Terrence Malick is one of the most important and controversial filmmakers of the last few decades. Yet his renown does not stem from box office receipts, but rather from his inimitable cinematic vision that mixes luminous shots of nature, dreamlike voiceovers, and plots centered on enduring existential questions. Although scholars have thoroughly examined Malick’s background in philosophy, they have been slower to respond to his theological concerns. This volume is the first to focus on the ways in which Malick integrates theological inquiries and motifs into his films. The book begins with an exploration of Malick’s career as a filmmaker and shows how his Heideggerian interests relate to theology. Further essays from established and up-and-coming scholars analyze seven of Malick’s most prominent films – Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), and Knight of Cups (2015) – to show how his cinematic techniques point toward and overlap with principles of Christian theology. A thorough study of an iconic filmmaker, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars in the emerging field of religion and film.

Terrence Malick's stunning film The Tree of Life is a modern Job story, an exploration of suffering and glory, an honest look at strife within a Texas family in the 1950s. In Shining Glory, Peter J. Leithart examines the biblical and theological motifs of the film and illuminates how Malick exploited the visual poetry of film to produce one of the most spiritually challenging and theologically sophisticated films ever made.

Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What's it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick's To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier's Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski's Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book's three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.

Terrence Malick's stunning film The Tree of Life is a modern Job story, an exploration of suffering and glory, an honest look at strife within a Texas family in the 1950s. In Shining Glory, Peter J. Leithart examines the biblical and theological motifs of the film and illuminates how Malick exploited the visual poetry of film to produce one of the most spiritually challenging and theologically sophisticated films ever made.

The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema develops a timely ecocinema approach to film analysis illuminated by Benjamin's notion of the turn of time. Current work on Malick's films emphasizes the spatial dynamics of his cinema, particularly as it pertains, from within a phenomenological framework, to the viewer's experience of films. This book redirects scholarly attention to the way Malick's directorial work shapes time and duration, laying new groundwork for the analysis of how films unsettle nature-culture binaries in modernity. The study performs this intervention through a rigorous engagement with Walter Benjamin's work on time, violence and technologies and the emergent figural approach to aesthetics in film studies. Each of these methods has important precedents in film studies and other fields. The combination of methods performed in this book contributes to understanding the relevance of a time-based approach to Malick's films and the practical implications of a time-based relation to history in contemporary ecocinema discourses.

Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volume II continues the work presented in the first volume of this title, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008. It provides informed yet accessible articles that will give readers an introduction to masters of world cinema whose works explore the themes of human spirituality and religious faith. Volume II contains essays dealing with canonical directors notably absent from the first entry of the series (such as Godard and Kurosawa) while also including examinations of contemporary auteurs who are still actively working (for example, Andersson, and von Trier). While retaining a truly international emphasisâ "it includes essays about directors from the United States, Canada, Iran, Sweden, India, Denmark, Italy, Mexico, Australia, and Japanâ "Volume II also acts as an important contribution to canon formation, illustrating the complexity and variety in the films of those who are truly the masters of world cinema. Built solidly around close, formal readings of selective films, the essays in Volume II also demonstrate familiarity with film history and bring insight from such varied disciplines as New Testament Studies, Clinical Psychology, Art History, and Medieval History. It also seeks to broaden the understanding of â ~faithâ (TM) and â ~spirituality, â (TM) examining how the meaning of such terms changes as the cultures that produce the art that defines them continues to evolve.

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.

From the dust of the Montana plains to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, Terrence Malick’s films have enchanted audiences with transcendent images of nature, humanity, and grace for nearly fifty years. The contributors in this volume explore the profound implications of Malick’s stories, images, processes, and convictions as they offer comprehensive studies of the ten completed films of Terrence Malick. Each chapter takes a reflective and retrospective approach, considering new interpretations and frameworks for understanding Malick's unique creative choices. Drawing from a range of diverse academic disciplines, the collection analyzes the groundbreaking qualities of his cinematic style and the philosophical underpinnings that permeate his work. Rigorously researched and unique, the arguments presented within this volume shed new light on Malick and the cinematic medium.

Leaving a promising career in academic philosophy to embark on a career in film, American director Terrence Malick has created cinematic works of art that are also deeply philosophical. His contribution to philosophy through a half century of filmmaking has become the focus of increasing scholarly attention. Inviting the reader along a journey of reflections at the intersection of film, art, and philosophy, Life Above the Clouds brings together an international team of contributors to present the most current and definitive statement of the filmmaker's work. Accessibly written and exploring films such as Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life, the nineteen essays herein will be of interest not only to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, film studies, and aesthetics, but also to anyone with a true love of film.

Abstract. The thesis is an introduction to a spiritual reading of the four films of Terrence Malick from 1973 to 2011: Badlands, Days of heaven, The thin red line, and The new world. The first part of the thesis contains the general introduction into Malick's cinematic language; it describes some of the common elements of the films, and deals with the topic of "spiritual interpretation." The second part of the thesis contains four commentaries on Malick's films.