Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher(Philosophical Filmmakers)

About the Book

Many critics have approached Terrence Malick’s work from a philosophical perspective, arguing that his films express philosophy through cinema. With their remarkable images of nature, poetic voiceovers, and meditative reflections, Malick’s cinema certainly invites philosophical engagement.

In Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick’s work as a case of cinematic ethics: films that evoke varieties of ethical experience, encompassing existential, metaphysical, and religious perspectives. Malick’s films are not reducible to a particular moral position or philosophical doctrine; rather, they solicit ethically significant forms of experience, encompassing anxiety and doubt, wonder and awe, to questioning and acknowledgment, through aesthetic engagement and poetic reflection.

Drawing on a range of thinkers and approaches from Heidegger and Cavell, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to phenomenology and moral psychology Sinnerbrink explores how Malick’s films respond to the problem of nihilism the loss of conviction or belief in prevailing forms of value and meaning and the possibility of ethical transformation through cinema: from self-transformation in our relations with others to cultural transformation via our attitudes towards towards nature and the world. Sinnerbrink shows how Malick’s later films, from The Tree of Life to Voyage of Time, provide unique opportunities to explore cinematic ethics in relation to the crisis of belief, the phenomenology of love, and film’s potential to invite moral transformation.

Table of Contents:

Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Terrence Malick: A Philosophical Cinema?
- Malick as filmmaker and philosopher
- Can film ‘do philosophy’?
- Malick’s Cinematic Ethics

Chapter 1: Approaching Cinematic Ethics: Badlands and Days of Heaven
- Badlands: Myth, history, and violence
- Days of Heaven: Myth, love, and tragedy
- A ‘negative’ cinematic ethic

Chapter 2: Philosophy Encounters Film: The Thin Red Line
- What is a ‘Heideggerian’ cinema?
- Malick as phenomenologist of finitude
- Malick as cinematic philosopher
- The Thin Red Line’s ‘Vernacular Metaphysics’
- The Thin Red Line as Existential Ethics

Chapter 3: Philosophy Learns from Film: The New World
- Exploring Cinematic Worlds
- Romanticism, Nature, Culture
- Mythic History and Cinematic Poetry
- Exploring Cinematic Romanticism

Chapter 4: Cinema as Ethics: The Tree of Life
- From ‘film as philosophy’ to cinematic ethics
- The Tree of Life and Cinematic Belief
- Aesthetic experience and transformative ethics
- Appendix: Voyage of Time

Chapter 5: Discourses on Love: Malick’s ‘Weightless’ Trilogy
- Malick’s ‘weightless’ or ‘faith and love’ trilogy (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song)
- Love sick: a Kierkegaardian critique
- Poetic phenomenologies of loving experience
- Myth, Narrative, and Abstraction: the challenge of Malick’s late films

Conclusion: Malick’s cinematic ethics (a philosophical dialogue)
- The rationalist sceptic versus the romantic idealist (three questions):
1) How to avoid naïve romanticism, aesthetic pretentiousness, and religious mysticism?
2) Malick’s ‘religious’ turn: are his films still philosophical?
3) Is a cinematic response to nihilism enough?
- Cinematic thinking as ethical experience

Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Robert Sinnerbrink is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, MacQuarrie University, Australia. He is the author of Cinematic Ethics (2016), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Understanding Hegelism (2007)

Review :
“[An] homage to Malick (b. 1943) and a robust invocation and endorsement of the relation between filmmaking and philosophy … The book is well written and well informed. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” Robert Sinnerbrink is among the most astute and persistent philosophical interpreters of Terrence Malick’s cinematic oeuvre. This detailed and comprehensive survey offers a sure guide to Malick’s films as well as to the voluminous critical literature that surrounds it. For some time now, Robert Sinnerbrink has been arguing that film-philosophy is not simply about aesthetics. To approach a film as a form of philosophical expression, for Sinnerbrink, is to also see it as a site of potential existential, ethical, and even spiritual transformation. Sinnerbrink’s masterful treatment of Malick’s cinema makes that case eloquently and powerfully. Through his careful, close study of Malick’s work, Sinnerbrink challenges his readers to see beyond the dominant and fashionable horizons that inform current discussions about the nature of cinema. In this rich and important book, Robert Sinnerbrink describes how his sense that cinema can be ‘philosophical’ has evolved through his engagement with Terrence Malick’s challenging and difficult cinematic works from Badlands to Song to Song. Sinnerbrink’s wonderfully detailed analyses of how, in each of the films discussed, specific features of Malick’s evolving cinematic style engage the viewer in philosophically important ‘cinematic thinking’ are a model of both exegetical and theoretical insight. Sinnerbrink makes a powerful case for a ‘cinematic ethics’, whereby cinema can produce an ethical experience capable of transforming us aesthetically, psychologically, and even culturally. Sinnerbrink has produced an essential (and nostalgic) trip through the responses to Malick’s work.