life’s narrative presents compelling resemblance to the narrative of Blossoms in the Dust (Mervyn LeRoy 1941). See Mules ‘How Film Can Carry Being’ (pp. 145-149). 13 Anthony Lane says Malick should know that ‘only one letter separates the cosmic from the comic’ (Vladimir Nabokov cited in Lane). Yet, he notes: The Tree of Life strikes me as a straightforward account of creation, Malick’s Genesis, ending in the Eden of Jack’s childhood; everything else in the f ilm dramatizes the loss of that prelapsarian grace and the rare, Proustian instants at which it is remembered afresh. (n.p.)

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what could be described as Jack’s coming to life from an unnamed beyond, followed by evocative images of Mr and Mrs O’Brien’s love story, and Mrs O’Brien’s pregnancy. Jack’s birth and his first steps into life compose an extraordinary sequence of pure cinematic force. As viewers, we are with Jack; we experience his passage from a prelapsarian, indefinite unity with the cosmos, to his first difficult steps into life. Jack learns to walk, read and write, and he learns that there are invisible boundaries in his garden that he shall not trespass, all punctuated by Mrs O’Brien playing with him, reading stories and nursery rhymes that will become the foundation of Jack’s world, including the story of God who lives in the sky. In this, Jack’s particular and historical childhood in 1950s Waco, Texas, is inscribed within a cosmic, rather than psychoanalytical development, transforming ‘Jack’s’ fragmented and tormented bildung into a metonym of human’s evolutionary journey. In this journey, the clarity of the nuns’ distinction between the way of Grace and the way of Nature in Mrs O’Brien initial voice-over 14 is immediately compromised in the f ilm by the ambiguity between the narration and images presented. The way of nature is associated with a shot of the sun running its course in the sky, and the way of grace is associated with a shot of sunflowers following the sun’s course, at slightly different paces, in a f ield. The visual association between the sun and the sunflowers presents grace and nature as irremediably linked, as if the movements of nature are somehow connected to the course of grace and vice versa. Similarly, the clear-cut distinction between the mother and father f igures at the dinner table in the sequence, as conceptual repetitions of the clear-cut dichotomy between nature and grace, is also complicated in the film. 14 In Mrs O’Brien’s initial voice-over, the way of Grace and the way of Nature of the film are posed in the following terms: The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, when love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you. Whatever comes. The voice-over accompanies images of an unnamed child, presumably Mrs O’Brien when she was ten or eleven years of age, looking and playing with farm animals and then falling asleep on her father’s shoulder. The film then cuts to Mrs O’Brien playing with her three children, well before the family receives the news that one of them has died, and then to the image of a delivery man who is about to give Mrs O’Brien the telegram with the terrible news.

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As viewers, we are compelled to think the way of grace is embodied by the mother’s feminine gestures and the way of nature is associated with the father’s masculine and violent gestures of patriarchy. Nevertheless, if the way of grace ‘accepts insults and injuries’ and the way of nature wants ‘to have its own way’, the rebellious gestures of the mother and stoic conservatism of the father throughout the film do not follow this division. In this, Mrs O’Brien (a supposed embodiment of the way of grace) is far from accepting ‘being slighted, forgotten, disliked’ and, indeed, would like to have it her way. Just as the division between the way of nature and the way of grace are subtly disrupted, so all other binary views over good and evil, masculine and feminine, time and space seem equally blurred and confused in subtle ways in the film. The film skillfully evades narrative progression on the one hand and focalisations through characters and subjectivities on the other. As viewers, we are given an impressionistic account of events and moments, the impression of following Jack’s flashback memories, for example, even if we are left unsure of when and where the events described have actually happened. Indeed, the film presents us with ‘an experience of disjunctive-chiasmic time (time that crosses over itself so that the past is experienced as the future and vice versa)’ (Mules, ‘How Film can Carry Being’, p. 153), as in the initial sequence when Mrs O’Brien receives the telegram with the devastating news of the death of her son. Jack’s voice-over narration eventually explains that one of the brothers died aged nineteen and the film eventually shows that the family moved from Waco, Texas, where most of Jack and his two brothers’ childhood takes place. However, in the initial scene considered here, Mrs O’Brien receives the telegram in a more modern house with glass walls. This is not the 1950s house of the boys’ childhood because set design displays 1960s furniture, but in the mise-en-scène there is nothing else to suggest the boys have grown older. In one fleeting shot, Mr O’Brien is seen listening to his youngest blond child, the one who will (have) die(d) in the story, playing the guitar in a bedroom. These temporal inconsistencies are repeated throughout the fragmented and folded narrative, suggesting that time and space are not intended as distinct categories in The Tree of Life. Malick’s cinematic relation to structural binaries undermines the very foundations of a persistent dualistic and teleological thinking that is ingrained in the films’ use of religious and scientific discourses. It follows that the feminine principle glimpsed in the film’s many women is not and cannot be seen as the feminine gaining the upper hand, as in a chessboard game, because from the game’s perspective, feminine or masculine supremacy are irrelevant, the game would still be the same. In this case, the same

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Nietzschean ‘will to power’ expresses itself in history 15 regardless of the alternation between polarities: masculine or feminine, material or spiritual, nature and grace, science and religion. My claim here is that The Tree of Life not only presents viewers with a non-dualistic perspective over human rational binaries, it offers a deeper dramatisation of a philosophical impasse in early twenty-first century’s culture—the impasse between an idealist and a nihilist view over the material, finite world. I contend that Malick’s cinema articulates an alternative vision of time and history that evades both dualistic and conciliatory views over nature and culture, feminine and masculine principles, time and space. Benjamin’s philosophy and vision of history offer insights for a precise interpretation of the way of grace as messianic time operating in the film.

Reconfiguring Modern Aesthetics in Evolutionary Narratives The Tree of Life opens with one of three shots of Thomas Wilfred’s light-sculpture ‘Lumia’ Opus 161 (1965-66). The mysterious light has been interpreted as an expression of a divine or theological presence in the film in a number of vitriolic reviews.16 The divine light appears at the beginning, middle and end of the story: it is the first shot of the film; it serves as transition shot from Mrs O’Brien’s grief to the ‘beginning of time and life’ sequence; and it is the very last image of the film. About the choice of recording Wilfred’s Clavilux installation, Nick Gonda (cited in Carlo Hintermann and Daniele Villa) has this to say: ‘Terry had always wanted to find something visual that would represent the mystery of the universe from its origins until its eventual end’ (p. 330). Regardless of the intended or perceived transcendental meaning of the divine light, what strikes here is Malick’s deliberate artistic choice of filming a work of art against the intentions of its creator. While there are a number of Clavilux installations playing in private collections and in modern art galleries around the world, Wilfred never wanted his Lumia works to be filmed: [Wilfred] felt that even projected at 24 fps the lumia’s continuity of motion would be destroyed if recorded as separate still images. He also believed that the intensity range of a lumia was too vast for any known process. (Graf and Scheunemann, Avant Gard, p. 187) 15 For a Nietzschean interpretation of history in Malick, see Macdonald, cited in previous chapter. 16 See Gregory Zinman.

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It is fair to ask why would Malick decide to ‘destroy’ what Wilfred and many of his contemporary viewers think of as a spiritual and transcendental experience of light. The mediated viewing of the Lumia light can be seen as a metonym of the film’s relation to myth and transcendence. The very cinematic relation to its content complicates straightforward mythic and religious interpretations of the film’s narratives. Thinking with Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay, the filming of the Clavilux would indeed alter Wilfred’s intended experience of transcendence and lose some of its original, mythic, and auratic magic. In this, the cinematic approach to the light-sculpture fundamentally alters the temporal structure of the object observed: we go from Wilfred’s ‘continuity of motion’, to Malick’s ‘piecemeal’ and interrupted vision—the piecemeal of 24 frames per second and the piecemeal of interspersed edits and inserts in different parts of the film. The distance between the filmed object and the observer would increase,17 and thereby shatter the sense of immediacy and continuity of motion of the original Lumia light experience. Malick’s cinematic relation to the film’s narratives reinforces the aesthetic distance between the viewer and the film. This is also evident in the documentary Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. While the I-Max version narrated by Brad Pitt presents high-resolution 4K digital imagery throughout, the longer version narrated by Cate Blanchett is interspersed with cell phone camera quality images, a digital translation of ‘grainy’ 16mm footage in a 70mm film. The raw footage interrupts the otherwise epic and seamless unfolding of ‘life’s journey’ on screen four times, with interspersed images of rather displeasing, twenty-first century’s human life on Earth.18 Further articulating the aesthetic approach to Malick’s films, it is important to go back to some of the most controversial scenes in both The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: the scenes of the dinosaurs. In both films Malick presents us with accurate digital simulations of the dinosaurs’ era.19 In The Tree of Life there is an ambiguous scene in which a dinosaur spares the life of another dinosaur. As Glass explains, citing Jack Horner’s consultancy in 17 See reference to the aura as ‘distance’ in Chapter 1. 18 These are images of poor, sick and old people in the USA; images of religious rituals and ceremonies belonging to different traditions (including footage of a traditional slaughter of water buffaloes in Asia); images of communities, dwellings and villages in Asia, Europe and Africa. 19 These simulations received severe criticism among cinephiles and critics. See Pfeifer mentioned above. See also Jason Solomons’ review of The Tree of Lifewhere he describes the dinosaurs’ aesthetics as ‘studenty and Discovery Channell-ish, a sort of lava lamp cinema’ and adds, ‘If you feel like laughing, maybe that’s OK, too’. (n.p.)

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the conceptualisation and design of the dinosaurs’ behaviours and visual effects, Malick wanted this scene to be very accurate: There is a plesiosaur on the beach, there is the parasaur which we also called ‘Junior’, the younger dinosaur you see in the woods, that we then see at the river; in the background at the river there are just some adult parasaurs. Then the predator that comes up and attacks but then shows mercy is called Dromiceiomimus, a kind of predecessor of birds. (Glass in Hintermann and Villa, p. 325)

Indeed, the dromiceiomimus showing mercy is an important aspect of Malick’s rendition of the evolution of life on Earth. The moment can be read as Malick’s critical stance on Darwin’s natural selection (The Origin of Species), as well as on Herbert Spencer’s theories to justify the ‘survival of the fittest’ model in political and economic theories (First Principles). This model still dominates the work ethic of the O’Briens in mid-twentieth century America and, as Mules’ analysis of the film suggests, has run its course in Jack’s present and personal crisis. More importantly, the dinosaur’s choice places the fall into consciousness and knowledge of good and evil well ‘before’ the advent of human beings in world history, thus complicating the human exceptionalism of religious and specifically Christian interpretations of the film: Human being is thus placed in evolutionary time after the coming of freedom. The film thus suspends the traditional mythical explanations of human existence in terms of a divinely decreed world entrusted to humans as superior free beings. (‘How Film Can Carry Being’, p. 154)

Nevertheless, despite all possible rational, philosophical and theoretical explanations of this important and significant scene, as viewers, it is difficult to completely forget the sense of aesthetic dissonance experienced when watching it for the first time. Contrary to the fluid and non-anthropomorhic20 camera work used in the rest of the film, the scene of the dinosaurs presents the very basic conventions on which classical Hollywood cinema and its humanist structure of looking are predicated. In the scene, the dromiceiomimus is seen sparing the parasaur’s life. The moment of conscious decision is conveyed through a high angle shot in which the dromiceiomimus is shown withholding 20 See Elsaesser and Haganer, p. 114 cited in Chapter 3.

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his immediate instinct to kill the injured animal, complete with the little dinosaur’s reaction of surprise and exchange of glances. The dinosaurs’ aesthetics and the cinematic portrayal of their alleged behaviours, millions of years ago, suggest a highly anthropomorphised vision of this moment anyway. As in the case of the Lumia light, whatever ‘truth’ this scene is supposed to represent (whether philosophical or scientific), the very cinematic, highly artificial relation to it will always return the viewer to a mediated and inherently anthropocentric vision of it. There is in fact a repetition of the dinosaur’s hesitation and choice later in the film, when Jack (Hunter McCracken) is tempted to release the jack that holds the car under which his father is working but refrains from doing it. It appears that Malick’s work is making at least two points in aesthetic terms. Firstly, it seems Malick’s philosophical take on human evolution cannot be interpreted according to progressive or regressive thinking, to a succession of events in a time-line, a before and after the fall into knowledge and consciousness of good and evil (be it human or otherwise). Secondly, it appears that the anthropocentric views over life can never be really transcended in human (even scientific and supposedly objective) relations to the world of nature. The aesthetic distance between subjects and objects at the base of the possibility of science (and, indeed, films and art), always returns humans to the temporal, mediated, and anthropomorphic nature of their knowledge. The ‘tree of life’ metaphor is one of the most pervasive f igures used to support many different narratives across human cultures, from the Upanishads, to the Cabbala, to the biblical temptation of knowledge and Darwin’s theory of evolution:21 One of the more beautiful aspects of this film for me is that it speaks equally to people with religious or spiritual beliefs, and those without those beliefs. There are symbols from many faiths worked into the film, and for those not looking in that direction, the exploration of nature and mankind works on its own. (Sarah Green cited in Hintermann and Villa, p. 302). 21 While it is outside the scope of this study to discuss any of these tree of life symbols and their meanings, from a philosophical point of view Malick’s approach seems outdated and contrary to the more fashionable ‘rhizomes’ of philosophical thought: ‘unlike the trees or their roots the rhizome connects any point to any other point’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousands Plateaus, p. 23). For those looking at Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Malick also appears to dismiss the more fashionable metaphor of the competitive ‘tangled bank’ (The Origin of Species, p. 520). For Darwin’s images and metaphors, see Carl Zimmer’s introductory text to evolutionary theory. For an archeological account of the symbolism of the tree of life across cultures, see Edwin Oliver James.

