Listening to the logos

pp. 155-188

in: James Batcho, Terrence Malick's unseeing cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

While the previous chapter was an overview of Malick's temporal shift, this chapter explores his post-Days of Heaven films in depth from the standpoint of unseeing. Shifting states of listening resonate an ethics of openness in The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life. A more hopeful chapter than the audible failures of Chap.  4, listening becomes a re-engagement with lost time through acts of recollecting and imagining. Malick presents a listening that resonates hearing and moves toward new durations: listening-for, listening-to, listening beyond, and answering the call of new thinking. Moving through deep unseeing expressions in Malick's work, it brings Kierkegaard, Deleuze, and Heidegger together to unfold themes of love, family, redemption, and the desire to reconnect and ultimately reform a lost unity.