Tucker Thomas Deane - Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick

Film and Philosophy

Edited by

Thomas Deane Tucker

and

Stuart Kendall

The Continuum International Publishing Group

80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Terrence Malick, film and philosophy / edited by Thomas Deane Tucker & Stuart Kendall.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-5003-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4411-5003-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Malick, Terrence, 1945 Criticism and interpretation. I. Tucker, Thomas Deane, 1962- II. Kendall, Stuart.

PN1998.3.M3388T47 2011

791.430233092dc22

2010048884

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-4895-7

Contents

Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker

Steven Rybin

John Bleasdale

Thomas Wall

Thomas Deane Tucker

Matthew Evertson

Ian Rijsdijk

Stuart Kendall

Russell Manning

Robert Sinnerbrink

Elizabeth Walden

Notes on Contributors

John Bleasdale is a film scholar and Professor at Universit Ca Foscari Venezia.

Matthew Evertson is an Associate Professor of English at Chadron State College in Nebraska and a scholar of American literature with a specialty in the literature of the Great Plains. He is the author of numerous articles on Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Teddy Roosevelt. His book Strenuous Lives: Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt and the American 1890s will be published by University of Alabama Press in 2011.

Stuart Kendall is an independent scholar working at the intersections of visual and critical studies, poetics and theology. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, he is the author of Georges Bataille, a critical biography, published by Reaktion Books, and the editor and translator of eight volumes of diverse writings in visual and critical studies by Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, Ren Char, Guy Debord, and Paul Eluard.

Russell Manning is a Postdoctorate Fellow at the Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakins University in Australia.

Ian Rijsdijk teaches a variety of film studies and media courses at The Center For Film and Media Studies at University of Capetown. He is currently working in the field of ecocriticism and film.

Steven Rybin is an Instructor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Film Studies and Philosophical Aesthetics from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, after completing his MA in Film Studies from Emory University in 2005. He has taught classes in film aesthetics, art cinema, film authorship, film history, and interdisciplinary courses on the arts. He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books, 2007) and Nicholas Ray in Hollywood: Cinephilia and Film Authorship (forthcoming in 2011).

Robert Sinnerbrink was awarded his Ph.D. on Hegel, Heidegger, and the Metaphysics of Modernity at the University of Sydney in 2002. During his postgraduate research period he spent six months studying at the Humboldt Universitaet in Berlin. He has taught philosophy at a number of institutions, including the University of Sydney, UTS, UNSW, The College of Fine Arts, and Macquarie University. He is currently Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. He is Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy and book review coeditor for the journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory.

Thomas Deane Tucker is a Professor of Humanities at Chadron State College in western Nebraska. His research and teaching interests are in philosophical aesthetics, continental philosophy, and cinema studies. His work has appeared in journals such as Studies in French Cinema, Film-Philosophy Journal, and Enculturation. He is the author of Derridada: Duchamp as Readymade Deconstruction (Lexington Books, 2008). It is the first text to explore Duchamps work in the context of the theories of Derrida and deconstruction. He is currently working on a book titled The Logic of Indiffrance.

Elizabeth Walden is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Her recent work addresses emerging notions of materiality and posthuman collectivities in film and visual culture.

Thomas Carl Wall is an English professor at National Tapei University of Technology in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His interests are in the Twentieth-Century World Literature, Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, Film Theory, History of Literary Criticism, and History of Western Thought. He is the author of Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (SUNY Press, 1999).

Chapter 1

Introduction

Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker

In the preface to his book The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, first published in 1971, philosopher Stanley Cavell acknowledges his gratefulness to Terrence Malick. Cavell thanks a number of other friends and colleagues, as well as his wife, in the same pages, so the comment is almost unremarkable. It is in fact a comment that would only become remarkable a few years later, after Terrence Malick had written and directed some of the most astonishing films produced during our times.

When Cavell first published his remark, Malick was 28 years old and a recent graduate of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Cavellseventeen years Malicks seniorhad been his professor in philosophy at Harvard in the mid-1960s and the two had stayed in touch as Malick sought and found his way from philosophy into film or, as this volume proposes to explore, from philosophy into a certain kind of filmmaking relevant to philosophy. In the second enlarged edition of his book, published in 1979, Cavell again references Malick, this time in connection with some passages from Martin Heideggers What is Called Thinking? that strike Cavell as particularly helpful to understanding Malicks then recent second film, Days of Heaven as well as to understanding the main subject of Cavells work, the ontology of film. Cavells book links a celebrated contemporary American philosopher and an inchoate contemporary American filmmaker in a unique and paradoxical relationship: here the teacher thanks his former student and references that students film work as an illustration of his own philosophical ideas. But who has taught whom, what, and when? What is the relationship between the philosopher and the filmmaker? This question resonates biographicallyproposing an ongoing friendship between these two significant culture-makersbut also and perhaps more importantly as a question posed between film and philosophy.

Cavells remarks signal the appropriateness of asking philosophical questions about Terrence Malicks works as well as the aptness of exploring the philosophical themes and problems posed by and examined in Malicks works. While it is not too much to claim that any filmno matter how derivative or aesthetically valuelessmay provide fodder for a certain kind of inquiry that can be understood as philosophical, it is also not too much to claim that Malicks films offer privileged sites for this kind of inquiry. Malicks background in philosophy and the evidence offered by the films themselves invites this style of interrogation. It is already a philosophical question to ask if the films