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Rather than voicing a subjective interpretation of the film (be it philosophical, religious or scientific)—which would be what the work of art solicits in their viewers anyway, depending on their experienced expertise, dominant narratives, upbringing and historicity—from an ecocinema perspective, it is far more productive to reflect on Malick’s choice to use a filmed light-sculpture as evocation of a theological presence in The Tree of Life. Similarly, it is important to reflect upon Malick’s choice to use digital smart phone images of contemporary humans in the otherwise sleek and seamless ‘National Geographic’ aesthetic of Voyage of Time. With Benjamin, it is possible to say these aesthetic, filming techniques and aesthetic ‘incursions’ and interruptions are meaningful. It is precisely the aesthetic, modern subject-object position that allows the expansion of the distance between viewers and film and the intensification of the temporal void that separates them. From a critical standpoint, it is precisely through the intensified distance between subject and object positions that the act of looking, hearing, and sensing the films are exposed, allowing a new temporal and non-religious ground of perception.

Figural Space beyond Idealism and Nihilism In The Tree of Life, there is a final after-life scene on a beach in which Mrs O’Brien eventually accepts the death of her son, and just like the father and Jack, she lets go of her state of mourning and grief and says, ‘I give him to you’. This ‘you’ is God in the film’s narrative, cited at the beginning of the film in his biblical talking to Job: ‘Where were you [Job] when I laid the earth’s foundations […] while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’ This ‘you’ is then subverted half way through the film by Mrs O’Brien’s voice-over, struggling to accept God’s will (like Job) and asking: ‘Lord, why? Where were you?’ This doubling of ‘you’ as God talking to a human (Job) and of a human (Mrs O’Brien) talking to God, suggests the film uses religious language to allegorise uncomfortable human relations to time and death in finitude and subjectivity. In Voyage of Time, Blanchett’s voice-over narration evokes a similar, anthropocentric desperation of living a life that is inevitably going to die, from the birth of galaxies to their death and Earth’s organic life in between. In her narration, Blanchett’s voice-over follows a Hegelian trajectory and vision of history, a spiritual movement from unity to distance to final reconciliation. The voice-over starts by saying: ‘Mother, you walked with me then. In the silence. Before there was a world. Before night or day. Alone in the stillness. When

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Nothing was’. At the end of the film, after a long central segment in which the birth of biological life on Earth is associated with death, restlessness and dissatisfaction,22 Blanchett’s voice-over evokes concepts of Platonic memory and says, ‘The shadows flee, the show. Time goes back to her source. Mother, I take your hand I dream no more. Joined with you. Leaf to branch, branch to tree. Love binds us together. What lives in you can’t die. Oh Life. Oh Mother’. In this movement from primordial spiritual unity, to separation and fall into duality, to reconciliation with one spiritual source, contemporary viewers’ response is polarized between idealist and nihilist responses. The idealist is with Blanchett’s voice-overs, but the nihilist laughs at the idealist’s naivety and looks away. In this reading I propose a third way which is neither idealist nor nihilist, but material and theological. The interruptions of present day human life on Earth, in Voyage of Time and in The Tree of Life, the doubling of events, the temporal inconsistencies, the use of accurate scientific simulations and spiritual voice-overs subvert the secular natural theologies of contemporary evolutionary narratives and open themselves to a clear vision of what Benjamin would call a materialist theology in twenty-first century’s culture.

Materialist Theology in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey One of the most interesting debates among scholars working in the environmental humanities is the debate over the need to reach a postanthropocentric age23 in which humans, if they are to survive the sixth mass extinction (Timothy Morton), must adjust to an order defined by technological processes outside of human control (Bruno Latour). Malick’s The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time are not to be reduced to simple illustrations of secular natural theologies, or as an illustration of a big time-line that encompasses different phases of the planet’s geological time scale, all the way through 22 When the sequence shows images of biological life on Earth the voice-over says: ‘Mother, born now I am. Life who are you? Life. Restless unsatisfied’ and later adds ‘Nature, who am I to you? You defy yourself only to give birth to yourself again.’ 23 See, for example, articulations of posthumanist theories of subjectivity and New Materialism (Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett) in environmental media theory (Jussy Parikka). For important critiques of Braidotti and Bennett founded on insights derived from the work of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, see Paul Rekret who argues that contemporary posthuman theories of materiality ‘leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought’ (n.p.).

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the ‘Anthropocene’24 (Paul J. Crutzen and Hanz Grünter Brauch), they articulate a set of material-theological meanings that are of great relevance in contemporary environmental humanities and discourses. Malick’s evolutionary narratives, as quintessential manifestations of the subject-object division of the modern world, contribute to a post-anthropocentric age in which humans can reframe their dysfunctional ways and exploitative relations with nature. In Thesis I of ‘On the Concept of History’, Benjamin suggests that historical materialism elides the workings of a thoroughly materialist theology in modern times. As in most of his writings, Benjamin recurs to figural language to convey the complexities and subtleties of his thought: There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called ‘historical materialism’, is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight. (p. 389)

The image epitomises Benjamin’s complex and uneasy position within the ranks of historical materialism. Michael Löwy’s insights into Benjamin’s thesis and philosophy of history explains this complexity by saying that the automaton of Thesis I points to the importance of reframing theology as a means to establish ‘the explosive, messianic revolutionary force of historical materialism—reduced to a wretched automaton by its epigones’ (p. 28). Löwy refers to the epigones of material philosophies operating within the ruins of a teleological Marxism derived from Hegel’s ideals and philosophy, and urges us to rethink the role of theology in Benjamin’s thought: Theology for Benjamin is not a goal in itself; its aim is not the ineffable contemplation of eternal verities, nor, even less, reflection on the nature 24 See Timothy Morton for a succinct rendition of the debate surrounding the term Anthropocene in the humanities.

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of the divine Being, as might be thought from its etymology: it is in the service of the struggle of the oppressed. (pp. 28-29)

Benjamin’s theological materialism at the service of the struggle of the oppressed exhorts us to see history from the standpoint of the struggle itself. This standpoint, as Benjamin’s image of the chessboard makes very clear, considers the opposition between polarities in history as one game, regardless of what party, white or black, wins the single match. A similar non-dualistic vision on Benjamin’s philosophy of history is put forward in Sami Khatib’s work (‘The Messianic without Messianism’, ‘Teleologie ohne Endzweck’, ‘The Subject of Historical Cognition’), in which he suggests that a purely Marxist interpretation of class struggle can be misleading in Benjamin: The notion of class struggle can be misleading. It does not refer to a trial of strength to decide the question ‘Who shall win, who be defeated?’, or to a struggle the outcome of which is good for the victor and bad for the vanquished. […] History knows nothing of the spurious infinity contained in the image of the two wrestlers locked in eternal combat. (Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ [Khatib’s translation] in Khatib, ‘The Subject of Historical Cognition’ p. 25)

Khatib identifies the moment of struggle as ‘the point of decision when an historical happening separates itself into different paths’ (p. 24). The temporality of this crisis and struggle is central here because, in Benjamin, it is thoroughly non-anthropocentric and it happens without subjective intentions. As Khatib puts it, the struggle ‘is itself a temporal medium in which the struggling positions and subjects are formed’ (p. 25). In other words, time is the site of this struggle and its condition of possibility. Nevertheless, time is not homogeneous and its shape25 is not a line, nor a succession of points, meaning that: Against the history written by the victors, the celebration of the fait accompli, the historical one-way streets and the ‘inevitability’ of the 25 As posited at the beginning of this study, the ‘shape’ of the turn of time is key here. The neutrality of the whole of time—from which the hyperbolic ‘now’, so to speak, ‘turns’ and folds—is paramount; the whole remains inaccessible, unknowable and unencumbered by intentionality. As Fenves’ study makes clear, this inaccessibility of the course of time is a result of its shape and interpolation: the ‘turn of time’ can thus appear only under the condition that the natural mythological attitude be ‘turned off’. The absence of lines tangent to the curve under consideration means that that there is no law whereby it can be ‘touched’. In other words, the course of time, so

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victory of those who triumphed, we must come back to this essential proposition: each present opens onto a multiplicity of possible futures. (Löwy, Fire Alarm, p. 115)

Here my argument is that the discontinuous temporal logic used in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey is an intrinsic aspect of the films’ material-theological significances. For example, going back to the visual parallel between the dinosaur’s and Jack’s moment of conscious decision not to kill, this reading claims that in a non-teleological and, specifically, messianic interpretation of the temporal logic of the film, not only does each moment open to ‘a multitude of possible futures’ (Löwy, p. 115), each moment potentially recapitulates the whole of time in a fractal-like abbreviation and opens to a new hyperbolic beginning and turning of time26 in a flashing ‘now’ of possible recognition. In other words, with Benjamin, it is possible to say that Jack’s moment of recognisability has a claim on life’s evolutionary past and the ability to change it.27 Jack’s life unfolds in the years of the ‘great acceleration’28 and stands as a metonym of a nihilist-type humanity living in a post-industrial, global world. Indeed, it is difficult not to see in Sean Penn’s Jack a figural continuation of Sean Penn’s Welsh. In The Tree of Life, an older Penn appears lost, wandering around the frame without direction,29 showing us the consequences of a construed, is inviolate […] And for the same reason, time is altogether different from the process of history. (The Messianic Reduction, p. 241) See Fenves (pp. 235-238) for the relevance of the concept of interpolation in mathematics and philology, their differences and similarities, and their applicability to a Benjaminian notion of non-synthesis between the shape of time and the catastrophic continuum of history. 26 Benjamin’s complex philosophical position not only vigorously opposes German Idealism it also complicates genealogical conceptions of history and time, including the Nietzschean conception of the ‘eternal return of the same’. Through the monadic and plastic character of time, time ‘recapitulates, without ever exactly repeating, all of time. The circular or cycloid character of the “eternal return of the same” is thus broken up—without time taking a telos in the process’ (Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, p. 243). 27 This ability can be understood in terms of a practical ‘counterfactual imagination’ in historical enquiry (Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft). This line of argument will be further developed in the analysis of Song to Song in the next chapter. 28 The ‘great acceleration’ designates the exponential increase in human population, gas emissions, and indiscriminate consumption of natural resources starting from the 1950s onwards (see John Robert McNeill and Peter Engelke). 29 It is interesting to note that Sean Penn, like Adrian Brody before him and many other Hollywood actors, is critical of Malick’s artistic choices and says: ‘A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly’ (Ben Child, n.p.).

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particular way of being: of ‘building islands to ourselves’30 in an increasingly alienated world. Rather than proposing a rather naïve, spiritual interconnectedness and reconciliation with premodern nature as possible solution to the age nihilism, Malick’s cinematic articulation of meanings opens thought to a non-subjective, temporal stance in ecocinema. This temporal, ‘messianic’ stance becomes especially important in light of a philosophy of nature that does not frame the human subject—neither its senses nor its mental faculties—as the measure of all experiences, particularly aesthetic experiences of art and nature. After the long sequence at the beach, in which Mrs O’Brien, Jack and all other characters of the film let go of their grief and accept the unavoidable mortality and finitude of subjectivity, the film’s very last shots repurpose some familiar images seen at the beginning: sunflowers in a field at the end of the day, the historical ‘way of grace’, which has followed the course of the sun and nature all the way through the end of a day cycle; then the elevator shown going up at the beginning of the film, now going down, no longer focalised through Jack, with images of an imposing building and sunlight filtering through the glass windows and reaching a tree, in the building; then Jack out of the building, immersed in the noise of the city, but relieved from the anguish and pain he showed throughout the film and with a faint smile appearing on his face. The last three shots are imposing skyscrapers again, a bridge, and the Lumia light. Camera work and Jack’s figural gestures and movements in the final sequence of the film operate as a movement of figuration that accepts finitude and death in subjectivity. In this view, while Penn’s character overcomes nihilism and finds a renewed relation to finitude on screen, his viewers are offered a temporal now of cinematic visibility, a now that not only can change the present but has a claim on the past.

