A story begins in the midst of its continuance. “‘…and then.’ A storyteller only knows these two words. I walk here, elsewhere, it doesn’t matter, and then the encounter happens. It changes the world. Rebirth” (Serres, 2012, p. 148). Cinema’s continuance drops you, like Alice, directly into sensation. Any film has its world of hearing, listening, and seeing that precedes its beginning and transcends its sequence as the drop begets its continuance: “and then….” You’ve never been in this world, not quite. Yet you have. Because you have lived, because you have preceded and continually transcend what you see, you can begin at the drop. Only then can “and then…” continue itself. Filmmakers imagine this; they imagine your drop. They know you’ve not only lived but also have been here before, in cinema, as they craft the newness of this particular time—this beginning in the midst of continuance. Every film is a movement forward, an imagining of the future from the past, a making and a living of the future—in short, a repetition.

To enter into this notion of repetition, let us relinquish cinema from its boundaries—as something outside of us, something made, even as a work of art. One stops thinking not only of beginnings and endings but also of borders and frames, analyses and readings, representation and form. One stops thinking about what a film is and thinks instead about thinking, cinematic thinking, the thinking that Terrence Malick and his characters make. One has already entered when one lets go of the familiar academic discourses of cinema as a phenomenon to be understood on textual, symbolic, technological, or material terms. These efforts to understand, this is not what moves us. Cinema instead moves through conditions of memory and experience in their fragmentations, as does the one who experiences the film’s unfolding.¹ This is why cinema is so ripe for philosophy—not because one can analyze it but because it continues one’s own fragmented sense of self, one’s feeling of time and presumed understandings of things. Philosophy works in these arenas as well. Cinema is an empathetic relation exchanged in signs, associations, images, and threads.² It is not a language; it is a way of thinking continuance.

In conversation with Andrew Klevan, Stanley Cavell says that a film “thinks” (2005). One might expand this and suggest that cinema gives “bodies” to thinking, to lives who think. It does not produce thought but, instead, provides bodies, beings, subjects who (and which) express the very process of thinking—a series of gatherers whose thought unfolds. Or, rather, certain films do. Malick’s films can be thought in many ways, but a theme offered here is that what one may name as his images and sounds are together expressions of unseeing and hearing. Given that films are audiovisual, one might think that the “other” to images is sound. But this would be another way of regarding cinema in its distance, that we as filmgoers, transcending the apparatus, receive images and sound. Instead, I suggest that a Malick film belongs to his characters. There is no camera that shows; there is memory. There is no sound that projects through speakers; there is hearing and listening. Malick’s films at this level of engagement are about the limits of memory, time, and audibility. What unfolds cinematically in Malick increasingly becomes an activation of unseeing that opens to expressions of thinking born of these limitations. Unseeing turns objects and sounds into gathering relations of time, opening a field of thought to relations as logos .

This does not mean that Malick injects philosophical problems or direct mentions of philosophy into his films (although he occasionally does), nor is it that his films are reflexively calling attention to the form and its process. Instead, one finds a cinema that does philosophy but through the thinking of its characters more than through plot or dialogue.³ If you were to describe the plot of a Malick film, particularly after Days of Heaven , you would struggle to say much beyond something like: people struggling to take account of their time of living within the world in which they are thrown. A Malick film neither states nor presents philosophy; instead, it offers an opening to the philosophical work going on within itself. He expresses thought through his “intercessors ,” the personae who think. This is different from Plato’s Socrates and Socrates’s interlocutors. Rather than working through philosophy in dialogues, Malick’s cinematic intercessors think and engage with the gathering of time. We as experiencers of the film then engage in the time of thought that is nothing like a reading but more a search along the tendrils of its limits. In Cavell’s terms, philosophy is not what is “in” a film but only what is discovered in it. His interlocutor Klevan adds that “films are not simply prompting clear thoughts in us, or even clear ambiguities. They encourage us to take notice of those feelings that have yet to be voiced, which are ‘awaiting’ their ‘voice.’ They encourage us to keep a hold of that sense, not to lose it, or forget it; to keep a hold of the murmurings, the rumblings, that are the route into discovery, not simply the discovery in itself” (Cavell & Klevan, 2005, p. 193) . To open such movement, Goodenough suggests that such a film must enable one to see beyond appearances to the “real” structure behind them (2005).⁴

Yet even here, in Cavell’s conception of cinema and the scholarship that has followed him, we still have not entered. We must move beyond mimesis and diegesis , showing and telling. If the ongoing Platonic tradition says in reasoned dialogue and shows in knowledge and understanding, cinema in Malick brings the process inward. Rather than showing or sounding, his immanent expressions of seeing and hearing take flight from what shows or sounds, from that which is causally or materially determined. There is an unseeing to any seeing, and this is where memory and the audible come to resonate each other in time. Within the moment of any seeing there is life in what is unseen—an audible life, but also an audibility that opens to new seeing.

This is as true for lived experience as it is for cinema. The audible is a forgotten element of philosophy, which as writing tends to concentrate on knowable statements and visibilities (Deleuze and Foucault ), the sayable and the picturable (Wittgenstein ), or the statement that discloses the image of truth (Heidegger ). And yet in all four philosophers just mentioned, particularly late in their careers, there is a striving to go beyond these limits, limits that cannot be achieved through philosophical prose. Malick, as he moved into the mature stage of his filmmaking, brushed these same limits, often through unstated repetitions of the ideas of those writers just mentioned. Cinema that shows and speaks, such as in a “philosophical” filmmaker like Christopher Nolan, who is often badly compared to Malick, is devoted to camera, exposition, and screenplay. We may think of his process as the reverse: screenplay is rendered as exposition that unfolds profilmically for the camera. Why do Nolan’s films talk and show so much? Perhaps because his ideas cannot be gathered and therefore must be clearly explained in statements and revealed in things. Cinema in its unseeing and unstated movement works instead through relations, signs, and silences that give time to thinking, rather than a presence with the ceaseless procession of objects, symbols, and language.⁵ This imagined and created time is lived, even if it cannot be directly seen nor stated. This duration is lived by poets who both conjure and gather in resonances of thought, or by one who struggles with faith, who both makes and feels a divine actuality.⁶ Malick’s cinema unfolds the time of this experience, bringing it closer to a Kierkegaardian thinking: an expression that in itself strives along the infinite within the finite, thereby bringing us within the inferences of faith and belief housed in those who hear and imagine.