Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Terrence Malick: A Philosophical Cinema? - Malick as filmmaker and philosopher - Can film ‘do philosophy’? - Malick’s Cinematic Ethics Chapter 1: Approaching Cinematic Ethics: Badlands and Days of Heaven - Badlands: Myth, history, and violence - Days of Heaven: Myth, love, and tragedy - A ‘negative’ cinematic ethic Chapter 2: Philosophy Encounters Film: The Thin Red Line - What is a ‘Heideggerian’ cinema? - Malick as phenomenologist of finitude - Malick as cinematic philosopher - The Thin Red Line’s ‘Vernacular Metaphysics’ - The Thin Red Line as Existential Ethics Chapter 3: Philosophy Learns from Film: The New World - Exploring Cinematic Worlds - Romanticism, Nature, Culture - Mythic History and Cinematic Poetry - Exploring Cinematic Romanticism Chapter 4: Cinema as Ethics: The Tree of Life - From ‘film as philosophy’ to cinematic ethics - The Tree of Life and Cinematic Belief - Aesthetic experience and transformative ethics - Appendix: Voyage of Time Chapter 5: Discourses on Love: Malick’s ‘Weightless’ Trilogy - Malick’s ‘weightless’ or ‘faith and love’ trilogy (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song) - Love sick: a Kierkegaardian critique - Poetic phenomenologies of loving experience - Myth, Narrative, and Abstraction: the challenge of Malick’s late films Conclusion: Malick’s cinematic ethics (a philosophical dialogue) - The rationalist sceptic versus the romantic idealist (three questions): 1) How to avoid naïve romanticism, aesthetic pretentiousness, and religious mysticism? 2) Malick’s ‘religious’ turn: are his films still philosophical? 3) Is a cinematic response to nihilism enough? - Cinematic thinking as ethical experience Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

An original philosophical interpretation of Terence Malik's oeuvre from one of the best philosophers of film writing today

About the Author

Robert Sinnerbrink is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, MacQuarrie University, Australia. He is the author of Cinematic Ethics (2016), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Understanding Hegelism (2007)

Reviews

“[An] homage to Malick (b. 1943) and a robust invocation and endorsement of the relation between filmmaking and philosophy … The book is well written and well informed. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.”
*CHOICE*

Robert Sinnerbrink is among the most astute and persistent philosophical interpreters of Terrence Malick’s cinematic oeuvre. This detailed and comprehensive survey offers a sure guide to Malick’s films as well as to the voluminous critical literature that surrounds it.
*Stuart Kendall, Associate Professor, California College of the Arts, USA*

For some time now, Robert Sinnerbrink has been arguing that film-philosophy is not simply about aesthetics. To approach a film as a form of philosophical expression, for Sinnerbrink, is to also see it as a site of potential existential, ethical, and even spiritual transformation. Sinnerbrink’s masterful treatment of Malick’s cinema makes that case eloquently and powerfully. Through his careful, close study of Malick’s work, Sinnerbrink challenges his readers to see beyond the dominant and fashionable horizons that inform current discussions about the nature of cinema.
*John Caruana, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Ryerson University, Canada*

In this rich and important book, Robert Sinnerbrink describes how his sense that cinema can be ‘philosophical’ has evolved through his engagement with Terrence Malick’s challenging and difficult cinematic works from Badlands to Song to Song. Sinnerbrink’s wonderfully detailed analyses of how, in each of the films discussed, specific features of Malick’s evolving cinematic style engage the viewer in philosophically important ‘cinematic thinking’ are a model of both exegetical and theoretical insight. Sinnerbrink makes a powerful case for a ‘cinematic ethics’, whereby cinema can produce an ethical experience capable of transforming us aesthetically, psychologically, and even culturally.
*David Davies, Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada*

Sinnerbrink has produced an essential (and nostalgic) trip through the responses to Malick’s work.
*Film-Philosophy Journal*