Conclusion: Counterfactual Histories in Evolutionary Narratives The critical shift from space, narrative drive, and characters’ subjectivities to viewers’ relation to finitude and temporality in films illuminates Malick’s 30 In The Thin Red Line, Welsh’s final voice-over says: Everything’s a lie. Everything you hear and everything you see. So much to spew out. They just keep coming, one after the other. You’re in a box, a moving box. They want you dead or in their lie. Only one thing a man can do, find something that’s his make an island for himself. If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes and my life will be yours.

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The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey as important interventions in ecocinema approaches to evolutionary narratives. Malick’s evolutionary narratives allegorise a contemporary philosophical deadlock between an idealist and a nihilist view over the world of nature and articulate a vision beyond dualistic, antithetical positions on science and religion in human history. For example, science in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was entrusted with the idea of overcoming humans’ ‘original sin’: the ‘fall’ into flawed, historical, and relative cognition. Following Harrison, the advent of empirical research and the use of objective methodologies in the natural sciences can be reframed as modern man’s attempt to recuperate a lost, immutable, somehow ‘divine’ (i.e.: objective) knowledge. Malick’s use of biblical language to accompany a state-of-the-art visual rendition of twenty-first century’s scientific theories in astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and paleontology are effectively shown as part of the same historical discourses. However, camera work and editing choices complicate this univocal narrative in effective aesthetic terms. Similarly, all other binaries used in the narratives, such as nature and grace, feminine and masculine, spiritual and mechanistic visions of life are reconfigured beyond duality in Malick. Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ provides a coherent phenomenological and material-theological premise to articulate a vision of history that breaks free from both univocal and dichotomous views on nature-culture relations. In this, Benjamin’s ideas and complex philosophical position on a non-teleological conception of time and history offers a coherent and fruitful philosophical framework able to generate a material reading of these films’ marked theological language. While the anthropomorphic stance is difficult to eliminate in human approaches to art and nature, Malick’s The Tree of Life clearly points to the necessity of reframing the disproportionate importance of individual subjectivity and sense perception in contemporary culture. Malick’s approach to human and non-human evolution in the twenty-first century reveals a material and theological (rather than transcendental and spiritual) relation to nature, one that reconfigures the way of Grace as, precisely, the messianic principle that justifies a thoroughly material approach to theology in contemporary culture. Such approach becomes central to counter theological-religious readings and open up the way to ecological considerations in Malick’s To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song.

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Works Cited Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). ——, ‘On the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, Vol. 4 1938-1940, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Harry Zohn (2006), pp. 389-400. ——, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Edmund Jephcott (2006), pp. 101-133. ——, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2004), pp. 55-58. Christian, David, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Christian, David, Craig Benjamin and Cynthia Brown, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (Columbus: McGraw Hill Education, 2013). Critchley, Simon, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, (London: Verso, 2012). Crutzen, Paul J. and Hans, Günter Brauch, Paul J. Crutzen: A Pioneer on Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Change in the Anthropocene (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2016). Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2004). Dorfman, Ariel, The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener, Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses (London: Routledge, 2015). Fenves, Peter, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Graf, Alexander and Dietrich Scheunemann Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Harrison, Peter, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ——, ‘Science and Secularization’, Intellectual History Review, 27 (2017), 1, pp. 47-70. ——, ‘What Was Historical About Natural History? Contingency and Explanation in the Science of Living Things’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 58 (2016) pp. 8-16.

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Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time: a Translation of Sein Und Zeit, trans. by Joan Stambaugh New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). Hesketh, Ian, ‘The History of Big History’, History of the Present, 4 (2014), pp. 171-2002. Hintermann, Carlo and Daniele Villa, Terrence Malick. Rehearsing the Unexpected, eds. by Carlo Hintermann and Daniele Villa (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2015). James, Edwin Oliver, The Tree of Life: An Archaeological Study (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). Khatib, Sami, ‘The Messianic without Messianism. Walter Benjamin’s Materialist Theology’, Anthropology & Materialism, 1 (2013), pp. 2-15. ——, Teleologie Ohne Endzweck. Walter Benjamins Ent-Stellung Des Messianischen (Antwerpen: Tectum, 2013). ——, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Subject of Historical Cognition’, Annals of Scholarship, 21 (2015), pp. 23-42. Lane, Anthony, ‘Time Trip. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life’, in The New Yorker, no. May 30 2011, 2011, (accessed 30 June 2011) Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45 (2014), 1, pp. 1-18. Löwy, Michael, Fire Alarm (London: Verso, 2005). Macdonald, Iain, ‘Nature and the Will to Power in The New World’, in The Thin Red Line, ed. by David Davies (London: Routledge, 2009) pp. 87-110. Malick, Terrence, The Tree of Life, Icon Film, 2011. ——, Voyage of Time, Wild Bunch, 2016. Mules, Warwick, ‘How Film Can Carry Being: Film Melodrama and Terrence Malick’s the Tree of Life as a Post Religious Film’, Cinema: the Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 4 (2014), pp. 133-163. McGhee, George R. Jr., ‘Can Evolution Be Directional without Being Teleological?’ Studies in Hostory and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 58, (2016), pp. 93-99. McNeill, John Robert and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Morton ,Timothy Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universit Press, 2007). ——, ‘How I Learned to Stop Worryimg and Love the Term Anthropocene’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 30 (2014), pp. 1-8. Murphy, Patrick, ‘The Whole Wide World Was Scrubbed Clean’, in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, eds. by Elisabeth Bell and others (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).

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Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Pfeifer, Moritz, ‘Either and Or: On Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life’, Senses of Cinema, no. 60, 2011. (accessed 25 May 2013) Ruse, Michael, ‘Evolutionary Biology and the Question of Teleology’, Studies in History and Philosophy o Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 58 (2016), pp. 100-106. Sepkoski, David, ‘Replaying Life’s Tape: Simulations, Metaphors and Historicity in Stephen Jay Gould’s View of Life’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 58 (2016), pp. 73-81. Sinnerbrink, Robert, ‘Cinematic Belief: Bazinian Cinephilia and Malick’s The Tree of Life’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretica Humanities, 17 (2012), 4, pp. 95-117. Solomons, Jason, ‘The Tree of Life - Review’, The Observer, Sunday 10 July, 2011, (accessed 3 March 2012). Zimmer, Carl, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (Englewood: Roberts and Company Publishers, 2010). Zinman, Gregory, ‘Lumia’, The New Yorker, 2011, (Accessed 5 February 2015).

4. The Wastelands of Progressin To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song Abstract Chapter 4, ‘The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song’ foregrounds the relevance of Malick’s time-based ecocinema work in contemporary culture. It argues that Malick’s use of cinema deeply affects the underlying mythic structures of traditional religious thought and reveals a phenomenology of time in the present of our dysfunctional relations to aesthetics, art and nature. Images from latest twenty-first century’s space technology are disguised as early twentieth century’s cinema aesthetics in Song to Song. The chapter frames the reference within Malick consistent meditation on the role of technology in contemporary culture, and example of that necessary ‘interplay’ between nature and humanity that Benjamin clearly foreshadowed in the alienated world of second technologies. Keywords: teleology; technology; phenomenology; ecocinema; counterfactual history; freedom.

This chapter analyses To the Wonder (2012) Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017) as consistent meditations on the exhaustion of teleological notions of time in contemporary Western cultures. These films, released in rapid succession in the 2010s, present very similar stylistic and aesthetic features and are the only Malick films to date entirely shot in contemporary settings. While To the Wonder is partly shot in France, the other two are entirely filmed in the United States. All three films utilise experimental shooting and extraordinary editing techniques to tell their stories. They use unconventional editing and narrative structures to organise direct cinema style images of contemporary Oklahoma (To the Wonder), contemporary

Blasi, G., The Work of Terrence Malick. Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989108_ch04

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Los Angeles (Knight of Cups) and contemporary Austin (Song to Song). The resulting portrait is certainly not an homage to the beauty of the American dream and its ideals of freedom, progress, liberty and individual fulfillment, but a haunting rendition of an age in which human alienation, economic exploitation of natural resources, art and spirituality are seen coming full circle and reaching exhaustion. Malick’s twenty-first century’s settings expose the dysfunctional relation between humans and nature in the deeply alienated worlds they portray. Contrary to dominant religious and esoteric readings of Malick’s films of the 2010s,1 building on the insights of previous chapters and in an appreciation of the Benjaminian ecocinema framework developed, these films cannot be analysed as simple illustrations and endorsement of reactionary religious views, or as simple ‘critiques’ of the American capitalist ideology portrayed in their narrative and formal elements. These films open up an alternative vision of time able to move beyond historical nihilism and beyond romantic idealism and traditional religious thinking in contemporary culture. As will be argued, Malick’s films become the terrain on which viewers’ actions are called into question; they become the material ground on which a non-linear, non-teleological temporal dimension becomes visible, opening a new vista on the role of individual freedom and individual choice in a post-anthropocentric age at a time of global ecological crisis. In what follows, Malick’s films of the 2010s are approached as consistent aesthetic reflections on art, culture, and nature. To the Wonder narrates the love story of Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and Neil (Ben Affleck) from the early days of their romance in France to its consummation and exhaustion in Oklahoma. The film presents a parallel between the wasteland of Marina and Neil’s love and romance and the crisis of faith of Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), a Roman Catholic priest who struggles to ‘love’ his church and to minister ‘God’s word’ in a poor and desolated community in Bartlesville. Knight of Cups is the story of Rick, a Hollywood screenplay writer who has lost his way in life and finds himself wandering from one ‘love-experience’ to the next. The film displays a dreamlike portrayal of Rick’s life and his many encounters, his inner turmoil, and conflictive relationship with his family, particularly his father. A very similar story is Fay’s story (Rooney Mara), also an artist—a musician—in Song to Song. Shot back to back with Kinght of Cups in 2015 and set in Malick’s home-town Austin, Song to Song follows the tormented love stories and artistic lives of Fay, Cook (Michael 1

See the overview of the scholarly literature on Malick’s films in the Introduction.

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Fassbender), BV (Ryan Gosling) and Rhonda (Natalie Portman). The film presents a very similar critical stance on contemporary culture, looking at the economic exploitation of artists and musicians, dysfunctional human relations, and individual alienation. While scholarly literature of these later Malick films is limited at the time of writing, the little scholarship available consistently analyses these films as expression of a renewed religious and transcendental impetus in the 2010s, especially in To the Wonder and Knight of Cups. This renewed religious impetus finds its force in the transformation of erotic, carnal love into a higher, metaphysical realm deemed to persist, despite human transient vicissitudes. For example, Camacho argues that To the Wonder is a meditation on erotic love as a potential gateway to a higher love: Is there a form of love that persists despite the equivocity of erotic desire? Are we to consider the eclipse of erotic love the inevitable failure of timebound desire, or is it rather that we all too often fail to live in fidelity to the promise of love? Malick’s film provides us with a nuanced theological answer to this question, principally in its portrayal of Father Quintana […] In the person of the priest we are meant to see an alter Christus, and we are meant to ponder the extreme self-emptying of a love that embraces the broken and imperfect, even while the self is conscious of a painful distance from God. To the Wonder is not only a meditation upon erotic love in its many forms, but it is also a reflection upon the mystery of kenotic, i.e., self-emptying, love. In twining together love as both eros and kenosis, Malick suggests that the gift of desire must be elevated and perfected by a higher gift, one that mysteriously parallels the empty-fullness of erotic love itself. (pp. 232-233)

Following a Catholic view, Camacho suggests that erotic love should aspire to a higher dimension. Similarly, Urda argues that Malick’s vision of love in To the Wonder is not only Christian, but specifically Catholic and reads Marina and Neil’s love story as missing the sacrament of Roman Catholic marriage: It is one thing to claim that marriage is or should be a sacrament; it is quite another to try to understand what that might mean or look like, especially in a period convinced that love is primarily our emotional experience of it and in which traditional religious notions of love, vocation, and even being have attenuated almost to the point of nonexistence. In a literary or cinematic work, how do you approach an audience who no longer speaks the language of the sacred, much less the language of sacrament? […]

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Malick never goes so far as to affirm Catholic teaching about marriage and remarriage, but there is some hint that the missing component has to do not only with Neil’s earlier inability to commit wholly but also with the couple’s inability to enter into a sacramental marriage. Early in the film Marina has recounted to Fr. Quintana the story of her abandonment by her first husband and the fact that she cannot remarry in the Catholic Church according to the priests to whom she has spoken. We do not hear Fr. Quintana’s reply, but we can assume that Marina and Neil choose the Protestant ceremony for this reason, especially since they seem to attend Fr. Quintana’s masses, at least occasionally. (pp. 132, 139-140)

In addition to a direct transcendental approach to religious and theological meanings of the films (Camacho, Gregory Allen Robbins, Urda) a second strand in the reception of this later Malick presents a blend of phenomenological and metaphysical interpretive keys focusing on a sensual, bodily approach to film aesthetics. For example, Julie M. Hamilton analyses Malick’s To the Wonder as influenced by documentary filming techniques, def ining Malick’s style as ‘a particularly phenomenological approach’ because: Malick’s camera enters human experience documenting ‘unscripted’ happenings. His lens draws our eye to the ‘thisness’ or ‘thatness’, particularity, and specificity. Essentially he is allowing us to take in and absorb ‘the given’, the bearing witness to life: in both its tragedy and glory—and to do so with gratitude. The protagonists’ questions, doubts and joys become our own, making Malick’s characters universal paradigms of ourselves. (p. 3)

Here, Hamilton’s passage evokes concepts of intersubjectivity in phenomenological approaches to film experiences.2 Nevertheless, in line with other critical-religious interpretations (Camacho), Hamilton reads To the Wonder as both an ode to human sensual love and as an allegory of divine, transcendental love. Thus, Marina and Neil’s love story is both seen as glorious and tragic, ascending and descending, bearing witness to life. In acknowledging the relevance of a film-phenomenological approach to this later Malick work, in this chapter I explore an alternative film-phenomenology that does not take characters’ and/or viewers’ bodies as the locus of universal paradigms. On the contrary, I argue that Malick’s later films reveal a materialist theology 2 Inter-subjectivity in film analysis derives from Merleau-Ponty’s work in embodied phenomenology (see Stadler, Pulling Focus, p. 56).

