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robert sinnerbrink
CINEMATIC BELIEF
bazinian cinephilia and
malicks the tree of life
concern with the ontology of the cinematographic
image. The second is their complex relationship,
both critical and transformative, with the idea of
cinematic realism; the way cinema, thanks to its
automatism, can open up and expand our sense
of reality to encompass perception, affect, and
thought. The third concerns the power of cinema
to confront our disorientation in a world in which
the inherited paradigms of perception, representation, and action are in crisis.8 Whether couched
in terms of realism (Bazin), scepticism (Cavell),
nihilism (Deleuze), or the power of the image to
reveal the world anew (Bazin, Cavell, and
Deleuze), these shared concerns centre on the
relationship between cinema and belief: how does
the image carry, depict, and elicit conviction for
us? What can cinema do when inherited
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cinematic belief
paradigms of representation (what Deleuze calls
the sensory-motor action schema) begin to break
down? Can cinema restore a sense of belief in the
world as image; a mass of images in which we no
longer quite believe? If cinema, as Bazin argues,
can embalm time through the power of images,
can it also give us, in Deleuzes words, reasons
to believe in this world a belief in the world
mediated by images, precisely when the cinemas
power to elicit and carry conviction has begun
to wane?
Given the so-called crisis in film theory, the
digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed
interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film
philosophy, Bazins thought appears ripe for
retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the
renaissance of philosophical film theory, as I shall
argue, is less epistemological and ontological than
moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the
revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not
only their power to reveal reality under a
multiplicity of aspects but also to satisfy our
desire for myth to allow an aesthetic overcoming of the limits of consciousness and
memory. The question I wish to explore is
whether cinema has the power to restore our
belief in reality, in the worlds that it can reveal, in
the experience that it can capture and transfigure.
My case study for exploring this question, the
question of belief in cinema or what we could also
call a Bazinian cinephilia, will be Terrence
Malicks The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose
ambition is to create a mythology personal,
historical, and cosmological capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world.
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essence of the cinematic medium, paying scant
attention to the manner in which these theoretical
reflections on film are situated within his critical
discussion of particular films, styles, or genres.15
Far from separating criticism from theorisation,
Bazins reflections on realism encompass at once
an aesthetic, a psychological drive, a concern with
ontology, and a moral-ethical perspective.
Bazinian realism refers not only to the ontological
dimensions of the cinematic image but also to an
aesthetic style or practice aiming at aesthetic and
moral authenticity; a rich and complex rendering
of cinematic (and psychological) reality, motivated by a psychological desire to preserve
experience against the inexorability of time and
death. This is the desire behind the development
of cinema as well as of painting and photography:
What a strange vanity painting is, Bazin
remarks, citing Pascal, if we do not see, beneath
our absurd admiration, a primitive need to
vanquish time through the immortality of
form!16
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cinematic belief
Bazin confirms this kind of claim in remarks such
as the following:
There is no one realism, but many realisms.
Every era seeks its own, meaning the
technology and the aesthetic which can best
record, hold onto and recreate whatever we
wish to retain of reality.23
specificities of the cinematic medium (its rendering of time, place, movement, gesture and
expression). As Morgan puts it:
The work of style is to generate a social fact by
taking up an attitude towards physical reality,
showing it in a particular way. As Bazin notes,
realism is a way of giving reality meaning27
. . . Facts do not enter a film with a pre-existent
meaning that is simply reproduced; they
emerge in the way style confers (new)
signification on physical reality.28
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nature, engagement with history, or spiritualmoral experience.
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cinematic belief
The magic of the image is its power to overcome
our fear of death, to satisfy the desire to preserve
evanescent experience. Bazins famous mummy
complex links the origin of our desire to make
images with the satisfaction of one of human
psychologys most fundamental needs: to defend
against time.39 The image is a talisman replacing
the tangible object, a magical artefact dispelling
my fear of death.40 Despite the narrow contemporary focus on Bazins ontology of the image,
these psychological, existential, anthropological
dimensions of Bazins concern with realism are
not to be gainsaid.
