Toward a dynamic ecocritical aesthetics: rethinking ‘Eco’ for the films of Terrence Malick

ABSTRACT

This essay tests the framework of ecocinema for the films of Terrence Malick, engaging the preoccupation with natural elements and environments that characterizes his work. Exploring this interface motivates certain key innovations to ecocinema as it is familiarly formulated. First, it expands the received picture of film’s eco-aesthetic, to consider formal strategies and effects that are as much corrosive as contemplative, with a special emphasis on montage. Second, this discussion also proposes a refreshed interpretive practice that highlights ecocinema’s phenomenological inflection, positioning it as an attentiveness to the shared contours of the world and as an expression of wonder at this situation. Serving as a detailed case study, a close analysis of Malick’s To The Wonder (2012) reads the film a distinctly phenomenological project, tracing the contours of lived experience in ways that are permeating and complex.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17400309.2019.1563361