The Historical Thought of Film: Terrence Malick and Philosophical Cinema
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Historical Thought of Film: Terrence Malick and Philosophical Cinema A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Steven M. Rybin June 2009 © 2009 Steven M. Rybin. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled The Historical Thought of Film: Terrence Malick and Philosophical Cinema by STEVEN M. RYBIN has been approved for the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and the College of Fine Arts by Vladimir L. Marchenkov Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts Charles A. McWeeny Dean, College of Fine Arts 3 ABSTRACT RYBIN, STEVEN M., Ph.D., June 2009, Interdisciplinary Arts The Historical Thought of Film: Terrence Malick and Philosophical Cinema (484 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Vladimir L. Marchenkov Previous scholarly work on the director Terrence Malick has argued that his films – Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005) – are, in varying ways, philosophical. This assessment is usually made via an analysis of the films in relation to a single philosophical metatext (frequently the work of Martin Heidegger) that transcends the concrete historical situation of both the given film and the historically existing viewer. This study seeks to intervene in this critical literature by theorizing an approach for understanding Malick’s films as works that do not merely illustrate already articulated philosophical themes but that rather function, in dialogue with the spectator, as an invitation to generate creative and historically situated meaning. The film medium, this study argues, is uniquely philosophical in that it exists in time (via the gradual entropy of the celluloid film print) as does the finite, historically embodied spectator. Malick’s cinema, I argue, reflects poetically upon the finite nature of both the film medium and the viewing subject through films that depict subjective experience in the historical past. Rather than construct a theoretical methodology that will then be “applied” to the films, the study uses its first three chapters to construct a propadeutic (in philosophy, a preparatory framework) that in the remaining chapters inform an exploration of the philosophical thought that Malick’s four films encourage. The first chapter of this study 4 places the dissertation’s framework in critical debates about the use and function of philosophy in relation to film. The second and third chapters then illustrate in greater detail the project’s own approach. The second chapter uses the work of D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and others to suggest that in watching films we are led to reflect upon what we value as existential, becoming spectators. The third chapter builds upon the phenomenology of Vivian Sobchack in order to suggest how the temporality of film experience emerges through film space. In the final four chapters, I use the insights of the propadeutic to craft a philosophically informed critical analysis of Malick’s four films. This analysis demonstrates not only the philosophical value of the director’s oeuvre, but also functions as a case study demonstrating the larger value of philosophy and existential phenomenology to the critical study of Malick and film in general. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Vladimir L. Marchenkov Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Vladimir Marchenkov, for his careful and intelligent critique of the dissertation. His suggestions generously clarified my own positions, even when he did not agree with them, and helped improve my argumentation. In addition, his critique of my writing style has helped improve the prose. A special thanks also to Ryan DeRosa, whose insight was helpful in formulating the project during the proposal stage. I would also like to thank the other distinguished members of my committee – Dora Wilson, Charles Buchanan, and Ghirmai Negash – for the contribution of their valuable time to the completion of this project. This dissertation is dedicated to Jessica Belser, without whom not a word of it could have been written. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract............................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... 5 Introduction......................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter One: Philosophy in Film Studies......................................................................... 43 Chapter Two: Historical Time and the Thought of Film .................................................. 77 Chapter Three: Malick and the Phenomenology of Film Experience............................. 139 Chapter Four: On Badlands ............................................................................................ 205 Chapter Five: On Days of Heaven .................................................................................. 266 Chapter Six: On The Thin Red Line................................................................................ 332 Chapter Seven: On The New World................................................................................ 402 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 463 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 471 7 INTRODUCTION By reproducing the condition of dream and fantasy in commercialized form, film seems not only to absolve us of responsibility for the world, but also absolve us of responsibility for our dreams and fantasies or at least to drive them further inside us instead of awakening them. -Michael Chanan1 You hope that the picture will give the person looking at it a sense of things. -Terrence Malick2 Towards Film as Philosophy This study will argue that the films of Terrence Malick – Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005) – are philosophically significant, and that this significance involves an engagement with history and with the historical medium of film. This project is not the first to suggest that Malick’s work rewards attention that is in some way philosophical. Many such arguments justify their approach by noting Malick’s career, prior to the making of his first film, as a teacher of philosophy and a translator of Heidegger, and then proceed to analyze his work via reference to a particular philosopher (Heidegger is usually the single philosopher of choice in these studies, following the clues offered by the director’s otherwise scant biographical legend).3 This project intervenes in such arguments by exploring how Malick’s cinema might not just reflect the influence of a single philosopher but might also itself function as philosophy, or more broadly as a companion to thought. Malick’s poetics pressure us not to think only about or of the film medium, and not to exercise our analytical powers over or against it, but rather to think through and with it. To ascertain further what this idea, and the more general phrase “film as philosophy,” might signify – and to connect this signification to larger debates within cinema studies – this project will also seek a more rigorous approach endeavoring to understand how we make meaning, 8 and thus potentially philosophy, when engaged in the experience of cinema and with the experience of watching a Malick film in particular. It is possible, at least initially, to consider the relationship between Malick and our ways of creating meaning by thinking of our engagement with Malick’s cinema as functioning like a dialogue occurring on and between two levels. Each of these speaks directly to the director’s engagement with the historical. First, we can consider the level of the historically and socially inscribed situations of the protagonists, whose stories are embedded, through Malick’s narratives and style, in lyrical filmic recreations of the American past. These characters include the fifteen-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands, who becomes the unwitting accomplice to a series of murders across the American Midwest in the late 1950s, committed by her boyfriend Kit (Martin Sheen), in a story loosely based on the real crimes of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate; the twelve-year-old Linda (Linda Manz) in Days of Heaven, who narrates a story, set in the Texas Panhandle of the late 1910s, about her brother Bill (Richard Gere), his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and the man, who we come to know only as the Farmer (Sam Shepherd), they attempt to swindle; a group of soldiers in The Thin Red Line fighting in the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II, a conflict they themselves only partially understand and which they have different means of coping with and questioning; and the quasi-mythical figures of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), whose fabled relationship, a subject treated as something like a dream, occurs in and against the backdrop of the European colonization of America. As we will see, in all of these disparate stories Malick’s cinema insists upon a degree of empathetic 9 commitment to the fictional lives dramatized, a social commitment not