There are, of course, other ways of defending
Bazins insight than treating it as a psychological
or existential claim. As Morgan points out, the
indexical sign reading of Bazin gets into
difficulty, for an indexical sign cannot be the
object itself. So how is this claim to be
understood? Morgan responds by giving it a
Cavellian interpretation, emphasising the role of
intersubjective acknowledgement as a condition of knowing.41 According to this perspective,
what the image depicts is a social fact rather
than a brute existent; a case of acknowledging
shared meaning rather than knowing a discrete
object. It expresses an intersubjectively shared
form of intelligibility that reveals an items social
and cultural meaning.42 It is in this sense that we
can say that the image is the model; it acknowledges its own status as a cinematic image, but also
presents us with a meaningful fact within a
cinematic world. The image draws attention to,
acknowledges so to speak, that what we are seeing
is a cinematic artefact; but it also reveals the
object, action, or event in its rich singularity or
expressive potential, as acknowledging both its
reality and its expressivity.
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the love of cinema and of the experience if affords
us its love of the world rendered through
images raised to the level of conceptual selfreflection. As we shall see with Malicks The Tree
of Life, it is this aspect of Bazins belief in
cinema belief in the aesthetic powers of film,
belief elicited by the authenticity of the image,
and belief that narrative cinema can depict that
Malicks hymn to life expresses with sublime
enthusiasm (in the Greek sense): a cinephiliac
love of the world revealed through images, a love
that also demands and inspires thought.
What cinema adds to photography, moreover,
is the power of revealing, as well as resisting,
time: the capacity for aesthetic transformation
through temporal transcendence. The cinematic
image, Bazin tells us, reveals the object itself,
and does so by liberating it from all its temporal
contingencies. What it reveals is a cinematic
reality that is both expressive and independent of
temporality in the phenomenological sense of the
time that we experience ordinarily. Cinematic
images, in expressing a world, take objects or
actions out of time, revealing these anew in a
unique time that is no longer a part of history, a
time that has confounded past and present in
order to become, so to speak, mythic.
Mythic time, as anthropologists and folklorists
observe, is ahistorical, timeless, cyclical, nonlinear, symbolic, and often supernaturally
inflected; it is the time before historical time
(or after) that accounts for the emergence of the
gods, the origin of the cosmos, and the end of
times.47 It coalesces originary time with the
present, opening up an experience of the sacred
in which not only are the gods symbolically
represented but actually experienced as presences
playing a guiding role within human experience.48 Part of the magical aspect of cinema,
for Bazin, is that it opens up, through technology,
a dimension in which a trace of originary time
and mythic meaning becomes manifest: a time
that is both within and without history; a
time that confounds past and present, that
transfigures ordinary perception revealing its
deeper aesthetic, existential and moral significance. The remarkable thing about the cinema is
that is achieves this effect automatically, thanks
to the technological rendering of reality through
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cinematic belief
in an individual viewers personal experience that
also partakes of a collective memory or contributes to a shared cultural archive. What these
different forms of temporality might be remains
ontologically obscure in Bazins writings, yet they
are what make the cinema potentially transformative of our habitual ways of perceiving, feeling,
and thinking. These multiple senses of duration
a coexistence of layers of time, past and present,
mythic and historical time are also a feature of
Malicks The Tree of Life, which explores this
Bazinian mythic aspect of movies in dramatic
fashion.
bazinian cinephilia
Bazinian belief is a matter not only of cinematic
images but of cultural-historical meaning. It is
the mythic power of cinema, its capacity to elicit
and sustain belief, which explains Bazins insistence on the aesthetic and moral importance of
realism. So what of Bazins aesthetics of belief?