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that critiques, precisely, a contradictory phenomenology of the ‘divine’ as expression of universal, transcendental love.

The End of Teleological Time in To the Wonder The love story between Marina and Neil in To the Wonder does not have a happy ending and is punctuated by several crises along the way. Marina and her daughter struggle to adjust to a new life in Oklahoma, and Marina will eventually betray Neil with the carpenter (Charles Baker) who forged a musical instrument for her, a dulcimer, which Marina places on the windowsill. Neil, on the other hand, betrays Marina with Jane (Rachel McAdams), a ranger who reads the Bible with whom Neil has a fleeting but intense relationship when Marina is forced to return to France for an expired visa. Upon Marina’s return to Oklahoma, the couple marries, but their love does not stand the erosions of time and eventually ends in divorce with Neil seeking comfort in Father Quintana’s troubled faith. Religious readings of the film unanimously interpret Father Quintana’s crisis as a theological response to Marina and Neil’s crisis. It is undeniable that the f ilm portrays Father Quintana’s crisis as a strong parallel and counterpoint to Neil’s and Marina’s love turmoil. In this, the film does indeed use the powerful language of early Christianity. For example, Urda refers to the allegorical significance of the enclosed medieval garden at Mont Saint-Michel Abbey3 and, following on the exploration of this strong medieval thread, 4 Hamilton notes that Marina’s musical motif is Wagner’s Percival: A tangential but fascinating symbolic component of the film is aligned with this piece of music. Parsifal is Marina’s theme and it recurs (like the 3 Hamilton notes: Marina and Neil have the quintessential romance in Paris, gallivanting from the Pantheon and the Pont-des-arts bridge, to the Jardin de Luxembourg and the medieval Cluny museum. In the Cluny, Marina’s shadow lingers above the ‘sight’ tapestry from the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry series [The Song of Songs], one of six concerning the f ive allegories of the senses. The unicorn sees itself in the mirror held by the lady, paralleling Marina’s own introspection. The final tapestry, mon seul desire (my sole desire), symbolizes love rightly ordering the senses and desires. (p. 8) 4 Urda notes: The lovers climb to the top where they find the abbey’s enclosed garden, in which they stand, and Malick evokes both ancient and medieval works in which an enclosed garden represents love and sexuality. To return to ‘The Song of Songs’, for example, we find just such a metaphor:

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memory of Mont Saint-Michel) as a leitmotif in the film amidst key points (i.e., during Marina’s affair). Wagner’s opera harkens back to the 12th century medieval romance Perceval, or the story of the Fisher King and the quest for the Holy Grail by Chrétien de Troyes. In his account, the Fisher King resides over barren land and has a sickly father in need of healing, only made possible by the grail. The concept of agrarian fertility and sterility in medieval culture was connected to the virtuosity of the ruler, as a king was ‘espoused’ to the land. Consider the possible loose parallels yet symbolic resonance to Neil’s occupation as a Toxicologist seeking to help the environmental health of the land and community of Bartlesville mirroring the fecundity and absence in his relationship with Marina. (p. 9)

Hamilton’s reference to Neil’s occupation as an environmental toxicologist in Oklahoma is important. In pursuing Hamilton’s exhortation to ‘consider the possible loose parallels’ with Neil’s occupation, there are unspoken interpretive possibilities of such a strong figural parallel between medieval and contemporary wastelands in Malick’s film. The connection between Neil and the sick land is not at all tangential, but central, opening the narrative to unexplored ecocritical interpretations. Unlike the high-tech, state-of-the-art, rich America portrayed in The Tree of Life, Malick’s To the Wonder shows us the other face of it. Neil is evidently one of the many employees of the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma, a state in which, at the time of filming, a quarter of the workforce is in the energy business, thanks to the high-intensity exploitation of natural resources allowed by hydraulic fracturing.5 In the film, Neil takes samples of water, dirt, and human hair to assess the presence of toxic waste in poor, densely populated areas in regional Oklahoma. Apart from Neil, the people Malick shows are real people, not extras. Some scenes evoke the sensation that Ben Affleck, rather than his character, is actually gaining a first-hand account of the gravity of the situation from the people he talks to. In this, as Hamilton notes, the film borders on documentary style. The same style is employed in ‘You are an enclosed garden, my sister, my bride, an enclosed garden, fountain sealed/ […] Let my lover come to his garden and eat its choice fruits.’ This idea of a sacred space shared only by the lovers, secret and chaste, is echoed by the film’s choice to have Marina and Neil in this garden utterly alone with each other. Though it is winter, they find a typical medieval image of love, a red rose growing in the midst of death. Their state is presented with great respect and the biblical and literary echoes in this scene suggest that we are meant to see this erotic love as having a sacred, mystical beauty to it. (p. 6) 5 Hydraulic fracturing exponentially increases the production rate of oil and gas in the mining industry but has significant geological and environmental consequences.

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Bardem’s visits to the old, poor, and sick people of Bartlesville. In fact, the gestures of Quintana and Neil in the film are strikingly similar, suggesting a deeper similarity despite their apparent differences. To be sure, Neil is a twenty-first century self-absorbed and distracted nihilist, who has ‘no faith’ as he confesses to Jane; whereas Father Quintana is a dedicated and committed priest who has invested his life to a higher purpose, pursuing his faith in God, the Church, and the study of biblical doctrines. Nevertheless, the film shows that Quintana and Neil are wandering the same streets of Oklahoma, talking to the same poor, sick American people who are rarely seen in Hollywood films. While Quintana struggles to minister God’s word, Neil struggles to defend the interests of the unnamed corporation he works for. Desolation and devastation are everywhere in To the Wonder and it is very difficult to concur with Urda’s reading and see in Quintana’s commitment to the Church’s doctrine and ritual any deeper sustenance or hope in the film.6 The images that accompany Quintana’s touching final prayer are ordinary images of twenty-first century exhaustion. Father Quintana himself seems exhausted, tired of repeating the same words over and over again, hiding from some of the people he is supposed to comfort,7 and struggling to give Neil meaningful guidance after his divorce from Marina. While Catholic readings interpret Marina and Neil’s infertility as a sign of their crisis, the film almost disturbingly draws closer attention to society’s push towards reproduction.8 Half way through the narrative there is a pivotal scene in which Marina and Neil visit a doctor. The viewer learns that Marina’s intrauterine contraceptive device is causing her some unspecified medical problem. The couple is asked the question if they are 6 For Urda: Fr Quintana is shown persisting through dryness and unrest precisely because of the commitment he has to the Church’s ‘doctrine and ritual’. In contrast to Neil and Marina who have not been able to commit fully, Fr. Quintana has, and he ultimately seems sustained by the grace that commitment gives him. The source of his dryness, Malick implies, is also the source of what sustains him, the spring of water that is deeper. It is not an accident that the prayers we hear as Fr. Quintana goes about his duties are known ones, memorized and perhaps repeated again and again, the kind of ritualistic act Brody mistakenly suggests that Malick deplores. Malick never averts our eyes from Fr. Quintana’s subjective experience, perhaps so close to our own, but the film simultaneously attests to a larger reality that is present, to paraphrase Quintana’s own words, whether he likes it or not, and whether he can feel it or not. The film’s accomplishment is that it allows us to sense the presence Fr. Quintana cannot himself feel. (p.15) 7 For example, Father Quintana recurrently hides from a drug addicted woman seeking to speak to him. 8 Images of high-density areas and new construction sites populate the figural economy of the film. This figural trope is also present in Song to Song.

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considering having children, and their relationship eventually ends after Marina’s ‘unmotivated’9 betrayal. Religious readings (Urda, Camacho, Julie M. Hamilton) tend to interpret Neil and Marina’s sterility as symbolic of their lack of commitment to religious dogma, and therefore as a possible explanation for their failure as a couple. However, the film’s images refuse to transfigure reality; they do not provide any spiritual dimension to worldly things. On the contrary, these images leave audiences with a series of very difficult ethical questions on the current indiscriminate reproduction rate of humans. In this, I contend that Malick’s work complicates religious closures and brings forth an uncomfortable reflective space in which we might be able to see and rethink the human contemporary push towards reproduction and growth as a manufactured, constructed desire within both religious and progressive socio-economic structures. In To the Wonder the viewer can see that love, spiritual yearnings and, indeed, the whole religious-economic nexus, are deeply entwined with the mechanical and cyclical progression of life on Earth. Significantly, Malick places the image of a broken clock between Quintana and Neil when they meet, further drawing viewers’ attention to the object through an apparent error of continuity in which the clock is purposefully different in the following shot.10 While the editing suggests flow and continuity of time and space in the scene, the substitution of the object confirms an oblique interpretive key to this troubled and desperate pair on screen. As in the case of the sundial in The New World, the image of the clock interrupts the seemingly seamless flow of images and points to film’s ability to expose time to its other, non-chronological, non-mechanical and messianic possibilities that break free from narrative, spiritual, and political notions of teleological progress. To the Wonder, like The Tree of Life before it (and, as we shall see, Knight of Cups and Song to Song after) presents a complex narrative structure in which the audience are left unsure of time-lines and causes and effects are intertwined, blurred, and deliberately confused. In the last quarter of the 9 Camacho interprets Marina’s betrayal as unmotivated. 10 In one frame the clock is bigger, with Arabic numbers and in the following shot the clock is smaller and with Roman numbers. We can see that the other objects displayed on the table are exactly the same, with the addition of a magnifying glass in the second shot. Mise-en-scène could not be more explicit in its visual meaning and I take this as Malick’s invitation to ‘look closer’ at the signif icance of the clock. As explicated in previous chapters, the image of the clock is an important trope in nature philosophy. See Fenves on Schelling’s use of this image, ‘The image of the clock […] can be generalized in relation to clock-like aspects of human beings, such as eating, drinking, having sex, and dying’ (‘Renewed Question’ p. 517). See also Benjamin in ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ cited in Chapter 2.

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film, the narrative splits in two directions: a time-line in which Marina has a child, and a time-line in which Marina appears to cross paths with Jane and leaves Bartlesville. On the one hand, these two time-lines well illustrate Marina’s voice-over narration explaining that there are two forces in her, one pulling her up towards the sky and another down towards the earth. On the other hand, these ‘two forces’ (call them eros and kenosis, nature and grace, love and violence) are not clear-cut and continue to mingle and cross, presenting a conception of time in which present, past, and future happenings and possibilities are simultaneous and both part of the same mechanical and historical progression of time. Contrary to symbolic, religious readings of the film, and resisting the temptation of reading Marina as embodiment of abstract femininity (as opposed to an equally abstract and binary notion of masculinity), I claim Malick’s films of the 2010s consistently articulate a rather sober, non-dichotomous relation to a contemporary (that is, nonmedieval and non-romantic) Blue Flower in the land of technology:11 a notion of time that opens the narrative to a non-teleological and non-recurrent logic beyond romantic idealism and postmodern nihilism. The film’s very final images of Marina and Mont Saint-Michel are emblematic of a possible renewed materialist theology in Western culture. If Quintana repeatedly uses the metaphor of a spiritual river that has dried out and of a spring that never dries, this materialist theology is, precisely, the spring that never dries: a Ursprung and notion of origin12 that can never be grasped; a beautiful, ‘historically illuminated’ (to paraphrase Benjamin) Blue Flower in the land of technology able to overcome the ‘superstitious belief in natural necessity’ and the superstitious belief in universal, recurrent paradigms. Such materialist theology, in Malick, does not try to transcend history and earthly things. While for the most part of the film Marina is seen yearning for the sky and some otherworldly, transcendental dimension of love or spirit, the last part of the film shows another possibility. Marina, or at least a big part of her, follows the push down towards Earth, with all its discomfort and pain. Malick ends the film following the earthly Marina, the one who lies on the ground, whose hands are covered in dirt. It is this other Marina, this human being closer to Earth, (whose gestures 11 See Chapter 2, in which I have referred to the Benjaminian take on medieval tropes of chivalry love and their Romantic, unfinished, declinations: No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept. The history of the dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this subject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural necessity by means of historical illumination. (‘Dream Kitsch’, p. 3) 12 See Weber’s reference to the Benjaminian conception of Origin, cited in Chapter 2.

