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ABSTRACT
This essay tests the framework of ecocinema for the films of Terrence Malick, engaging the preoccupation with natural elements and environments that characterizes his work. Exploring this interface motivates certain key innovations to ecocinema as it is familiarly formulated. First, it expands the received picture of film’s eco-aesthetic, to consider formal strategies and effects that are as much corrosive as contemplative, with a special emphasis on montage. Second, this discussion also proposes a refreshed interpretive practice that highlights ecocinema’s phenomenological inflection, positioning it as an attentiveness to the shared contours of the world and as an expression of wonder at this situation. Serving as a detailed case study, a close analysis of Malick’s To The Wonder (2012) reads the film a distinctly phenomenological project, tracing the contours of lived experience in ways that are permeating and complex.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See, for example, Rust, Monani, and Cubitt (Citation2013).
2. See, for example, Abram (Citation1997). Exemplary ecocritical studies informed by phenomenology include Westling (Citation1996); Scigaj (Citation1999); Bate (Citation2000); Rigby (Citation2004).
3. Two versions of the film were produced: one is narrated by Cate Blanchett; a shorter edit, narrated by Brad Pitt, was released to theaters as an ‘IMAX experience.’
4. See Robert Koehler’s indignant (Citation2013) review, ‘What the Hell Happened with Terrence Malick?’
5. Malick’s cinematographer, Nestor Almendros, confirms this emphasis, specifically with reference to the Panaglide camera system (Almendros Citation1979).
6. On this dynamic, see Gadamer (Citation1997), especially 102–110.
7. Perez (Citation1979) has pointed to a related tendency in Days of Heaven, cogently described as an ‘interruptive principle.’ This observation, retrieved from Perez’s 1975 review of the film, is a wonderfully prescient comment on Malick’s work.
8. The film’s concern with sense experience is emphasized by the couple’s visit to the Cluny Museum: in four swift, successive shots, Marina is pictured before three of the ‘Lady of the Unicorn’ tapestries. Woven in Flanders in the sixteenth century, the series is dedicated to the five senses. Specifically, ‘La Vue’ and ‘Le Toucher’ are briefly presented (suitably, Marina reaches toward the latter, echoing its central gesture), as well as the last of the series, known by its inscription, ‘À Mon Seul Desir.’
9. The film’s title alludes to the group of buildings at Mont-St-Michel, dating from the 13th century, referred to ‘la merveille.’
10. This point is evidently phenomenological: it recalls Merleau-Ponty’s assertion, quoting Goethe, that ‘What is inside is also outside.’ (Citation1964, 59).
11. On the concept of the pastoral, see Paul Alpers’ clarifying discussion (Citation1982).
12. This idea is playfully extended in Eisenstein’s later essay, ‘The Kangaroo.’ (Citation1987).
13. Malick’s cinematographer and frequent collaborator, Lubezki (Citation2013) indicates that they sought to make the sequence different from the rest of the film, with greater steadiness.
14. In his excellent analysis of classical Greek statuary, Neer (Citation2010) emphasizes wonder’s ‘twofold’ character, as though suspended between modes of possibility.
15. On this point, I think of the film as potentially sympathetic to Heidegger’s arguments concerning technology, but never as illustrating them.
16. Of course, Arendt’s charge was also aimed at Heidegger, citing an excess of wonder as the cause of his alliance with National Socialism. Rubenstein’s response, that Heidegger was not wonder-struck but rather susceptible to the kind of ‘packaged opinion’ that marks the closure of wonder (54), is a substantial argument.