There are at least three senses of the concept
relevant to his work: (1) belief in the aestheticmoral possibilities of cinema, its power of
aesthetic revelation, which is expressed in
Bazins championing of criticism, of theorising
via criticism; (2) belief aroused by the cinematic
image, its power of ontological revelation, which
is expressed in Bazins championing of realism,
the carrying of conviction in regard to a
(fictional) world; and (3) belief within cinematic
narrative, its power of depicting belief, expressed
most explicitly in spiritual-religious films, which
both narrate the experience of faith or belief
while at the same time enacting or manifesting a
belief in the power of cinema itself (as I shall
discuss in The Tree of Life). The concept of
belief, for Bazin, refers to cinemas power to
reveal reality anew; to transform our experience,
to transfigure our spirit, which is the true
vocation of art.
This merging of aesthetic concerns with
spiritual transcendence has been a recurring
theme in the reception of Bazins work. Indeed,
the question of Bazins spiritualism has often
served as a critical reference point both for his
defenders and for his critics.52 Although Bazins
spiritual-religious sensibilities imbue his writing
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possible? Can it give us reasons to believe in this
world? With its fusion of moral, historical, and
metaphysical-spiritual visions, The Tree of Life
aims to cultivate belief in this world, thereby
challenging our endemic scepticism, whether
towards religion, mythology, love, or the aesthetic possibilities of film. In this regard Malicks
film echoes Bazins desire to show how cinema is
an idealist and technological miracle; a cinephiliac medium of aesthetic revelation capable of
evoking personal, historical, even cosmic
memory. Malicks wager is that, despite our
pervasive cultural and moral scepticism, cinema,
as a poetic machinery for the creation of
revelatory images, can still elicit and sustain
belief, giving us reasons to believe in this
world.
The key to the film, I suggest, is the complex
dialectic between the way of Nature and the way
of Grace. These two paths through life compose a
dynamic relationship articulated at a number of
levels in the film, from the personal to the
metaphysical. It links the young Jacks (Hunter
McCracken) attempts to reconcile his fathers
(Brad Pitt) egoistic self-interest with his mothers
(Jessica Chastain) love and mercy; it relates the
sublimity of nature in its elemental power, the
blind striving of life struggling to exist, with a
transcendent dimension of spirit that unites us
with the cosmos as a whole. One of Bazins
remarks on Bressons Diary of a Country Priest
(1950) resonates well with Malicks numinous
hymn to life. It too is
a new form of drama, one that is specifically
religious, or better yet, theological: a phenomenology of salvation and grace.54
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reception history of Malicks other films, critical
responses to The Tree of Life stand polarised
between rapturous celebration and sarcastic
ridicule. Noted critic Roger Ebert, for example,
praised Malicks work as a film of vast ambition
and deep humility, attempting no less than to
encompass all of existence and view it through
the prism of a few infinitesimal lives.61 By
contrast, Amy Taubin, another noted critic, took
precisely the opposite view, complaining that
the films attempt to represent the presence of
the Creator in all living things from the Big Bang
to the End of Time relies on an aesthetically
insufferable pile-on of maudlin voiceover combined with a glut of classical religious music.62
Taubins complaints concerning Malicks use of
voiceovers (used far less than in The Thin Red
Line) and challenging musical repertoire63 are
representative of a common strain of critical
rejection criticising the films aesthetic as
compromised by its spiritual-religious commitment. What separates the perspectives of Ebert
and Taubin, then, is less a dispute over the films
aesthetic qualities than a dispute over its status as
a religious work of art.64 Indeed, it is precisely
The Tree of Lifes Christianity or rather its
religiosity more broadly construed that lies at
the heart of the films polarised reception:65 the
question whether acknowledging the films religiosity is compatible with critical appreciation of
its aesthetic or philosophical qualities.
