Terrence Malick

Film and Philosophy

Thomas Deane Tucker, Stuart Kendall, Thomas Deane Tucker, Stuart Kendall

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441148957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Dirección y producción cinematográfica

Terrence Malick's four feature films have been celebrated by critics and adored as instant classics among film aficionados, but thebody of critical literature devoted to them has remained surprisingly small in comparison to Malick's stature in the world of contemporary film. Each of the essays in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy is grounded in film studies, philosophical inquiry, and the emergingfield of scholarshipthat combines the two disciplines. Malick's films are also open to other angles, notably phenomenological, deconstructive, and Deleuzian approaches to film, all of which are evidenced in this collection. Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy engages with Malick's body of work in distinct and independently significant ways: by looking at the tradition within which Malick works, the creative orientation of the filmmaker, and by discussing the ways in whichcriticismcan illuminate these remarkable films.

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.¹ 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. Cavell—seventeen years Malick’s senior—had been his professor in philosophy at Harvard in the mid-1960s and the two had stayed in touch as Malick sought and found his way from philosophy into 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 Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? that strike Cavell as particularly helpful to understanding Malick’s then recent second film, Days of Heaven as well as to understanding the main subject of Cavell’s work, the ontology of film. Cavell’s 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 student’s 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 biographically—proposing an ongoing friendship between these two significant culture-makers—but also and perhaps more importantly as a question posed between film and philosophy.

Cavell’s remarks signal the appropriateness of asking philosophical questions about Terrence Malick’s works as well as the aptness of exploring the philosophical themes and problems posed by and examined in Malick’s works. While it is not too much to claim that any film—no matter how derivative or aesthetically valueless—may provide fodder for a certain kind of inquiry that can be understood as philosophical, it is also not too much to claim that Malick’s films offer privileged sites for this kind of inquiry. Malick’s 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 demand this kind of questioning. But this is not the kind of question for us to pursue here in this introduction. Our goal here is simply to sketch some of the possible relations between film and philosophy and to outline some of Terrence Malick’s biographical itineraries, particularly as they relate to his engagements with film and philosophy.

The practices of film and philosophy have in fact benefited from several different kinds of relationship over the past one hundred years and more. There have been films that unfold in a philosophical register, films about philosophical problems, and films that endeavor to function as philosophy. The greatest films arguably often engage in subtle and complex ways with the most challenging questions of human life and thus tread willfully into territory traditionally occupied by philosophers and theologians.

Cinema has of course also attracted the interest of a number of philosophers and been written about in a philosophical key by an even larger number of film commentators, critics, and, occasionally, filmmakers. Sergei Eisenstein arguably occupies as significant a place among aestheticians as he does among filmmakers. Since cinema has been the dominant art form of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that it should figure prominently in the works of philosophers interested in aesthetic concerns. What is perhaps more surprising is that these philosophers have so rarely agreed upon relevant questions pertaining to the relationship between film and philosophy or even the basic nature of the medium and the ways in which it might be approached. This diversity of opinion is occasionally obscured by the assured literary and intellectual style of some philosophers and even, one might observe, some philosophical approaches. Despite this apparent will to uniformity, philosophical approaches to film studies remain diverse in method, orientation, and range of concern.

In his two-volume treatment of the first ninety years in the history of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze observes that a philosophy of cinema operates both within and alongside cinema: “Cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema,” he argues, “And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema . . . Cinema itself is a new practice of image and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice.”² A philosophy of cinema, for Deleuze, endeavors to articulate the concepts at work in cinematic practice. This is different from attempting to explore philosophical questions through cinematic examples and different too from attempting to define cinema philosophically. Deleuze wants philosophy or philosophical concept making—theory—to speak for the philosophy of cinema rather than to develop or advance a philosophy about cinema. But this is just one approach among many to this relationship.

Rather than embodying or illustrating a single approach to the relationship between film and philosophy, the following chapters hope, among other things, to celebrate the diversity of philosophically informed approaches to the films of one filmmaker, Terrence Malick. In this volume, you will find Malick registered with the likes of Schiller, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Kant, Gilbert Ryle, Heraclitus, Wright Morris, Wittgenstein, and, of course, Malick’s often noted companion philosopher Martin Heidegger. This diversity speaks to the richness of Malick’s films for this kind of inquiry as well as to the difficulty of defining those films through any one single approach. As will become clear, Malick’s films are at once extremely fecund and extremely reticent, and a similar comment might be made about the filmmaker himself.

