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  • I thought it was a dream...

  • what we knew in the forest.

  • It is the only truth.

  • There are only a few directors who have truly developed their own cinematic language like Terrence Malick has.

  • While we can break this down as a combination of techniques like his frequent use of Steadicam,

  • wide-angle lenses, or his use of poetic voice-overs,

  • What's this war in the heart of nature?

  • I am more interested in the immediate experience of his work,

  • which to me feels like a view of the world that is always wandering,

  • that always seems to be in search of something that lies just beyond the story we are witnessing.

  • Actor John C. Reilly once told a story about how he was working on this big scene in The Thin Red Line.

  • He and some of his fellow actors were in this big truck that was set to drive into camp;

  • a huge set on which the crew had to coordinate not only the vehicles,

  • but also the dozens of extras and planes flying overhead.

  • But all of a sudden, Malick spotted a bird and the entire scene was put on hold to film this one creature.

  • It seems to be a frequent occurrence as all of Malick's films contain these spontaneous moments

  • that capture something that clearly wasn't staged,

  • be it crickets in the wheat fields in Days of Heaven, or a butterfly in the street in The Tree of Life.

  • At first glance, it might feel like the point of view of someone who is easily distracted, confused even.

  • This became even more pronounced in his later work,

  • a series of films that were essentially shot without a script,

  • and diverged so much from any kind of pre-conceived structure that even his long-time admirers

  • began to wonder what Malick was trying to achieve.

  • What was he searching for?

  • I thought that we could build our nest high up.

  • With this year's release of A Hidden Life,

  • the true story of an Austrian farmer who was prosecuted for refusing to fight for the Nazis,

  • critics have hailed Malick's return to form.

  • And although the film is indeed more conventionally structured,

  • it still contains many of the same elements.

  • Above all, the main question still remains: what is he trying to achieve?

  • What is he searching for?

  • The Cinema of Terrence Malick

  • Why is there something rather than nothing?

  • Long before his first feature film, Malick was actually on his way of becoming a philosopher.

  • As a university student,

  • he was particularly drawn to the work of one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century:

  • Martin Heidegger.

  • Heidegger argued that philosophy, since the Ancient Greeks,

  • had avoided what he sees as the most fundamental question,

  • that of the meaning of being.

  • A question that was often dismissed for being either too obvious or too indefinable for meaningful engagement.

  • But for Heidegger, this was the result of a wrong perspective on the concept of being,

  • one that is too concerned with consciousness,

  • with traits of being, and not the meaning of being.

  • He was particularly critical of Descartes, whose separation of body and soul,

  • of the world and the mind,

  • created what for Heidegger was a needless abstraction of the way we relate ourselves to existence.

  • In his magnus opus Being and Time,

  • Heidegger carries out his fundamental ontology by introducing the notion of 'Dasein', or 'being-there';

  • the distinctive mode of Being particular to humans, the beings for whom being matters.

  • Actually, let's not forget:

  • Terrence Malick did not become a philosopher,

  • he became a filmmaker.

  • And this shift from philosophy to cinema, I think, should be taken into account,

  • lest we make a mere overview of Heidegger's ideas as they are represented in Malick's films.

  • Heidegger's ambition was to move away from philosophy

  • as an overly anemic and intellectual endeavor.

  • To him, the discussion of metaphysics was limited by technical philosophical language,

  • one that, as he later admitted, he was not able to transcend in Being and Time

  • despite his already highly poetic style of writing.

  • And I can imagine Malick realized this as well,

  • and therefore set out to explore a different kind of language.

  • So instead of trying to fit cinema into philosophy, let's try it the other way around.

  • Let's see how the work of Terrence Malick not only captures,

  • but also clarifies and contributes to Heidegger's ideas.

  • One of the most recurring elements in Malick's work is his clear distinction between the world of nature,

  • and the world of man, or more specifically; the world of technology.

  • Malick's characters are almost always introduced as practical beings in a practical world;

  • a garbage collector, a factory worker, a soldier, architect, screenwriter, farmer.

  • They capture the fundamental break that Heidegger made with Descartes,

  • and to a lesser extent, his own teacher Edmund Husserl.

  • For Heidegger argued that our default experience of the world is not based on knowledge or reason,

  • but on a pre-existing sense of practicality.

  • Before we question what is, as previous philosophers proposed,

  • we first instinctively see how to use.

  • Heidegger uses the example of a hammer

  • to point out that before we've intellectually questioned the attributes of such an object,

  • let alone pondered the meaning of its existence,

  • we already have an engrained idea of how to use it.

