*symposium

The perspective of Terrence Malick

By Jon Baskin

 

One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain, that death’s got the final word … Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory.
—welsh, the thin red line

Is it the essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with a happy eye?
—wittgenstein, notebooks

The director of four films beginning with Badlands in 1973, Terrence Malick studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard before abandoning a doctorate on Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. A promising journalist and academic—as well as an outstanding high school football player—in 1969 Malick published what is still the authoritative translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons. That same year he ended his academic career and enrolled alongside David Lynch and Paul Schrader in the American Film Institute’s new conservatory, developed to encourage “film as art” in America. Although his background has long encouraged commentators to investigate his influences and sources, Malick’s films also merit consideration as artistic achievements that confront their audiences with a distinctive experience. Like any great filmmaker, Malick demands that we see in a new way. Unlike most filmmakers, his films are also about the problem of seeing—that is, of perspective.