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A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line

2006; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/film.2006.0027

1466-4615

Robert Sinnerbrink,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

In his 1979 foreword to The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell remarks on the curious relationship between Heidegger and cinema (1979, ix-xxv). Cavell is inspired to do so by Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), a film that not only presents us with images of preternatural beauty, but also acknowledges the self-referential character of the cinematic image (Cavell 1979, xiv ff). For Cavell, Malick's films have a formal radiance that suggest something of Heidegger's thinking of the relationship between Being and beings, the radiant self-showing of things in luminous appearance (1979, xv). Days of Heaven does indeed have a metaphysical vision of the world, but 'one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human existence-call it the arena between earth (or days) and heavenquite realized this way on film before' (Cavell 1979, xiv-xv). As Cavell observes, however, the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and Malick's films seems to challenge both philosophers and film-theorists. The film-theorists struggle to show how Heidegger is relevant to the experience of cinema, while the philosophers grapple with the question of cinema and aesthetics, precisely because film puts into question traditional concepts of visual art, as Walter Benjamin showed long ago (Cavell 1979, xvi-xvii). In what follows, I take up Cavell's invitation to think about the relationship between Heidegger and film by considering Malick's 1998 masterpiece, The Thin Red Line. The question I shall explore is whether we should describe The Thin Red Line as 'Heideggerian Cinema'. Along the way I discuss two different approaches to the film: a 'Heideggerian' approach that reads the film as exemplifying Heideggerian themes (Furstenau and MacAvoy 2003); and a 'film as philosophy' approach (Simon Critchley 2005) arguing that, while the film is philosophical, we should refrain from reading it in relation to any particular philosophical framework. In conclusion, I offer some brief remarks about