Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory , Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven
- 2 Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World
- 3 Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time
- 4 The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
1 - From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory , Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory , Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven
- 2 Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World
- 3 Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time
- 4 The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 1, ‘From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory, Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven,’ redirects scholarly attention to the self-reflective aspects of Malick's early-career films. Drawing on Benjamin's concept of second technology, Malick's films are seen as effective meditations on the renewed affectivity of time opened up by media technologies in modernity. The chapter shifts critical attention from characters’ visions and subjectivities to the films’ oblique presentation of recurrent biblical allusions in conjunction with modern film technologies. In particular, the sequence of the stereopticon in the forest in Badlands and the scene of the projection of Chaplin's The Immigrant (1918) in Days of Heaven are reframed as disclosing a distinctively Benjaminian relation to time-images in modernity.
Keywords: aura; second technology; time-image; modernity; natureculture divide.
In Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick makes a rare appearance on screen. He plays the role of a visitor to the rich man's house where Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) are hiding, keeping the man and his maid as hostages. Whatever the visitor's message is, it will be lost in the depth of a big jar where Kit throws it, with a certain care, as soon as the visitor leaves. Malick is well known for his reticence in publicly commenting on his films’ meanings and messages. On the occasion of Badlands’ premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1973, Malick said, ‘I don't really like to be asked opinions on my own film because they are feelings I have right now I wouldn't trust’ (Malick in Maher, p. 5). He seems to acknowledge that films become separate and distinct entities from their authors’ creative intentions, a distance that has been amply theorised in literary and cultural studies but more difficult to accept in complex films that present such strong visions, personal styles and authorial signatures as in the case of Malick's films. In his study of Fritz Lang's oeuvre, Tom Gunning articulates this problem in similar terms:
In film studies, it was often assumed any treatment of the author must follow the naive trajectory Barthes denounces: the author as god, as first cause and ultimate meaning of the text to be discovered through the biographical author's person, his history, his taste, his passions […] The possibility of a modern author dedicated not to self-expression but to the play of discourse […] remains largely unexplored.
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- Information
- The Work of Terrence MalickTime-Based Ecocinema, pp. 49 - 76Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019