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so closely echo Linda’s in Days of Heaven and Rebecca’s in The New World) that viewers are left with in the end. In the film’s final two images, Marina is seen illuminated by a shining light, suddenly turning to look behind her,13 next is Mont Saint-Michel immersed in a similar evening light. There is no spatial continuity between the two images; in To the Wonder, as in Malick’s Knight of Cups and Song to Song, the articulation of meaning is purely cinematographic and temporal.

The Pilgrim’s Progress in Knight of Cups Scholarly literature on Knight of Cups (2015) concurs with theological readings (Trevor Logan; Gail Hamner). Hamner enumerates the many religious and cultural references used in the film, which: compresses quest and emotional charge in its tarot-card title. Depicting a knight on horseback carrying a chalice, the card is said to indicate either a seeker whose emotions outweigh reason or a forceful current of change that is driven by passion. The card effectively encapsulates the film in thin outline, since Rick (Christian Bale) is clearly a restless soul drawn to large, existential questions, and yet distracted like a moth to a flame by every romantic or merely sexual opportunity that flits past him. The Tarot frame is, however, insufficient. The film weaves into its fabric the texts of at least three other quests, each decidedly ‘religious’: Plato’s Phaedrus, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and what seems to me to be the Gnostic ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ from the Acts of Thomas. By ‘religious’ I here refer to the fact that each of these texts concerns the relationship of humanity to divinity, or, more specifically, that each presents an allegory of the human soul’s true relationship to eternity and transcendence. (p. 251)

Hamner’s reading draws on Malick’s quotation of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrims’ Progress as a framing device to the narrative. Against a black screen at the beginning of Knight of Cups, the audience hears: The pilgrim’s progress from this world to that which is to come: delivered under the similitude of a dream wherein is discovered, the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey; and safe arrival at the desired country. 13 In this scene, there is even a dog, never seen before in the narrative, illuminated by the same light.

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The seventeenth century Christian allegory contextualises Rick’s journey as a specific spiritual quest and effectively explains the film’s stream-ofconsciousness style as ‘delivered under the similitude of a dream’. To further reinforce the religious and theological context of the dream and quest, Hamner notes that Malick quotes Plato’s Phaedrus,14 and a tale that Rick’s father used to tell Rick as a child: Remember the story I used to tell you when you were a boy […] about a young prince. A knight, sent by his father, the King of the East, West into Egypt […] to find a pearl. A pearl from the depths of the sea. But when the prince arrived, the people poured him a cup that took away his memory. He forgot he was the son of the king. Forgot about the pearl […] and fell into a deep sleep. The king didn’t forget his son. He continued to send word […] messengers […] guides. But the prince slept on.

The religious and theological origins of Rick’s father’s tale are the object of scholarly debate. For example, Hamner notes that: An email communication from Malick’s team to this volume’s editor, Christopher Barnett, indicated that the ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ story, which is embedded in Knight of Cups, does not derive from the Acts of Thomas but from Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi’s (d. 1191) ‘Tale of Western [or Occidental] Exile’. The latter text is a fusion of poetry and Qu’ranic verse and was the only of Suhrawardi’s short writings composed in classical Arabic (as opposed to Persian). It is a fascinating document, but it contains no references to a prince, a journey to Egypt, a search for a pearl, the falling asleep (and into slavery) and then finally remembering his princely task—all of which are elements of the ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ in the Acts of Thomas. Perhaps the film’s connection to Suhrawardi lies in the latter’s attempt to blend Platonic philosophy with Persian literature and mythology, an example of which is his attraction to Avicenna’s text, ‘Bird Recital’, which borrows directly from the Phaedrus. Perhaps the 14 In the course of the film Charles Laughton’s reading Plato’s Phaedrus is heard in voice-over: Once the soul was perfect and had wings and could soar into heaven where only creatures with wings can be. But the soul lost it wings and fell to earth, ere it took an earthly body. And now, while it lives in this body no outward sign of wings can be seen, yet the roots of its wings are still there and […] when we see a beautiful woman, or a man, the soul remembers the beauty it used to know in heaven and […] the wings begin to sprout and that makes the soul want to fly but it cannot yet, it is still too weak, so the man keeps staring up at the sky like a young bird that has lost all interest in the world.

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Acts of Thomas is the wrong source for the story of the pearl, but it is the clearest lead I have […] (p. 253)

Whether Malick draws on the Act of Thomas or Suhravardi has important interpretive repercussions in a theological framework, situating the reference in the Christian or in the Islamic tradition. Nevertheless, as Hamner’s précis clarifies, the Gnostic text presents the same Platonic influences. In this view, it is worth noticing the similarities between Rick’s father’s tale and Rumi’s poem Prince of Eternity. In Rumi’s poem, which borrows the figural pearl from Suhravardi’s same mystic sources,15 there is a prince who must wake up from his sleep and the pearl is found within the broken shells of the soul. In the poem it is said: ‘Say goodbye to your eating and sleeping. Go and seek the truth within. Throw away your petty rituals and become a prince of eternity’ (Jonathan Star, p. 160). The reference to Rumi’s poem seems confirmed in another voice-over statement that precedes the father’s tale in Malick’s film and is part of the same initial segment (when Rick’s voice is heard over images of the aurora borealis watched from space): ‘All those years living the life of someone I didn’t even know.’ Rumi’s poem states a similarly complex position on self and subjectivity: ‘Oh body what a joke!—the Prince I’m looking for is me yet I spend all my time thinking I am you!’ The reference to Rumi certainly resonates with possible, contemporary investigations of subjectivity, love, and emotions in Malick’s latest films, but simultaneously complicates body-based phenomenological interpretations of them, pulling critical and scholarly attention away from the self, the body, and a plethora of contemporary, self-centered religious and spiritual practices.16 Regardless of the exact inter-text used to relate the Father’s tale, what strikes is that the rich tapestry of allusions used in Malick’s intense first five 15 Rumi and Suhravardi are contemporary and both linked to the Persian, Sufi and Zoroastrian mystic tradition, heavily influenced by Plato’s texts. See Lewis D. Franklin and Stephen Schwartz. 16 There are a number of contemporary spiritual and esoteric practices shown in Rick’s wanderings on screen in Knight of Cups. Hamner enumerates them as part of the ‘religious’ in Malick’s film: From the level of signifying content, the pull and promise of the film are framed by the three quest narratives (Pilgrim’s Progress, Plato’s Phaedrus, and the fable of a prince sent to search for a pearl), and by an unconnected series of religious practices. The quest stories are each given in a ‘chunk’ of narration and then referenced intermittently by whispered injunctions to ‘wake up’, and ‘remember’, etc. The religious practices include a tarot card reading, a discussion of attention and distraction with a Zen teacher (billed as ‘Christopher’, and played by Peter Mathiessen), a visit to a Buddhist retreat of some kind, a woman practicing yoga, and a conversation about suffering and God’s guidance with a Catholic priest (billed as Fr. Zeitlinger, and played by Armin Mueller-Stahl). (p. 260)

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minutes of Knight of Cups finds a common philosophical denominator and source in Plato. The Christian (The Pilgrim’s Progress), Islamic (Suhravardi or Rumi) and pagan (the tarot cards of the film’s title and chapters) references are successful in providing a common framing device to the film. Significantly, the long introductory segment and set up ends with Rick awakened by an earthquake in Knight of Cups. The film shifts viewers’ attention from Plato, Rumi and the Pilgrim’s Progress back to the earth and to the ground. The earthquake tremors in Knight of Cups last for more than 30 seconds of screen time, and are conveyed in all their power and magnitude by Lubezki’s superb camera work, and unsettling jump-cuts and edits.17 During these 30 seconds of cinematic, earthly power Rick is thrown around the room and down onto the ground by the film’s cinematic force. After this moment, while some viewers would hope for a compelling narrative and counterargument to Plato, all they are left with is almost two hours of wonderful, dreamlike, visually stunning cinematic happenings with no progression and no closure. Logan proposes that Knight of Cups ‘displays a Kierkegaardian structure: a trifold movement—the experience of drowning in the world, the call to take flight from it, and the return to the world’ (n.p.). The sensation of being submerged by images of water is undeniable in watching Knight of Cups and the film does seem to continue exploring the imaging material18 of fluidity and change. In this, as Hamner’s analysis notes: Formally, water images saturate the aesthetic canvas of the film and yet do so by constantly changing. We are surrounded by water, we are drawn to it, dive into it, bathe in it, swim in it, scoop it up with our hands, run our fingers through it, contain it in aquaria and pools, and wonder at the way it outstrips our control in streams, rivers, and seas. Our bodies are mostly water, as our planet is more ocean than earth. It is true that as I thought of the spectrum of water in this film, the clichéd explanation 17 The aesthetics of the earthquake scene in Knight of Cups is comparable to the sudden, violent camera and editing movements that strike Mrs and Mr O’Brien at the beginning of The Tree of Life. In his analysis of the scenes in which Mr and Mrs O’Brien’s fall on their knees when they receive the news of the death of their son in The Tree of Life, Mules (‘Mise-En-Scène and the Figural’) argues that ‘This collapse with its momentary recovery […] is an effect of the “crack in being” triggered by the jump cuts and anamorphic stretching of the film image. The editing and camera movement cause the actor’s gesture of collapsing and rising, as if the film were itself ontologically bound to the event enacted.’ (pp. 9-10) 18 In the Introduction I have referred to Dubois’ notion of the imaging material [matière imageante] of water arguing that the image of the river and water, in Malick, operates as a figural time-image, or ‘matter of visual thinking’.

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of the Christian Trinity came to mind, the one that analogizes ‘God in three Persons’ to water in its three phases. We do not have to stretch that Christian metaphor over Malick’s film, however; we need only extract from it the logical connection of being and sacrality, just as Foucault and Tortel did for writing, and I have argued Malick does for cinematography. Water is the body of being itself, the matter that eludes representation because it takes the shape or flow of what is around it. It is the most visible and most mutable instauration of the film’s daimonologic, the lure and promise of eternity. (p. 272)

But does the film’s use of images of water leave the viewer with the lure and promise eternity? In the film there are many images suggesting that promise has run its course. Like To the Wonder, Knight of Cups presents a series of images of exhaustion and pollution, from the initial image of the river that has dried out, where Rick stands at the beginning of the film, to the images and voice-overs associated with Rick’s father (Brian Dennehi), the film visually and aurally suggests the ways of the past have run their course. For example, Rick’s father appears near a dry fountain in a desolated, industrial area; and Rick is seen swimming in murky waters. As a parallel to the rich Los Angeles of hotels and parties, Malick again contrasts the America of late capitalism with over-crowded beaches, sickness, traffic, and poverty. If the ocean and water are a symbol of regeneration and transcendence, the water in Knight of Cups has lost its transcendental power. As Logan convincingly argues, the film shows repetition rather than regeneration and transcendence. In the final images of the film, in a promising chapter titled after the tarot card ‘freedom’, Rick is seen following a blonde ethereal beauty (Isabel Lucas), a contemporary ‘Eve’ (Logan n.p.), swimming naked in a swimming pool. The woman says, ‘Wake up’ to Rick, and then he is seen starting to climb an arid mountain in the desert. The editing abruptly ends the ascent towards the sky and cuts to underwater images of Rick swimming in murky waters, when the camera eye emerges the shot cuts to the sky and Rick again, with dry hair, walking on a beach. It seems as if the viewer is taken back in time. Next is the image of Rick’s minimalistic house; the camera flows slowly towards the window but again there is no sense of liberation, a jump-cut takes the viewer back in the house with Rick’s voice-over saying ‘begin’. All the audience is left with in the next, last shots of the film, is the road that goes back to where Rick started his journey: the arid desert. In Knight of Cups the pilgrimage towards transcendence is precluded. The narrative does not progress, but folds back, over and over again. Like To the

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Wonder and Days of Heaven before it, Knight of Cups very clearly shows the prison of cyclical, mechanical time. It presents the collapse of progressive, teleological thinking, expressed in its refusal to give viewers the familiar framework of mythical storytelling. The Platonic framework used is not simply a meta-structure of meanings to apply to the film. The allegorical opens the narrative to historical, figural seeing and to the possibility of a new hyperbolic beginning of time disassociated from myth and teleological progression. This possibility is enacted in the film’s final line: ‘begin’. That imperative arrives after almost two hours of an extenuating, circular viewing experience19 over a rather ordinary image, a road leading to the desolated land seen at the beginning of the film. The new beginning is not towards some other distant and mythic time and country, some otherworldly state of transcendence, but is in the here and now of the viewers’ lives in a temporal ground of seeing and recognition. Malick’s work cannot be understood following the simple logic of linear causality based on past, present, and future happenings. Malick’s ‘style’ and innovative approach to film and narrative conventions subvert all classical rules of continuity and progression that are based, precisely, on mythical, heroic, and teleological thinking.

