Description:
Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. From Myth, Tragedy and Narrative to Allegory , Trauerspiel and Film in Badlands and Days of Heaven -- 2. Time and History in The Thin Red Line and The New World -- 3. Looking at Evolutionary Narratives in The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time -- 4. The Wastelands of Progress in To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- About the Author -- Index
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