It is interesting to note the interpretative
strategies that critics have deployed in order to
deal with the films religiosity. There are four
that a survey of the films critical reception
reveals: (1) uncritical affirmation of the film
because of its religious content (the Christian
interpretation of the film); (2) uncritical rejection
of the film for essentially the same reason (the
anti-religious response); (3) disavowal of the
films religious content in favour of its aesthetic
merits (the aestheticist reading); and (4)
acknowledgement of the films aesthetic merits
and transformation of its religious content into
generic or post-secular forms of spirituality
(the revisionist approach).66 One common
move is to downplay the religiosity and praise
the films aesthetic virtues; alternatively, one can
criticise the films alleged aesthetic vices as a way
of rejecting its religiosity. The difficulty, however, is that these two aspects are inextricably
entwined (e.g., the pointed use of voiceover in the
film). The Tree of Lifes religiosity therefore
poses a problem, not only for evaluating aesthetic
responses to the film but for understanding the
relationship between film, philosophy, and
religion.
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multivalent notion that spans many of the major
world religions, various mythological accounts of
the origin of life, but also refers to Darwins
conception of evolutionary development.71 This
coalescence of meanings in the title of the film
combining Christian, mythological, and evolutionary senses is reflected in its synthesis of
disparate styles and genres. There are, I suggest,
at least three narrative/mythic dimensions of The
Tree of Life the familial melodrama, the
historical-spiritual Fall or loss of the American
Dream, and the cosmological creation myth
combining spiritualism and naturalism all of
which are woven together in the story of the
OBrien family. Given the complexity of the film,
with its mythic coalescing of narrative layers,
temporal series, and personal, historical, and
metaphysical dimensions, some further description of its structure seems warranted.
All three dimensions coexist and communicate
with each other in a topology that could be called
mythopoetic (combining myth and poetry). (1)
The first layer is the familial melodrama, which
centres on middle-aged architect Jack OBriens
(Sean Penn) spiritual-existential crisis on the
anniversary of his younger brothers death (killed
when he was nineteen). Set during the course of
this one day, a troubled and lost OBrien
recollects, via a complex use of episodic flashbacks, the lost life and joy of his childhood,
growing up with his two brothers, stern father
(Brad Pitt) and serene mother (Jessica Chastain)
in Waco, Texas, during the 1950s.72 (2) The
second layer is the historical-spiritual story, the
way the OBrien familys story depicts mainly
through visual style, mise-en-sce`ne, framing,
composition, and inspired use of light a
Fall narrative from the romanticised historical
Eden of the 1950s Midwest to the spiritually
destitute space of contemporary urban America,
marked by the imposing, geometrically ordered
glass and steel architecture of downtown
Houston. (3) The third layer is the cosmological
creation myth, interpolated within the familial
melodrama and historical Fall stories, which
evokes the sublime emergence of life within a reenchanted universe; a naturalised cosmos developing with evolutionary vitality and imbued with
aesthetic grandeur and spiritual wonder.
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cinematic belief
Fig.1. The luminous realism of Malicks cinema.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
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Fig. 2. His lifelong quest to reconcile Nature and Grace. TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
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cinematic belief
fortune and happiness but loss and despair, the
sudden death of Mrs OBriens beloved youngest
son. This shattering event is announced by the
mothers silent reading of a telegram delivered to
the family home, and a devastating phone call to
the father drowned out by the drone of propeller
engines.76 This overwhelming loss almost
unspeakable, unintelligible, hence the silence or
noise accompanying the images of the mother and
father as they receive the news threatens to
destroy the family, transposing the lesson of Job
to an ordinary family in the American Midwest.
Waves of grief reverberate throughout Jacks
adult life, which is materially and professionally
successful but emotionally and spiritually void.
His enduring melancholy culminates in the day
that frames the entire movie, presumably the
anniversary of his brothers death. We see Jack
waking with a start in his austere, architecturally
designed home, his wife silent, withdrawn; unable
to communicate his emotion, Jack lights a
solitary candle in commemoration of his lost
brother and, perhaps, his own childhood self.
This one day, a spiritual moment of vision or
Kierkegaardian Augenblick in which all is
transfigured, reverberates throughout Jacks life,
linking the plenitude of his childhood in the
1950s with the barrenness of the contemporary
world, enveloping Jacks personal sense of
despair and involuntary memory within a
mythic origin and end of time.