Twenty-First Century’s Histories and Technologies in Song to Song Song to Song continues the exploration of mixed fictional and non-fictional elements, with a number of contemporary singers/song writers and artists playing ‘themselves’ in the credits, including Patty Smith, Iggy Pop, and John Lydon, and Lykke Li playing BV’s former girlfriend, ‘Lykke’. As per its two close predecessors, Song to Song borders on direct cinema aesthetics with the addition of cutting-edge, experimental editing techniques that constantly fold the narrative backwards and forwards in a non-linear structure that, as Richard Brody notes, ‘makes almost all other movies look, by comparison, like the stodgiest vestiges of filmed theatre’ (n.p.). The resulting picture is an extraordinary work of pure cinematic power that I contend is not romantic and idealist (Brody) at all, but material and theological and able to disrupt, 19 As one commentator states, watching Knight of Cups is not a pleasurable experience: ‘Malick’s films are difficult in form, requiring a disciplined attention-span almost unheard of in today’s f ilm industry […] Malick’s f ilms are chockfull of allusions, it’s as if James Joyce, Dante, and Kierkegaard sat down and decided to make a f ilm together. The result is an inexhaustible treasure that rewards multiple viewings year after year.’ (Trevor Logan, n.p.)

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precisely, the underlying symbolic and transcendental temporal structures upon which romanticism and idealism are predicated. Unlike To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, Song to Song presents limited religious inter-texts and allusions, and its plot and characters’ developments are certainly more discernible in comparison. The main inter-textual allusion, to which I will return, is to Blake’s poem Divine Image in Patty Smith’s My Bleakean Years. The f ilm narrates the inner and outer turmoil of Fay (Rooney Mara) and her two lovers Cook (Michael Fassbender) and BV (Ryan Gosling) in a crude portrait of a decidedly nihilist world-view on the contemporary music scene: a rather flat world-view in which Fay has to decide whether to follow her heart and a ‘simpler life’ closer to Earth, or to continue down the rabbit hole of self-absorption and self-deceit. Luckily, the extraordinary folded editing structure of the f ilm complicates such a dichotomous and simplistic world-view and opens thought to a new vista on what Fay’s and all other characters’ ‘choice’ entails. The film’s structure is fractal-like: the entire story is contained in micro and macro replicas within it. Each character represents one or more aspects of the others and is seen making choices that will influence future and past events depicted in the film. For example, in the first ten minutes all characters are seen, all problems and their possibilities are seen, and the major plot line of primary characters (the love triangle between Fay, Cook, and BV) including its resolutions, problems and setbacks are presented. The entire f ilm is thematically concerned with the role of individual choices in the folded narratives. Fay chooses between BV, Cook, and Zoey (Bérénice Marlohe), BV chooses between Fay, Lykke, and Amanda (Cate Blanchett), Cook chooses to trap and ‘kill’ Rhonda in his world well before Rhonda’s suicide actually takes place, and Rhonda chooses between a luxurious life with Cook—in which she can provide for herself and her beloved mother (Holly Hunter)—or a ‘simpler’ life that will then become BV’s and Fay’s choice in the end. However, the extraordinary, non-linear, folded editing techniques of this film exceed the capacity to articulate its complex meanings in beginning, middle and ending narrative form. In a non-teleological perspective applied to the film’s aesthetics and narrative elements, the folded structure of the film’s editing is not only expression of a ‘Malickian’ style, but is deeply entwined with a specific notion of time that disrupts narrative continuity and directly calls into question viewers’ active choices in meaning-making. As further discussed in the reminder of this chapter, Malick’s groundbreaking editing style and interruption of narrative continuity is able to disrupt the vestiges of romantic and idealist

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conceptions of heroic narratives. In this, I claim that Malick’s Song to Song reveals the temporality of what Blake romantically terms the ‘divine’ image. This alternative temporality is not some abstract, metaphysical concept in Malick, but is given visibility through the film itself. The importance of the film and its material-theological significance lie in showing viewers that this alternative temporality grants them freedom in non-mythical, but historical terms.20 Malick’s Song to Song conf irms a self-ref lexive thread on second technologies that figural aesthetics and Benjamin’s notion of the shape of time help illuminate in thoroughly material-theological terms. The first image of the f ilm is a blade of light tearing the black screen, when Cook, as a modern Lucifer, opens a door revealing Fay and her reflection on a mirror inside a closet. Such image well encapsulates Cook’s ‘luciferian’ role in the narrative, which will become apparent two thirds into the film, in the segment that contains some early cinema-style images of Saturn and a brutal murder shot and edited in early-cinema style, black and white, grainy images. This folded segment will eventually end with the suicide of Cook’s wife Rhonda who, unlike Fay, is unable to escape Cook’s deceiving influence and chooses death instead. There is no mentioning of the silent f ilm shown in this segment in the credits of Song to Song. However, there is a credit to NASA. The images and sounds of Saturn and its rings shown at the beginning of the segment here considered are reminiscent of the ones that the ‘Cassini Mission’ (1997-2017) sent back to Earth from 2009 onwards, 21 including the images of Saturn’s Moons Enceladus and Mimas which open and conclude the sequence. Throughout this book I have constantly referred to Malick’s thematic exploration of biblical fallenness in his films and interpreted such notion as the fall into communication and self-reflection, and into an inescapable subject-object relation upon which technē, language, art, and science are predicated.22 This line of argument is here extended to twenty-first century’s aesthetics and technologies. The image of Saturn’s Moon Enceladus taken during the Cassini mission are not only used in the silent-film segment, but appear on a wide screen in the first ten minutes of film, in a fleeting shot of Cook working at his digital audio workstation. Steering critical 20 This finite freedom opposes the delusional, mythical freedom explored in the narrative trajectories of Kit in Badlands, Captain Smith in The New World, for example. 21 For general information on the Cassini Mission, see Tony Greicious. 22 For example, in Chapter 2 I have pointed out that the association between modern cinema technologies and the biblical temptation of evil is a recurrent theme in Malick.

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interpretations away from superstitious, religious beliefs and from Platonic and Manichean notions of good and evil, it becomes clear that Cook is not just an ‘evil’ influence in the f ilm (which Fassbender’s impressive performance communicates well). Given his work as a contemporary rich and powerful music producer, and following his figural association with Saturn and the devil, he seems to allegorise a particular function in the narrative, one linked to rational knowledge and technē. For example, during the brief silent-film style segment with images of Saturn, Cook’s voice-over addresses his wife Rhonda and says: ‘I was once like you. I didn’t know what I know now. To think what I once was, what I am now’. Similarly, Cook’s wife Rhonda is not simply an innocent and virtuous young woman tainted by Cook’s evil influence.23 Rhonda’s line ‘Everything I could do to get free goes through my mind, makes me evil’ signals this character’s inability to live in historical and rational relations to the world. In this view, her suicide is emblematic of her incapacity to live in non-mythical relations, away from the false certainties of Cook’s money and away from religious dogma. As we shall now see in detail, this capacity is instead seen in Fay, who finds the courage and strength to extricate herself from Cook’s Saturnine influence in the narrative and live a non-mythical life, f inite and free, that Patty Smith’s f igure clearly presents in the folded narrative of the film. Patty Smith is used multiple times in Song to Song and has a decisive role in Fay’s decision-making process to leave Cook and begin again. We see her at a party in which she shows one of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, and in two other moments, fragments of a longer dialogue scene interspersed in different parts of the film. The two split moments of the dialogue scene are shown in the first 30 minutes and in the last 30 minutes. In her first appearance, Smith describes the moment she saw her future husband Fred Smith, and in the second she tells Fay she still feels married to Fred, despite his death in 1994. This second moment then merges with a live performance of My Bleakean Years (with Fay playing the bass) and Fay’s juxtaposed voice-over (reading from Blake’s The Divine Image, cited in Smith’s song). The second fragment of the dialogue with Smith is preceded by a scene in which Smith shows Fay Leonardo’s drawing: a particular from The Virgin 23 In an intense scene, Rhonda confesses to her mother that she feels ‘evil’, the full passage is: Mom, I’m afraid of myself. A hatred in me. Everything I could do to get free goes through my mind, makes me evil. I used to think I could never be wicked, wicked before. A long way out for me. After this moment, we see Portman/Rhonda going to a Catholic blessing of animals with her dog (Bang) followed by some moments of solitary introspection and her final suicide.

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and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, saying ‘You see, she has a face, a face like yours’. After this moment, the narrative folds back and shows a scene in which Fay and BV seem to meet for the first time, again, in the same location we just saw Leonardo’s drawing. BV says: ‘I didn’t know why I was coming to this party, but then I saw you and I said that’s why’. This ‘second’ meeting between BV and Fay (the ‘first’ was at Cook’s pool party six minutes into the film) reinforces the sense of folded and parted temporalities operating in the film. The dialogue also clearly exemplifies the inexplicable workings of a temporal ‘reduction’ in aesthetic relations to the world, illustrated by Smith’s reference to the actuality of the face depicted in Leonardo’s painting. Regardless of the particular lives, real or invented, portrayed on canvas or screen, the point I want to make here is that Malick’s use of the film medium provides a different way to look and relate to aesthetic, subject-object relations in film analysis. Consistent with the lines of argument developed in previous chapters, I propose that Benjamin’s vision of the moving image, time, and history help us articulate Malick’s cinematic work at the service of a renewed materialist theology that has much potential in contemporary ecocinema studies. In this view, a new reading of Song to Song opens up; one that is not simply related to individual characters, lives and subjectivities.

Contemporary Ecocinema in Song to Song At the end of the first ten-minute segment of Song to Song, we hear the voice of one of the many rock stars performing in Austin. The voice is not assigned to any particular face in this initial set up24 and is placed over images of the crowd gathered to attend the concert and over go-pro images of Fay and Cook walking together at the concert venue: 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.

If, as I posited in the analysis of Malick’s evolutionary narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time, the role of humans and their choices are crucial at 24 The voice we hear in this segment will be then recognized as Patty Smith’s when she appears later in the film.

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this particular juncture in human history,25 then Malick’s films of mid-2010s shot in contemporary settings consistently articulate a philosophy of time and nature in which viewers’ ethical actions are directly called into question. Malick’s Song to Song not only presents a folded narrative that constantly changes characters’ past, present, and future actions in always-new beginnings, it articulates a non-religious, material-theological way of being in finitude that is not transcendental and universal at all, but historical, and particularly important at this juncture in human history. Building on the material-theological insights of a counterfactual history operating in Malick’s evolutionary narratives, Song to Song can be defined in totally historical, phenomenological terms as instances of ‘counter-factual imagination’ (Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft): a specific type of historical inquiry that ‘provides us not only with a sense of what “constellation” we form with that past, but with a sense of agency to change that constellation’ [emphasis added] (p. 381),26 allowing us to change our relation to present, past and future events simultaneously. In this view, the powerful ‘NOW’ of Smith’s exhortation is the now of class struggle,27 the moment of crisis and recognition of a constellation of meaning that can lead to different worlds and possibilities depending on the conscious, critical choices that follow a sudden, nonintentional moment of recognition of a constellation of meanings. In this view, the particular stories and characters Malick brings on screen are not at all universal paradigms of ourselves, but instead function as constellations of possibilities predicated upon a non-teleological notion of time. These meanings are offered to the film’s viewers as ways to see, hear, and feel chararacters’ choices, and then act upon the myriad of choices that affect us in our present, future, and past histories. Malick’s Song to Song confirms a sustained meditation on contemporary wastelands of capitalist and spiritual visions of progress in his mid-2010s’ narratives. These mature films not only consistently expose the disastrous environmental consequences of a particular way of thinking and being in the world, but clearly work against the foundations of thought that have produced a dysfunctional, exploitative human-nature relation that is impossible to sustain and repeat. This dysfunction, the films confirm, includes capitalist, religious, and mythic conceptions of self and life. It is 25 See Chapter 3. 26 As articulated throughout this book, this sense of individual agency is the defining feature of a Benjaminian rather than Deleuzian material philosophy in present culture. See Introduction. 27 See the concept of class struggle in Khatib, cited in Chapter 3. See also Hamacher ‘“Now”: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time’.