Terrence Malick is in fact among the most reticent of filmmakers. He has not given interviews or aided in the promotion of his films in any way since the release of his first film, Badlands, in the early 1970s. He does not permit photographs to be taken of him either on or off the set. He does not explain his films in writing or in any other form of commentary or documentation nor does he publish or release any other kind of writing—nothing, in short, that might offer his viewers a useful tool in approaching the films themselves. Aside from a brief public conversation at the Rome Film Festival in 2007, Malick’s silence about his films and about film in general has been complete.³

In our interconnected, networked, and media saturated age, this kind of reticence is remarkable. It is all the more remarkable for the depth of consideration Malick both reportedly and obviously devotes to every aspect of his craft as a filmmaker. It is remarkable, in short, that such care has been left to speak for itself.

Interviews with the casts and crews of his films, such as those available on the Criterion Collection DVD releases of Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, for example, shed some light on Malick’s materials and working methods without fully explaining them. The bits and pieces of information they offer serve in some ways only to deepen the enigmatic nature of the objects—the films—themselves. Technical and biographical details in cases like this beg hermeneutic questions: what kind of information or insight is helpful in approaching films in general and Malick’s films in particular? How should Malick’s films be situated or contextualized most productively?

These questions have proven to be very vexing for Malick’s critics, both casual and concerted. Some critics affiliate him with the New American Cinema of the 1970s—with Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, and Bob Rafelson, for example—others affiliate him more strongly with the European Art Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the book-length works devoted to Malick—Hannah Peterson’s edited collection The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America and Lloyd Michaels Terrence Malick—adopt a “literary” approach to their subject.⁴ David Davies’ edited volume on The Thin Red Line, by contrast, appears in a series of works in which philosophers write on film. Undoubtedly these approaches are both valid and helpful, perhaps equally so.

Biographical Itineraries

Terrence Malick was born on November 30, 1943 in either Ottawa, Illinois or Waco, Texas (according to conflicting reports).⁵ His father, Emil, was a geologist of Lebanese heritage (the name Malick means “king” in Lebanese). Malick’s mother, Irene, grew up on a farm outside Chicago. Malick is the oldest of three boys. Both of his brothers would encounter tragedy. The middle son, Chris, would be badly burned in an automobile accident that killed his wife. The youngest son, Larry, would become depressed when studying guitar with Andrés Segovia in Spain in 1968. Larry broke both of his hands and ultimately took his own life.

Well before these events, when Malick was young, his father Emil got a job with Phillips Petroleum that moved the family to Texas and later Oklahoma. In one of the only two interviews Malick has ever granted, he observed: “I was raised in a violent environment in Texas. What struck me was how violence erupted and ended before you really had time to understand what was happening.”⁶ He also describes being trained in civil defense against a nuclear attack.

As a student at St. Stephen’s Episcopal High School in Austin, Malick performed in plays, played football, and was an excellent student. During the summers through high school and college, he worked the wheat harvests north from Texas into Canada. He also worked in the oil fields and in a railyard. After high school, Malick went on to study philosophy at Harvard, as we have already noted, with Stanley Cavell. Following graduation from Harvard—summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa—in 1965, Malick won a prestigious fellowship to continue his studies in philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford. His major professor there was Gilbert Ryle, but the two apparently did not agree on the direction of his work. Malick abandoned his fellowship after only one year and found employment as a journalist for the New Yorker, Life, and Newsweek. In the fall of 1967, the New Yorker sent Malick to Bolivia to cover the trial of Régis Debray, the French philosopher who had been a member of Che Guevara’s revolutionary cadre, but nothing came of the story.⁷ The following spring Malick continued to write, contributing to the obituaries of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy for the New Yorker, among other pieces.

In 1968, Malick taught philosophy as a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1969 he published The Essence of Reasons, a translation of Martin Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes with an informed and astute critical introduction and notes. The book appeared in the prestigious Northwestern University Press series Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. These endeavors would suggest that Malick intended to pursue a career as a professor of philosophy, despite having abandoned his studies in Oxford. Apparently, however, his experiences in front of the classroom were not positive ones. In his interview with Barbara Walker for Sight and Sound, Malick said flatly: “I was not a good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else.”⁸ That something else was film school.

In 1969, Malick enrolled in the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory) in Los Angeles. David Lynch and Paul Schrader were there at the same time and the place seems to have been an incubator for the New Hollywood. Friendships he formed there have followed Malick through his professional career, most notably perhaps his friendship with a high school friend of David Lynch, Jack Fisk.⁹ Fisk has been either Art Director or Production Designer on all of Malick’s films to date. While working with Malick on Badlands, Fisk met Sissy Spacek (the female lead in the film). The two were married a year after Badlands was released. Fisk has spent the majority of his career in Hollywood directing his own films and working as a production designer for friends like Malick, Lynch, and Brian De Palma.

Malick is thus a member of the first generation of filmmakers substantially formed by film school. This generation had access to a wider variety of films, produced over a longer period of time in more countri...