  • It is only when using the hammer fails or surprises us in some way,

  • that we begin to think about its being.

  • And the same goes for our lives in general.

  • In Malick's first film, Badlands, the story is deliberately guided by a rather naïve narrator;

  • by a sheltered teenage girl named Holly.

  • Little did I realise that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town

  • would end in the Badlands of Montana.

  • The story begins with her falling in love with Kit,

  • a James Dean wannabee who takes her on an adventure that eventually becomes a killing spree

  • and ends with both of them arrested.

  • Through her eyes however, the crimes are presented with a rather careless lightheartedness,

  • with a level of mindfulness that does not seem to consider the meaning of what is happening.

  • It exemplifies what Heidegger meant when he said that our default state

  • is not one that questions the meaning of being, and portrays what its consequences are.

  • For a disposition that does not engage with the meaning of being,

  • that does not relate itself to our mortality, to our 'thrownness' as Heidegger called it,

  • has no real connection to life and death, and renders both insignificant.

  • I want you to attack! I want you to attack right now with every man at your disposal!

  • It dulls us into a kind of unconsciousness,

  • and for Heidegger as well as for Malick, this seems to be the great illness of who we are.

  • We see this in the absurdity of war in The Thin Red Line,

  • but we also see it in his later films.

  • In Knight of Cups, the story of a Hollywood screenwriter is paralleled with a fable of a knight

  • who travels west in search for a pearl,

  • but then drinks from a cup that lulls him into a deep sleep,

  • completely forgetting who he is, completely forgetting about the pearl.

  • In Song to Song, the characters deliberately live their lives moment by moment.

  • I thought we could just roll and tumble, live from song to song, kiss to kiss.

  • A careless existence that does not worry about the grander questions.

  • To symbolize the insidiousness of this kind of unconsciousness,

  • Malick also employs the motif of snakes

  • which, from a biblical perspective, represent the seduction into sin and evil.

  • Sometimes this takes the form of literal snakes,

  • other times they are human characters tempting others with snake-like behavior,

  • The world wants to be deceived.

  • which actor Michael Fassbender emphasizes here through his crawling, aggressive movement.

  • Another motif is our technological progress,

  • and the modernity representing our practical disposition that, in its advancement,

  • removes us ever further from the question of the meaning of being.

  • In The Tree of Life and Malick's later films,

  • the main characters find themselves in completely artificial worlds

  • populated with beings that relish in the excesses of modern life.

  • This, however, is not to make a simple statement about how technology and progress is bad.

  • In Days of Heaven, the characters try to exchange their industrial world for a more natural one.

  • But even here, we see how technology has taken root in what was once the domain of nature.

  • This becomes especially evident in The New World,

  • in which colonists arrive in what to them was a place largely untouched by mankind,

  • a place that is soon transformed by their presence.

  • What The New World shows, perhaps more than anything on this subject,

  • is that a practical approach towards the natural world is not just an illness of modernity,

  • but is engrained in our very being.

  • It just revealed itself more clearly over time.

  • You thought we had forever.

  • That time didn't exist.

  • The real problem with engaging the world based on mere utility

  • is that not only we tend to view its resources as endless,

  • we also see ourselves as practically immortal.

  • Again, a disposition that does not consciously consider the meaning of being

  • has no immediate connection to life,

  • and more importantly,

  • it does not truly concern itself with death,

  • besides acknowledging it as a vague theoretical concept.

  • Of course, sooner or later, despite our best effort to avoid it,

  • the limits of existence will impose themselves on us nonetheless.

  • In Badlands, Holly at one point finds herself out in the wilderness

  • where she is looking at some old images when suddenly her own mortality,

  • and the transience of all things, dawns on her.

  • She wonders what would have happened if she and Kit had never met, or if he had never killed anybody.

  • She wonders what would have happened if her father and mother had never met.

  • In short; she begins to question her world.

  • For days afterwards, she narrates, I lived in dread.

  • I suppose that's what damnation is,

  • the pieces of your life, never to come together.

  • This is where we can re-introduce Heidegger's conceptualization of human existence,

  • which he referred to as our Dasein, our Being-there.

  • According to professor John Haugeland, Dasein should not be understood as 'biological human',

  • nor as 'the person',

  • but as “a way of life shared by the members of some community.”

  • When it comes to what could be seen as our community of human beings;

  • our way of life, our Dasein, is one that can reflect on what it means to be.

  • However, because this is not our default state,

  • and because we are so easily dulled into mere practicality,

  • this only shines through occasionally.