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up to us, as viewers, to see and recognise the constellations of meaning that affect us most and make informed, critical choices less concerned with the future of our particular bodies and selves, and more with a new relation to individuality and the world as historical, finite expressions of time. This new relation to self reclaims the centrality of critical, historical, and linguistic mediations as the conditions of possibility for individual choice and ethical action in a post-anthropocentric age.

Conclusion: Finite Freedom and Materialist Theology in Ecocinema Malick’s material-theological work has important repercussions in contemporary material culture and practical applications in ecocinema discourses. While Malick’s mature films continue to use biblical and esoteric tropes, they do so in conjunction with deeper philosophical understandings of the function of linguistic mediation in modernity. Consistent with all other figural and material-theological readings of Malick’s films in this book, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song, cannot be solely interpreted through structural and linguistic understandings of philosophical discourses; they also require a more fluid, historical and phenomenological interpretation of biblical and theological tropes. Without a figural understanding of these metaphors, allegories, and symbols, there is a clear risk of falling back into interpretive universalising metanarratives, including a sudden return to convinced conservative and traditional religious readings. As the critical literature on Malick’s work attests, this is evident in even nuanced film-phenomenological interpretations of Malick’s cinematic style.28 Parallel to the many religious and cultural allusions, in later Malick there is a productive tension between a traditional and an innovative way to relate to the world of nature, temporality, and finitude. To the Wonder presents an oblique interpretive key that parallels the actions of a Roman Catholic priest and those of an environmental toxicologist in twenty-first century Oklahoma. Their deeper similarity is encapsulated in the figural trope of a broken clock when they meet, suggesting a time-based interpretation of their respective theological and mundane crisis. This crisis relates to a 28 The specifically Christian language and fluid cinematographic style of Malick’s later films has prompted a series of theological readings in the Christian tradition and film-phenomenological readings. See Christopher Barnett ‘Spirit(uality)’; Barnett and Clark Elliston Theology; Jonathan Beever and Vernon Cisney.

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precise teleological vision of time and history in which the push towards human transcendence and contemporary capitalist economic drives are part of the same mechanic, self-centered, and progressive vision of nature and history. The same time-based interpretive key illuminates Rick’s crisis in Knight of Cups. As a contemporary Hollywood writer, Rick’s crisis assumes a larger signif icance on the exhaustion of the mythic and heroic paradigm in storytelling. A material-theological reading reframes the many references to Christian and Islamic tropes as part of a deeper Platonic discourse that the film’s aesthetics problematises. In this view, the earthquake scene in Knight of Cups allegorises the cinematic, earthly power operating in Malick’s aesthetic argument. The film arrests narrative progression and teleological thinking via a number of oblique images of pollution and exhaustion, and a constant frustration of progress in Rick’s narrative journey. The film shows repetition rather than transcendence in a non-narrative that folds back and begins again, on a road that leads to a desolated desert and a dried out river. The river, in Malick, operates as a metaphor for a persistent dualistic, teleological, and mythic view of time and history, one that has reached exhaustion in contemporary settings. Through a material-theological reading, Fr. Quintana’s and Rick’s tales allegorise a precise mythic and transcendental view over the world of finitude and nature. However, a material-theological reading of these narratives consistently points to an alternative vision of Malick’s cinematic language. Malick’s camera work and editing techniques articulate an increasingly folded and associative style, where most of the connections happen visually and aurally, through diffractive temporalities. Such aesthetic articulation of meanings finds full expression in Song to Song, in which Malick’s style conveys a fractal-like narrative without beginning, middle, and end, without traditional notions of linear past, present, and future events, and without implementing notions of causality between shots. A Benjaminian phenomenology of time reveals fluid temporal complexities and histories in Song to Song. The allusions to Blake’s poem The Divine Image and Smith’s My Bleakean Years are therefore reframed away from notions of traditional romantic idealism. In Malick, the figural ‘divine’ image is not some otherworldly, transcendental, and immutable image of time but can be understood in terms of a what Benjamin terms the Blue Flower in the land of technology. As exemplified by the analysis of Patty Smith’s figural function in the film, the process of recognition of historical time-images cannot be objectively determined. Following Benjamin’s concept of a timeimage, this recognition is predicated upon a leap in which the coming and

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going of time can only be glimpsed as a flashing ‘mirage’ in aesthetic, fallen, manifestations of art and nature. While the scene of Leonardo’s painting can be seen as exemplary of such figural relation to aesthetics, the enormous and unprecedented achievement of Malick’s cinematic style is giving concrete visibility to the complexities of an ungraspable ‘messianic’ temporality in the twenty-first century. As argued, Malick’s films articulate the effects of non-intentional glimpses of time and receptive moments of recognition in which past, present, and future manifestations form a constellation of meaning with us. Malick’s film-philosophical work has very practical implications in contemporary ecocinema theory and in media studies more generally. Consistent with previous findings, Song to Song displays a constant preoccupation with environmental concerns at this particular juncture of human history. Rather than advocating a return to a lost mythical oneness with the world of nature, Malick’s work clearly points to the role of media technologies as an important and undetected force in culture capable of altering traditional, mythical relations to world and time. If in Badlands and Days of Heaven Malick’s self-reflexive scenes on early cinema experiences opened a new vista on modernity, in Song to Song the concept of a ‘modernist’ aesthetics assumes a complete new meaning in contemporary settings. The presence of images of Saturn and its Moons from the Cassini space mission (1997-2017) disguised as early cinema fragments becomes a powerful argument on the role played by technology in articulating complex notions of nature-culture relations in the twenty-first century. While the religious-cultural symbolism of Saturn well illustrates Cook’s association with a Luciferian, divisive function in the narrative, a material-theological reading of the figural and aesthetic complexities of the scene reveals a consistent meditation on the role of technology in altering traditional religious and dogmatic interpretations of the symbolism. Consistent with the analysis of Malick’s evolutionary narratives in previous chapter, Malick’s cinematic language in the twenty-first century continues to articulate a shift from a conventional use of camera work and editing techniques at the service of narrative and character development towards an increasingly associative style, where most of the connections happen visually and retrospectively, in the editing room. In this view, Malick films articulate important ecocritical meanings in the twenty-first century, meanings that reclaim the importance of human ethical actions at this critical juncture in evolutionary history. As argued, Malick’s answer to the age nihilism is not in some abstract, philosophical concepts or theories, but is given concrete visibility in aesthetic terms, through the complex and

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extraordinary temporality he manages to articulate in a groundbreaking editing style in which present, past, and future possibilities collide in moments of recognition and possible action.

Works Cited Barnett, Christopher B., ‘Spirit(Uality) in the Films of Terrence Malick’, Journal of Religion and Film, 17 (2013), 1, pp. 103-130. Barnett, Christopher B., and Clark, J. Elliston, Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017). Beever, Jonathan, and Vernon W. Cisney, The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace. Philosophical Footholds in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). Benjamin, Walter, ‘Dream Kitsch’, Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 1 1927-1930, edited by Michael W. Jennings and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Howard Eiland (2005), pp. 3-6. ——, ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926, eds. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), trans. by Rodney Livingstone (2004), pp. 55-58. Brody, Richard, ‘Song to Song: Terrence Malick’s Romantic Idealism’, The New Yorker, 2017. (accessed 7 November 2017). Camacho, Paul, ‘The Promise of Love Perfected: Eros and Kenosis in To the Wonder’, Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, eds. by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (New York: Routledge, 2017) pp. 232-250. Dubois, Philippe, ‘La tempête et la matière-temps, ou le sublime et le figural dans l’œuvre de Jean Epstein’, Jean Epstein: Cinéaste, Poète, Philosophe, ed. by Jacque Aumont (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1998), pp. 267-323. Fenves, Peter, ‘Renewed Question: Whether a Philosophy of History Is Possible’, MLN, 124 (2014), pp. 514-524. Franklin, Lewis D., Rumi - Past and Present, East and West: the Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (London: One World Publications, 2014). Greicious, Tony, ‘A Song of Ice and Light.’ NASA (accessed 3 April 2018) Hamacher, Werner, ‘“Now” Walter Benjamin and Historical Time’, in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. by Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 38-68.

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Hamilton, Julie M., ‘“What Is This Love That Loves Us?”: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder as a Phenomenology of Love’, Religions, 7 (2016), 76, pp. 1-15. Hamner, M. Gail, ‘Remember who you are: Imaging Life’s Purpose in Knight of Cups’ Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick, edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 251-274. Khatib, Sami, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Subject of Historical Cognition’, Annals of Scholarship, 21 (2015), pp. 23-42. Logan, Trevor, ‘Kierkegaard in L.A.: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups’ Curator Magazine. (accessed 16 March 2016). ——, Knight of Cups, Film Nation Entertainment, 2015. ——, To the Wonder, Film Nation Entertainment, 2012. Robbins, Gregory Allen, ‘Aftertones of Infinity: Biblical and Darwinian Evocations in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and To the Wonder’, Journal of Religion and Film, 20 (2016), 1, pp. 1-24. Schwartz, Stephen, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Stadler, Jane, Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics (London: Bloomsbury Puplishing, 2008). Star, Jonathan, Rumi: In the Arms of the Beloved (London: Penguin, 2008). Urda Kathleen E., ‘Eros and Contemplation: The Catholic Vision of Terrence Malick’s to the Wonder’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thouht and Culture, 19 (2016), 1, pp. 130-147. Weber, Samuel, ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth, Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play’, MLN, 106 (1991), 3, pp. 465-500. Wurgaft, Benjamin Aldes, ‘The Uses of Walter: Walter Benjamin and the Counterfactual Imagination’, History and Theory, 49, (2010), October, pp. 361-383.

Conclusion 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;

Blasi, G., The Work of Terrence Malick. Time-Based Ecocinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989108_concl

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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. The cinematic relation to the narrative and formal content of the films provides a different way to grasp temporality and finitude in nature and culture—a way that opens up the entropic and circular narratives of the films to an alterity of time not related to narrative action and logical continuity, but to figural presence and disruption of causal relations. This disruption of causal relations in scripted narrative conventions finds full formal expression in the contemporary non-narratives of To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song and has always been a prerogative of Malick’s distinctively cinematic approach to storytelling. From the self-reflexive scenes dealing with pre-cinematic technologies and experiences of early modern cinema in association to biblical tropes in Badlands and Days of Heaven, to the more explicitly aesthetic possibilities opened up by camera work and editing techniques in The Thin Red Line, The New World and The Tree of Life, to the fully developed folded narratives of Song to Song, the cinematic relation to the figural tropes used in the films transforms their symbolic, mythic, and transcendental content into their allegorical, historical, and material possibilities of time. This work paves the ground for further academic enquiry into viewers’ material relations with characters, situations and conflicts brought to view in the course of a seemingly passive act of watching a film. The book is a contribution to understand the work of one of the greatest thinkers and philosophers of his time, one who, like Benjamin in the twentieth century, operates under the premise that moving images are an explosive and powerful material force in human history. Benjamin’s philosophy and concepts offer a fitting conceptual and theoretical tool to start looking at Malick’s work from a perspective that does not dwell in fulfilled time, Romantic and Transcendentalist views of art and nature. In this effort, Malick’s films are not and cannot be interpreted as mere illustrations of Benjaminin’s philosophy or concepts. Such vision would diminish Malick’s own contribution and powerful intervention in twenty-first century’s film studies and aesthetics. In this book, Malick’s clear change of style from his early career to his mature films articulates a coherent and precise statement about the continuous historical connection between aesthetic, figural and narrative elements in films. Such connection relies on underlying technological and historical possibilities that Malick’s style continually actualizes and challenges in a remarkably coherent career as an innovative thinker and filmmaker. In this view, this book offers future scholars of Malick’s work a non-dichotomous view on nature and technē for a fruitful ecocinema

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interpretation of his innovative work in the twenty-first century. Benjamin’s concepts and ideas are illuminating insofar they assist us understanding Malick’s own philosophical use of the film medium, its underlying temporal structures and unfolding of figural surfaces via a non-transcendental approach to time and space. As argued, Malick’s f ilms consistently articulate a shift from space, subjectivity, and bodily sense perception to a phenomenology of time, which proves particularly productive when dealing with ecocinema considerations on the role of films and screen media in contemporary nature-culture relations. Further work remains to be conducted on Malick’s Together (2018), a virtual reality experience, and Filmed on Pixel 3 (2018). Meanwhile, in 2019, Malick continues to shoot and work as much as humanly possible. After A Hidden Life,1 a new generation of viewers and readers will be likely to experience The Last Planet, passages in the life of Christ through representing evangelical parables shot on the shores of Anzio, Italy.2 Regardless of Malick’s personal faith, views or intentions, which he guards and keeps rigorously private, the time-based ecocinema framework here developed promises to continue steer critical receptions of his work away from mythical, religious and transcendental notions of life and time. It promises to offer a growing number of transnational viewers and spectators a fresh ecocinema approach able to translate those openly human and figural gestures on screen into the concrete realm of people’s everyday life, acts and choices. This, for the ongoing life of Malick’s films themselves, a timely ecocinema paradigm and a new generation of film viewers and thinkers not bound to religious dogma and traditions.

