Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher

by Robert Sinnerbrink, Costică Brădățan (Editor)

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 Filmmaker and Philosopher , Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick's work as a case of cinematic 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 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.

Genres: Film

272 pages, Hardcover

Published July 11, 2019

Reviews

[Elijah]

Overall, I appreciated this book immensely. Sinnerbrink is as readable a philosopher as I could hope to find writing about any filmmaker, especially Malick. I am very grateful for the ways he so clearly elucidates Malick's interactions with Kierkegaard in particular, as most writers have tended to dismiss Malick's later, Kierkegaardian films, focusing instead on his earlier Hegelian oeuvre. (I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write "Hegelian oeuvre," now could I?)

Regarding those later films, I think Sinnerbrink missteps when he collects To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song into a cohesive trilogy that does not include The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. This categorization prompts him to define the three films as all dealing with questions of "love" primarily, rather than love as an aspect of a larger concern about "meaning." There are, admittedly, many influences to Malick's films, but disregarding their biblical antecedents—the Wisdom literature, Job, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs—invariably means doing extra, unnecessary work to make the films cohere. Like most philosophers, Sinnerbrink is averse to the overt Christian aspects of Malick's later films. He is as welcoming of those aspects as I could ever imagine a secular philosopher being, but he is still embarrassed by them.

Again, I am enormously grateful for all Sinnerbrink does here, and I am in awe of how lucid it is. I would absolutely assign this text in a graduate level course on Malick. That it lacks the biblical underpinnings is a fault of the Theology and Film crowd, a fault I intend to correct one of these days.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

P

[John Bleasdale · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent

Fascinating, interesting, original survey of Malick’s work as it connects to broader issues of philosophy and its possible relationship to film.