Robert Sinnerbrink

Terrence Malick (eBook, ePUB)

Filmmaker and Philosopher

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781350063655
• Artikelnr.: 56955188

Autorenporträt

Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Terrence Malick: A Philosophical Cinema?
- Malick as filmmaker and philosopher
- Can film 'do philosophy'?
- Malick's Cinematic Ethics
Chapter 1: Approaching Cinematic Ethics: Badlands and Days of Heaven
- Badlands: Myth, history, and violence
- Days of Heaven: Myth, love, and tragedy
- A 'negative' cinematic ethic
Chapter 2: Philosophy Encounters Film: The Thin Red Line
- What is a 'Heideggerian' cinema?
- Malick as phenomenologist of finitude
- Malick as cinematic philosopher
- The Thin Red Line's 'Vernacular Metaphysics'
- The Thin Red Line as Existential Ethics
Chapter 3: Philosophy Learns from Film: The New World
- Exploring Cinematic Worlds
- Romanticism, Nature, Culture
- Mythic History and Cinematic Poetry
- Exploring Cinematic Romanticism
Chapter 4: Cinema as Ethics: The Tree of Life
- From 'film as philosophy' to cinematic ethics
- The Tree of Life and Cinematic Belief
- Aesthetic experience and transformative ethics
- Appendix: Voyage of Time
Chapter 5: Discourses on Love: Malick's 'Weightless' Trilogy
- Malick's 'weightless' or 'faith and love' trilogy (To the Wonder, Knight
of Cups, Song to Song)
- Love sick: a Kierkegaardian critique
- Poetic phenomenologies of loving experience
- Myth, Narrative, and Abstraction: the challenge of Malick's late films
Conclusion: Malick's cinematic ethics (a philosophical dialogue)
- The rationalist sceptic versus the romantic idealist (three questions):
1) How to avoid naïve romanticism, aesthetic pretentiousness, and religious
mysticism?
2) Malick's 'religious' turn: are his films still philosophical?
3) Is a cinematic response to nihilism enough?
- Cinematic thinking as ethical experience
Bibliography
Index