Alternative ethics for ecocinema: The Tree of Life and post-continuity aesthetics

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I define ecocinema as a pedagogy of worldly reciprocity, and I ask how contemporary cinematic aesthetics, specifically camera movement and editing, may offer points of access or anchorage to a world which seems to recede further from us with each repeating catastrophe. I analyse Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) as an exemplar of post-continuity filmmaking to make two critical interventions. First, I decouple post-continuity from accelerationism to indicate that the technical aspects of post-continuity engender an immanent experience. Second, I claim that this experience is of value to ecocinematic discourse as it delimits the role typically played by reflection and visuality. To this end, I offer a critique of ecocinema’s normalized identification of environmental ethics with cinematic duration. In the case of The Tree of Life, post-continuity style forces an encounter with beauty and its dimension of profound, de-anthropocentric, withdrawal.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrence Malick
• post-continuity
• ecocinema
• ethics
• accelerationist aesthetics

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Steven Shaviro for sharing his lecture on Spring Breakers, as well as James Leo Cahill and Ted Geier for their critical comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In his development of a theory of ecological perception in the cinema, Scott Richmond states that, ‘the modulation of perception is its primary aesthetic vocation, phenomenological import, and technological work’. Richmond, Scott. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating and Hallucinating. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 9.

2. Though I do not have the space to elaborate an argument for the social or normative formalization of desire in space, I want to indicate such formalization operates beyond the action genre. I would argue that the ‘wedding reception’ is a social genre with specific codes of actions and behaviour that Melancholia breaks through a combination of social impropriety and post-continuous camera work and editing.

3. The image is a fragment of a larger piece by Thomas Wilfred, Opus 161 (1965–66). It is a composition of light and colour that continuously alters its shape. Wilfred named such compositions, lumia (Carruthers, 121–123).