The sons death is the crucial event that
defines this family odyssey, Mrs OBrien and Jack
both struggling to reconcile this loss with belief
in a benevolent God. In a significant moment
during her grieving, while reciting a comforting
prayer, Mrs OBrien questions God, asking
plaintively, What did you gain? The grandmother (Fiona Shaw) tries to counsel her,
advocating a Christian stoicism in the face of
pain and suffering: The Lord gives and the Lord
takes away . . . sends flies to wounds he should
heal. The waves of grief reach across time, his
brothers loss still affecting Jack in his adult life,
as he struggles with his sceptical despair:
Worlds going to the dogs. People are greedy,
just getting worse, he murmurs in a voiceover
recalling his character Welsh in The Thin Red
Line. Ascending in a glass lift in his austere
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the numinous origin of things, images of creation
and the emergence of matter, the evolution of life
from the primeval chaos, the appearance of
dinosaurs on earth, including a startling state
of nature sequence in which a dinosaur
(a
Troodon
confronting
an
injured
Parasaurolophus) displays a moment of animal
grace, a mythic depiction of a meteor hitting the
earth, extinguishing the dinosaurs, destroying in
the blink of an eye what had taken eons to evolve.
What the cosmological myth shows is how
nature and grace coexist within a dynamic unity
of opposites; a pre-Socratic vision combining
Heraclitean cosmic fire with Empodocles divine
principles of love (philia) and strife (neikos) as
the basic impulses attracting and separating
matter in the universe. It shows how a
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cinematic belief
Fig. 6. Cinematic thinking: Nature and Grace. TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
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Teilhard de Chardin. As Jeffrey Crouse notes,
Teilhards influence animates the whole of
Bazin, his teleological version of Bergsonian
creative evolution linking the development of
life in the universe with the inspired articles
of Christian revelation.79 From the emergence
of matter in the cosmos (the geosphere), the
biological evolution of life (the biosphere), of
human consciousness and its technologically
mediated development into a sphere of transpersonal consciousness (the noosphere), creative
evolution, for Teilhard, aims at and would
eventually reach what he called the Omega
Point: the ultimate merging of creation,
humanity, and God.80 Teilhards vision of a
cosmic mind/global brain or noosphere offered
Bazin and perhaps also Malick a striking
concept/metaphor to capture the revelatory
powers of the cinema: a spiritual technology or
brain-screen capable of uniting the disparate
consciousnesses of millions of individuals, one
which makes possible the contemplation of
nature, the rendering of subjective experience,
and the aesthetic revealing of reality in its
multifarious facets.81 Indeed, for Bazin, the
cinema, was already a means of personalizing
the universe, a preview of Teilhards noosphere;82 a statement that could well be applied
to The Tree of Life, a film embodying what
Bazin once described as essential to cinema,
namely the love for creation itself.83
It is in these senses that The Tree of Life
exemplifies a Bazinian cinephilia or cinema of
belief: a belief in this world, comprising the
conflicting powers of Nature and Grace; a belief in
love, in the philosophical-spiritual sense of agape;
a cinematic love of nature and of the world,
expressed in the radiant cinematography of
Emmanuel Lubezki, capturing the everyday in
its contingent beauty, its breathtaking singularity;
and a belief in the revelatory power of cinema, its
capacity to challenge our scepticism towards
moral, aesthetic, or spiritual authenticity. From
this point of view, The Tree of Life expresses
thought in images, what we could call a cinematic
thinking: a meditation on childhood, grief, and
loss; a metaphysical speculation on the origin and
end of life; a symphonic poem on the meaning of
suffering, death, and love. By merging familial
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melodrama, historical recollection, and cosmopoetical myth, The Tree of Life is a moral and
aesthetic profession of belief. It expresses a
Bazinian cinephilia, a love of the
world; celebrating its beauty and
its darkness, its history and its
memory, in numinous images of
gravity and grace.
notes
The Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery
Project scheme (DP1092889) supported the
authors research for this essay. The views
expressed herein are those of the author and are
not necessarily those of the ARC.
