Terrence Malick's Unseeing Cinema

Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema James Batcho Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema Memory, Time and Audibility James Batcho United International College Zhuhai Shi, China ISBN 978-3-319-76420-7 ISBN 978-3-319-76421-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76421-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936609 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For my father, David John Batcho (1935–2017) PREFACE This book is an attempt to create a work of original philosophy. It is not a book on film theory. As a work of philosophy, it does not aim to summa- rize or advance contemporary trends of scholarship but, rather, to invent new concepts. Terrence Malick’s films provide the experiential lines of flight and Gilles Deleuze, in particular, provides a conceptual language. Through their work I wish to offer a way of thinking of cinema not on visual or textual terms—e.g., receptive, cognitive, psychoanalytical, or semiological—but through what I name “unseeing.” From this approach, cinema—Malick’s in particular—is not observed from the distance of screen to viewer, rendering it for analysis as a text, work of art, or mode of spectatorship. Exploring cinema from the standpoint of unseeing requires one to enter the life that unfolds, to treat cinema as a real experience for those who live its reality. This is the philosophical work I am attempting through my engagement with Malick and Deleuze. I believe that philosophy, at least in the post-Nietzsche European tradi- tion, is as much a reflection of a writer as of his topic. Therefore, while this book is a philosophical work about cinema, it is also personal. It was written during a time when I witnessed my father succumb to the anguish of Alzheimer’s disease. In January 2017 he died of a heart attack before the effects of the disease could completely incapacitate him. What I witnessed was the slow, incalculable process. I remember several times sitting with him late at night when he couldn’t sleep, haunted by dreams as vivid as waking life. I listened to him recount memories that overlapped in illogi- cal recreations. These late-night tales would always end the same, in tear- ful pleas to “go home,” wherever that was. These nightly gatherings came vii viii PREFACE in moments of quiet and stillness. During the day was another gathering, a demand to know and a failure to understand what was slipping away. This, I imagine, is a familiar story to family members who have lived it and who themselves have felt powerless to come to terms, let alone to help make amends for the darkness that accompanies it. I have written nothing about this beyond this paragraph. But I mention it because it is here throughout this work, unstated within the statements. Memory, reborn in recollection, becomes an act of imagination and creation, a striving to make what is continually in a process of unaccountable loss. As this book moves through Malick’s cinema, these aspects of memory and imagination are expressed as an audible gathering in the moment that opens to the newness of time. This account culminates with The Tree of Life, a work that reforms Malick’s characters through such gatherings. Love, redemption, and forgiveness are not the words spoken but, instead, the move- ment itself—a process, another listening, a new expression being made. This is cinema’s power, which Malick expresses in beatitude, a Spinozan beatitude. Another personal reflection I wish to offer is that I met Malick when he came to teach a seminar at my university, an indirect result of the research I was doing on him at the time as a PhD student. During the time of my dissertation defense, I attended his lectures and spoke with him briefly outside of class. I found him to be anything but the recluse I had read so much about. Instead, he was in person warm, kind, and open, even enthusiastic. One might think I would take such an opportunity to ask him questions pertinent to my research, but I resisted, less out of reverence and more because I did not want to know whether he read Deleuze or what he had to say about his use of sound. (I told him briefly about my research and I believe his response was a simple, Yes, sound is important.) I wanted his films to express themselvesto and for me, with- out the burden of explanations about his artistic and philosophical inten- tions. It became clear during my time with him that he felt the same. Whenever students tried through their questions to draw him into recol- lections about technique, casting, or life on the set, his response was always a polite variation of I don’t remember; it was a long time ago. He seemed uninterested in interpreting his own work, which to me was for the best. Instead, he took a Socratic approach to class time, politely shift- ing any probing questions back onto what the students felt about topics such as redemption, authenticity, and friendship. PREFACE ix Or at least this is my recollection. I try to imagine, to recreate, July 2015, listening to Malick’s recurring lectures about Plato’s two winged horses that every rider attempts to steer in her chariot of reason. One lifts its rider toward the heavens while the other pulls the whole vehicle (the soul) down to the earth. During these class sessions, Malick requested that nothing be recorded, nor anything written down. The seminar was to be lived in the moment and in the future only in its capacity for remem- bering and forgetting, two “currents” of memory living in mutual need, as Kierkegaard suggests. I remember the books he asked us to read: the Phaedrus, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, The Gospel According to Mark, and Epictetus’s Discourses and Selected Writings. I remember the films he screened for us: Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, Olmi’s Il Posto, and Fellini’s La Strada. I remember that the one film of his that he chose to screen was The New World. I remember that this theme of redemption, this theme that became mine as I rewrote my dissertation into this book, was his theme that he returned to with the most frequency. I remember that he seemed most concerned in hearing the students’ thoughts on these questions, through these films he screened and the books he offered for reading. As for everything else, I’m trying to remember but I cannot. I wrote nothing down. My writing now cannot bring it back. It can only express in recollection and forgetting, the film that I play back in myself. For many of these same reasons, I avoided reading analyses of Malick’s films during my three years of research for this book. This also applies to recent works on film theory and film philosophy, most of which came late in the process. Although I address film semiology and sound theory, my purpose here is to move through a different process. There is a wealth of great scholarship on Malick, Deleuze, and cinema. But the majority of film theory and philosophy sees and listens to film from the distance of recep- tion, a distance taken and analyzed as visual (spectatorship) or textual (“readings”). I wish instead to take the filmsas they are and work through them on their own philosophical terms. My conscious effort, therefore, is to remove myself from film analysis in favor of penetrating cinematic experience. I hope this keeps me true to the two central figures of this work: Deleuze and Malick. Deleuze’s mission in writing his two books on cinema was not film criticism or theory but proper Deleuzean philosophy. The intensity with which he writes about time, memory, sense, and difference, and his emphasis on a transcendental immanence, reveals the craft of a metaphysician more than a scholar referencing prior scholarship. Similarly, x PREFACE much of Malick’s uniqueness comes from it being nonreferential, nonlinear and noncategorical, which is one of the central themes of Deleuze’s meta- physical and ethical oeuvre. In the spirit of Deleuze’s monographs, this is mine on Malick, yet one written from a particular rather than total perspec- tive.

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