“TERENCE, this is stupid stuff…But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, It gives a chap the belly-ache.” — A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896.
The first Terrence Malick film I ever viewed was The New World (2005) during its theatrical release. I thought the film was terrible. I was familiar with the name Terrence Malick as he was one of those elusive, cinematic figures whose name appeared in textbooks on the history of film. I went into the viewing experience of The New World ignorant of Malick’s previous films, his departure and reemergence or his visual style. When the screening of the film had concluded I left the theater confused, unsatisfied, and irritated that Malick would make a film that was difficult to view and, more importantly, not very entertaining. The experience was similar to having a conversation with another individual whose dialect I was only partially familiar with. Some meanings can be made and a mutual respect can be created and maintained, but key pieces will always be missing, thus limiting the joy of genuine conversation.
The second Malick film I viewed was The Thin Red Line (1998) and the viewing experience was similar to my first viewing of The New World. The question I could not resolve was why Malick had made such specific visual choices that directly conflicted with my desire for the information to be spoken by the characters through dialogue. Another puzzling aspect was Malick’s tendency to be indirect rather than direct, which requires the viewer to make a substantial mental investment in identifying and discerning the meanings of the facial expressions of the actors or cutting to a shot of a flock of birds. The problem was not Malick or the way he made films; rather, the problem was that I did not understand the dialect of his cinema well enough to engage with what he was saying.
The epigraph which I include at the beginning of this chapter is take from the first stanza of a poem by British poet A.E. Housman. Housman’s Terence is being chastised by an unidentified friend who does not appreciate the somber and cerebral quality of Terence’s poems: The problem is with the language. Terence responds to the unidentified friend that somber and cerebral poems exercise the mind and soul and those exercises are sufficient for preparing an individual for the challenges of life. Housman’s Terence concludes the poem with the tale of a King Mithridates who died in old age, having developed an immunity to the poisons that his enemies had tried to use against him.
The difficulty of language and how it is used to create express meaning frustrated the unidentified friend of Housman’s, Terence just as the cinematic dialect of the Terrence Malick frustrated my initial viewing experience of The New World. If the viewer only has a partial command of this dialect, most film viewing experiences can be a pleasing and rewarding exercise of the mind and soul; however, a dissonance can occur with only a partial command. This deficiency reduces the viewing experience to an awkward and unsatisfying attempt to engage and understand a visually beautiful, but complex, cinematic dialogue. This study seeks to address and reconcile that very deficiency.
Learning the dialect of Malick’s cinema requires an understanding of the technical aspects of filmmaking. This understanding can be gained by repeated viewings of his films and paying specific attention to the recurring visual patterns that Malick uses throughout of his films. The recurring visual patterns, a fundamental part of Malick’s cinematic dialect, leads to the more abstract question of determining what certain things mean to Malick and why their inclusion in the film is significant. The complexity of the choices that Malick makes ranges from relatively simple, such as the direction to an actor to emote a certain facial expression, to more complex editing decisions such as the inclusion of a scene which does not directly relate to the preceding scene or the one which follows. The decisions which a viewer of a Malick film must make about what the viewing experience may mean requires a degree of patience and compromise.
The discussion of Malick’s films within the academy has yielded such conclusions as “Terrence Malick is among the most celebrated and critically acclaimed contemporary American directors” (Davies 569) and Malick “gives us, as great films must, a sense of things, like no other” (Morrison and Schur 133). Ideally, these quotes should be taken from articles authored by film analysts. They were not. Both of these quotes appear in articles published by philosophy scholars who study the ways in which films and philosophy intersect. This is not to say that discussion of Malick’s film is totally absent within film studies, but it is indicative of an absence of conversation.
Asking why film scholars are not more engaged in discussion of the films of Terrence Malick leads to a broader discussion on the nature and direction of film studies as an academic pursuit. In a personal assessment, Altman argued that one of the glaring problems concerning film studies is a tension between the commitment to specificity of theoretical models and the availability of resources made possible by digital technology (Altman, “Whither Film Studies” Altman 131–135). Increased resource availability and decades of cross-disciplinary conversation and scholarship has, as Altman notes, led to “an increasingly unpredictable mix of theoretical backgrounds” (“Whither Film Studies” 134–135). Altman’s proposal is an extension of the dialogue of the Post-Theory compilation by Noel Carroll and David Bordwell in which the objective of film studies should employ the act of theorizing and making use of all fields of inquiry (xiii-xiv). Carroll, in a personal assessment of the field, decries the “interesting interpretation” method of film criticism in which a critic uses a theory to analyze a film in order to reach an interesting interpretation (Carroll 37–68). Carroll argues that the “prospects for film theory hinge on critical debate. Whether film theory has a genuine future depends on its becoming truly dialectical” (68). A step towards dialectical argument about films and their meaning parallels to the same arguments made by Prince about the intersection between psychoanalysis and film theory.
The philosophy scholars who also like to discuss film are not entirely at fault for the lack of direction for the field of film studies. The scholarship generated by these philosophers is a useful starting point in which a film scholar can begin to reinvigorate a critical discussion on the films of Terrence Malick. First, it can be admitted without hesitation that Malick has a genuine and legitimate background in academic philosophy which specifically focuses on the work of Martin Heidegger. The second admission which can be made without hesitation is that Malick willingly walked away from a career in academic philosophy to become a filmmaker. Malick continues to be a filmmaker and, at the time of this writing, released his seventh feature film titled Knight of Cups (2016).
This dissertation’s objective is to reinvigorate the discussion of Malick’s films by taking an approach which is primarily cinema-centric. To study Malick’s films is to take into consideration the historical poetics of the periods of time which were most influential upon the filmmaker. Malick is an interesting and challenging subject as he has become a multi-generational filmmaker whose approach and style continues to change and evolve. The key to understanding and reinvigorating discussion of Malick’s films is to locate Malick within the history of cinema, identify and elaborate upon the influence of the historical poetics of Malick’s films across his career, and most importantly allow the films to inform and direct the process of making meaning.
Andrew F. Rosbury 
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