1 Deleuze,Cinema 2 172.
2 Bazin,Theatre and Film (2) 197.
3 Idem,Cinema and Theology 61.
4 As Joubert-Laurencin remarks, [f ]ew intellectuals have suffered a more difficult, contorted,
and contradictory reception than has Bazin in his
native France these past fifty years (Andrew and
Joubert-Laurencin xiii). This difficult reception is
echoed in the anglophone world, as Hunter
Vaughan observes: Bazin has received one of the
most systematic drubbings in twentieth-century
cultural studies (100).
5 See Younger, Re-thinking Bazin. See also
Carroll; Henderson, Two Types of Film Theory;
Macbean; and Michelson.
6 See the critiques of Bazin by Carroll;
Henderson; Macbean; MacCabe; and Wollens
influential interpretation.
7 See Cavell16, 20, 21, 39,166; and Deleuze,Cinema
1 16, 24. Compare Cavells remark: Why are
movies important? I take it for granted that in various obvious senses they are. That this can be
taken for granted is the first fact I pose for consideration; it is, or was, a distinctive fact about
movies (4). I discuss this issue further in
Sinnerbrink 90 ^116.
8 See Cavell 16 ^ 41, 60 ^73; and Deleuze, Cinema 1
1^12, 58 ^72, 201^19.
9 See Sinnerbrink 7^ 8.
10 Crouse, Because we need him now: reenchanting film studies through Bazin. See also
cinematic belief
the recent essay collection Opening Bazin, edited
by Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin;
the 2007 Bazin special issue of Film International
edited by Jeffrey Crouse; Ivone Margulies edited
volume Rites of Realism; Philip Rosens Change
Mummified; Daniel Morgans Rethinking Bazin;
William Rothmans Bazin as Cavellian Realist;
and Richard Rushtons The Reality of Film 42^78.
Christian Keathley has explored the relationship
between Bazin and cinephilia (see his Cinephilia
and History) while Prakash Younger has retrieved
Bazin as an exemplar of cinephilosophy or film
philosophy.
11 See Carroll 108 ^ 09.
12 Mourniers Christian personalism was an
important influence on Bazin, in particular the
valorisation of individual moral autonomy, creative
freedom, and social responsibility against the
abstract universalism, impersonal institutions,
and depersonalisation wrought by capitalism. See
Mournier.
13 See Andrew, Andre Bazin.
14 As Colin MacCabe remarks: Bazins Catholic
humanism and realist aesthetic had banished him
from the theoretical reading lists of the 1960s and
1970s (75).
15 Carroll, for example, sharply distinguishes criticism from theory, remarking that Bazins astuteness as a critic makes up for his weakness as a
theorist: What fails as theory may excel as criticism (171).
17 Ibid. 8.
37 Bazin,Ontology 5^ 6.
44 Bazin,Ontology 9.
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45 Ibid.
46 Crouse (9) praises this as the most jaw-dropping idea I have ever encountered in film studies.
47 Cf.
The crucial difference between historical and
mythic time interpretation is related to the
model used for comprehending temporality.
Historical time is linear, continuous, and is
composed of unique events, but mythical
time is cyclical and repetitive. The latter
encompasses and unites two temporal
dimensions: the original time and the present. (Pentikainen 235)
48 See Allen (190):
Mythic time is sacred time, mythic history is
sacred history . . . mythic space is sacred
space . . . In Eliades interpretation of the
nature, structure, function and meaning of
myth, mythic believers actually become contemporaneous with the supernatural beings
and other sacred realities described in their
myths.
Many aspects of this mythic mode of presentation
and experience will also be apparent in Malicks
The Tree of Life.
