Previous scholarly work on the director Terrence Malick has argued that his films “ Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World> (2005) “ are, in varying ways, philosophical. This assessment is usually made via an analysis of the films in relation to a single philosophical metatext (frequently the work of Martin Heidegger) that transcends the concrete historical situation of both the given film and the historically existing viewer. This study seeks to intervene in this critical literature by theorizing an approach for understanding Malick's films as works that do not merely illustrate already articulated philosophical themes but that rather function, in dialogue with the spectator, as an invitation to generate creative and historically situated meaning. The film medium, this study argues, is uniquely philosophical in that it exists in time (via the gradual entropy of the celluloid film print) as does the finite, historically embodied spectator. Malick's cinema, I argue, reflects poetically upon the finite nature of both the film medium and the viewing subject through films that depict subjective experience in the historical past.
Rather than construct a theoretical methodology that will then be “applied” to the films, the study uses its first three chapters to construct a propadeutic (in philosophy, a preparatory framework) that in the remaining chapters inform an exploration of the philosophical thought that Malick's four films encourage. The first chapter of this study places the dissertation's framework in critical debates about the use and function of philosophy in relation to film. The second and third chapters then illustrate in greater detail the project's own approach. The second chapter uses the work of D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and others to suggest that in watching films we are led to reflect upon what we value as existential, becoming spectators. The third chapter builds upon the phenomenology of Vivian Sobchack in order to suggest how the temporality of film experience emerges through film space. In the final four chapters, I use the insights of the propadeutic to craft a philosophically informed critical analysis of Malick's four films. This analysis demonstrates not only the philosophical value of the director's oeuvre, but also functions as a case study demonstrating the larger value of philosophy and existential phenomenology to the critical study of Malick and film in general.