1 In May 2019, Fox Searchlight secured a 12 million US dollars’ distribution deal for a theatrical release of A Hidden Life in December 2019 in the US. Such strategy promises to give Malick’s tenth feature film a late entry in the 92nd Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Awards in 2020. This is a clever strategic move on the part of Fox Searchlight, as Hollywood is certainly more prone to reward Malick’s work for a f ilm set in another time and space, World War II Europe, rather than contemporary United States. 2 The Comune di Anzio has announced a new Malick project shot in the Riserva of Tor Caldara in Anzio, Italy, on 21 June 2019. The project is provisionally titled The Last Planet. See (Accessed 30 July 2019).



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About the Author

Gabriella Blasi teaches and researches at Griffith University as Adjunct in the Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Her research and academic publications consistently focus on the complexities of nature-culture relations in contemporary culture and cinema.

Index Adorno 28, 44, 119 aesthetics 17, 38, 39, 40, 66, 90, 94, 106, 110, 114, 115, 129, 150, 156 figural aesthetics 11, 13, 21, 23, 26, 145, 151 Agamben 64, 93 A Hidden Life 14, 157 allegory 50, 51, 59, 60, 62, 70, 71, 72, 132, 138, 139 Anderson 19 Ansell-Pearson 32, 33 Anthropocene 108, 120 a priori 25 Arendt 60, 61 Auerbach 22, 23, 29 Aumont 25 Badiou 17, 32 Barnett 15, 139, 149 Baudry 63 beautiful semblance 38, 60, 61, 63 Beever 149, 152 Behler 59 being toward death 15, 58 Bell 25, 85, 86 Benjamin 12, 13, 18, 20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 50, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 136, 137, 145, 147, 148, 150, 155, 156, Bennett 14, 119 Bergson 19, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 34, 37 Bersani 79, 84, 85, 87, 88 Biskind 50 Blue Flower 63, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 98, 137, 150 Bordwell 19, 50 Braidotti 119 Breitenbach 85 Brenez 22, 23, 29 Brody 122, 135, 143, 152 Brown 37 Buck-Morss 33, 37, 92 Burchill 27 Butler 83 Camacho 15, 131, 132, 136 Campbell 14, 50, 53, 55 Cassini 69, 145, 151 causality 40, 72, 80, 81, 85, 143, 150 causal relations 39, 53, 72, 73, 156 Cavell 15, 26, 94 Chaplin 39, 68, 69, 70, 72, 85, 94 Child 122, 147 choice 13, 85, 114, 116, 117, 118, 130, 134, 144, 149 Christian 108, 109

Clewis 15 clock 59, 80, 81, 86, 136, 149 Clooney 84 Cohen 37, 57 constellation 29, 34, 35, 36, 55, 63, 97, 148, 151, 155 counterfactual history 122, 123, 148 Critchley 83, 111 Crutzen 108, 120, 125 crystal-image 27, 32 Cubitt 13, 19, 20, 43 Darwin 116, 117 Davies 13, 15 Deleuze 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 86, 101, 117 distance phenomenological distance 50, 61, 62, 65, 71, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98, 99, 115, 117, 118 Donougho 15, 18, 80, 101 Dorfman 110 Dreyfus 15 duality 119, 124 Dubois 22, 25, 141 Dutoit 79, 84, 85, 87, 88 ecocinema 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 30, 33, 38, 40, 80, 98, 107, 118, 123, 124, 130, 147, 149, 151, 155, 157 Ecocriticism 18 editing 39, 63, 64, 65, 78, 92, 124, 129, 136, 141, 142, 144, 150, 151, 152, 156 Elliston 15, 149 Elsaesser 29, 53, 64, 91, 116 Engelke 108, 122 Epstein 22 eternal recurrence 27 fallenness fall, the 13, 14, 15, 30, 39, 69, 93, 145 Fenves 13, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 59, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 94, 95, 97, 121, 122, 136 Ferrara 29 film-philosophy 16, 19, 26, 28 Floch 22, 23 force 22, 38, 59, 92, 105, 112, 120, 141, 151, 156 Foucault 64, 142 fractal 34, 95, 122, 144, 150 Frankfurt School 119 Franklin 140 freedom 12, 13, 34, 35, 51, 54, 55, 68, 72, 81, 85, 130, 142, 145, 149, 155 Freud 29, 85 Friedberg 91 Furstenau 15, 43

176  Garrard 17 Gnosticism Gnostic 14, 15, 91, 138, 140 good and evil 79, 85, 94, 98, 99, 106, 113, 116, 117, 146 Graf 114 Grant Hamilton 164 great acceleration 108, 122 Greicious 145, 152, 164 Gunning 50, 53 Hagener 29, 64, 91, 163 Hamacher 83, 94, 148, 152, 164 Hamilton 102, 132, 133, 134, 136 Hamner 138, 139, 140, 141 Handley 15, 44, 165 Hansen 37, 38, 44, 61, 70, 75, 165 Hanssen 37, 44 Harrison 105, 106, 107, 108, 124 Hegel Hegelian dialectics 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 41, 79, 89, 91, 118, 120 Heidegger 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 28, 36, 110 Hesketh 109 Hintermann 109, 110, 114, 116, 117 history 12, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 36, 37, 41, 50, 51, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 70, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 137, 147, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156 Hjelmslev 25 Hodge 17 Hoggard 14 Hoggard Creegan 14 Husserl 28, 34, 35, 36, 97 immediacy 60, 63, 70, 78, 89, 94, 115 Ingram 19 intentionality 29, 83, 84, 95, 97, 98, 121 interplay 38, 40, 60, 62, 65 interpolation 94, 121, 122 Ivakhiv 13, 19 Jägerstätter 11, 12 Kant 26, 34, 37, 81, 85 Kendall 18, 56, 57 Khatib 36, 121, 126, 148 Knight of Cups 13, 14, 39, 40, 41, 45, 50, 69, 124, 129, 130, 131, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 149, 150, 153, 156, 165, 167 Kracauer 22, 28, 29 language 15, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 41, 62, 63, 64, 65, 71, 88, 93, 94, 97, 107, 109, 111, 118, 120, 124, 145, 155 Leibniz 33, 81, 82 Leithart 14 love 85, 86, 88, 89, 96, 99, 133, 136, 137, 140,

The Work of Terrence Malick

Lumia 114, 115, 117, 123 Lyotard 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 38 MacAvoy 15 Macdonald 18, 90, 96, 114 MacDonald 19 Maher 50 Malick 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 30, 37, 38, 39, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 157, 159 Marburg School 34, 37 Marks 29 Martin 12, 15, 29, 49, 50, 56, 80, 97 McGhee 108 McLuhan 30 McNeill 108, 122 McWhorter 17 mediality 30, 31, 33, 73, 83, 89, 93, 97 pure mediality 77, 83, 89, 90, 93, 94, 97, 100 media 30, 31, 38 media technologies 16, 39, 49, 62, 65, 151 Merleau-Ponty 23, 132 Metz 63 Michaels 49, 57, 58, 71 Monanni 13 Morris 56 Morrison 52 Morton 108, 119, 120 Mottram 13 Mourenza 37 Mowitt 24 Mules 14, 17, 18, 22, 37, 79, 111, 113, 116, 141 Murphy 110 Nagel 108 nameability 29, 38, 99 Nancy 92 nature 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117, 120, 123, 124, 130, 137, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156 nature-culture relations 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 38, 39, 40, 54, 55, 57, 66, 67, 71, 73, 78, 84, 93, 98, 99, 107, 124, 151, 157 Nietzsche 26, 37, 163 nihilism 32, 37, 84, 98, 100, 123, 130, 137, 151, 155 now 33, 34, 35, 73, 90, 96, 97, 99, 121, 122, 123, 139, 143, 148 O’Regan 91 origin 62, 63, 81, 82, 90, 137

177

Index

Orr 14 Osborne 37, 160 Parikka 119 Patton 84 Peebles 14 Penn 46, 84, 122, 123 Pensky 33 perception 19, 23, 25, 29, 35, 38, 61, 62, 64, 71, 92, 95, 118, 124, 157 Perkins 29 Pfeifer 110, 111, 115 phenomenology 13, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 35, 36, 40, 91, 98, 100, 129, 132, 150, 157 Pippin 79 Pisters 19 Plate 15 Plato 138, 139, 140, 141, 150 prehistory 60, 63 prelapsarian 25, 87, 95, 98, 111, 112 progress 34, 81, 86, 130, 136, 142, 148, 150 Pursley 28, 32 Quendler 91, 95 reconciliation 79, 89, 90, 106, 111, 118, 119, 123 reduction 35, 36, 38, 98, 147 Rekret 119 Rhym 15, 17 Ricoeur 29 Robbins 132 Rodowick 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 38 Romanticism 18, 100, 144, 171 Rosenbrück 59 Ross 33, 48, 83, 93, 94 Routt 22, 23 Ruse 108 Rybin 14, 16, 17, 18 Salazar Prince 15 Salzani 36 Sandilands 37 Schelling 59, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 91, 136 Scheunemann 114 science 17, 106, 107, 108, 114, 117, 124, 145 Sean Penn 79, 84, 109, 122, 162 second technologies 40, 64, 69, 71, 72, 73, 145 second technology 60, 65, 66, 72 secular natural theologies 40, 105, 108, 109, 119 Sepkoski 108 shape of time 13, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 59, 82 Silberman 14, 15 Silverman 15, 17, 89 Sinnerbrink 16, 17, 18, 79, 89, 111 Sobchack 16, 28, 29, 31 Song to Song 13, 14, 39, 40, 41, 50, 69, 122, 124, 129, 130, 135, 136, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152 Soper 38

Sorlin 30 spectatorship 12, 19, 28, 29, 68 Spencer 116 Spinoza 26, 33, 48 Stadler 19, 132 Star 171 structural binaries 40, 105, 113 structural linguistics 24, 25 subjectivity 17, 20, 28, 29, 30, 33, 36, 41, 59, 64, 70, 88, 91, 100, 106, 107, 118, 119, 123, 124, 132, 140, 157 subject-object divide 17, 20 subject-object position 94, 106, 118 subject-object relations 18, 64, 107, 147 tableau 53, 54 technē 63, 65, 145, 156 technology 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 39, 40, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 73, 94, 98, 109, 137, 150, 151, 155 teleology 26, 28, 39, 129 temporality 24, 25, 51, 58, 67, 72, 88, 99, 100, 121, 123, 145, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156 temporal plastics plastic time 24, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 73, 95, 122 TePaske 14 The Tree of Life 13, 14, 18, 39, 40, 84, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124, 134, 136, 141, 147, 156 theology 107, 108, 111 materialist theology 19, 119, 120, 124, 132, 137, 147, 149 Thomas Wilfred 114 time 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 50, 53, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 130, 134, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 166 messianic time 41, 66, 72, 73, 77, 83, 89, 90, 107, 114, 122, 151 time-based ecocinema 12, 13, 33, 38, 149, 150, 157 time-based phenomenology 98 time-image 25, 26, 27, 33, 150 To the Wonder 13, 14, 39, 40, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143, 144, 149, 156 Trauerspiel 49, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59, 62, 70, 71, 72, 73, 86, 88 turn of time 34, 36, 95, 98, 99, 121, 122 Urda 15, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136 Vattimo 17 Villa 109, 110, 114, 116, 117 violence 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 137

178  virtual continuum 27, 28, 31, 32, 35 vitalism 32, 37 Vogler 50 Voyage of Time 13, 14, 39, 40, 96, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124, 147, 156 Walden 80 Weber 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 47, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 91, 93, 137

The Work of Terrence Malick

Weik von Mossner 19 Woodward 21 Zimmer 117 Zinman 114 Žižek 83

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 contem porary ecocinema discourses.

FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION

Gabriella Blasi teaches and researches at Griffith University as Adjunct in the Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Her research and academic publications consistently focus on the complexities of nature-culture relations in contemporary culture and cinema.

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