49 Cf. Cavell:
The idea of and wish for the world
re-created in its own image was satisfied at
last by cinema. Bazin calls this the myth of
total cinema . . . What is cinemas way of satisfying the myth? Automatically, we said . . . It
means satisfying it without my having to do
anything, satisfying it by wishing. In a word,
magically. (39)
50 See Rosen,Change 29.
51 Morgan 452.
52 See Bill Nicholscriticism that Bazins theory of
film presents us with: [a] dual and perhaps contradictory approach combining transcendent spiritualism and sociology (151).
53 Crouse 9.
54 Bazin,Diary of a Country Priest and the Robert
Bresson Style 150.
55 Quoted from Malicks press release on the film
before its public release.
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cinematic belief
65 As Peter Bradshaw remarks: [p]eople would
repeatedly reproach me for my own laudatory
notice; this film, they said, was pretentious,
boring and ^ most culpably of all ^ Christian.
Didnt I realise, they asked, that Malick was a
Christian?
66 See Sterritt for an aestheticist reading of the
film that takes issue with Malicks alleged
theodicy. Jones acknowledges the films religiosity, as mentioned above, but rejects the attribution of a Christian meaning to the film. Pfeifer
hedges on the question of religiosity, contrasting
two contrary perspectives that the film attempts
(with difficulty) to reconcile: that of the idealist,
for whom The Tree of Life is an ineffable aesthetic
and emotional revelation of beauty and spiritual
truth; and that of the analyst, for whom the film
is a self-reflexive cinematic meditation on
memory, childhood, and history.
67 Bazin,Cinema and Theology 64.
68 See Otto. Otto popularised the concept of the
numinous (from the Latin, numen), which was
taken up by Carl Jung, C.S. Lewis, and in the religious studies of Mircea Eliade. It describes a shattering encounter with a transcendent dimension
beyond ordinary experience (the sacred as
wholly other) that resists description and comprehension. As a religious experience it is characterised both by a sense of terror (a fear and
trembling or mysterium tremendum) eliciting dread
or anxiety, as well as rapture or fascination evoking silent awe or wonder.
69 In this category we might include films such as
Kubricks 2001,Tarkovskys Solaris (1972) and Stalker
(1979), Kies lowskis The Double Life of Veronique
(1993), Apichatpong Weerasethakuls Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (2010), and
BelaTarrsTheTurin Horse (2011).
70 The Tree of Life is mentioned in the Book of
Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and hence are
cast out of the Garden of Eden: And the LORD
God said, Behold, the man is become as one of
us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put
forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live forever (Genesis 3.22, King
James edition). The film evokes this quest to
retrieve the fruit of the Tree of Life (eternal life),
but within the limits of our natural and historical
dwelling.
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ideas concerning the reconciliation of science and
theology.
80 Crouse 9. See Teilhards posthumously published The Phenomenon of Man, which details the
Darwinian evolutionary development of life and
the Lamarckian or convergent evolutionary development of culture towards a unified field of consciousness (God).
81 Deleuze (Cinema 2 215) takes up the termnoosphere in discussing the relation between thought
and cinema; the noosphere is formed by the circulation of cinematic noosigns ^ expressing topological, probabilistic, and irrational cuts/
connections ^ that together compose a new
image of thought. The noosign, for its part, is
defined as an image which goes beyond itself
towards something that can only be thought
(Cinema 2 335). Deleuze takes theTeilhardian noosphere in a materialist direction, regrounding its
Bergsonian version of creative evolution via the
immanent becoming of nature, removing its spiritualist dimensions of transcendence and thus
blockingTeilhards teleological naturalist theology.
82 Andrew, Andre Bazin 66 ^ 67; qtd in Crouse10.
83 In the world of cinema one must have the
love of a De Sica for creation itself (Bazin, De
Sica 76).
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Robert Sinnerbrink
Department of Philosophy
Building W6A, Balaclava Rd
Macquarie University
North Ryde, NSW 2109
Sydney
Australia
E-mail: robert.sinnerbrink@mq.edu.au