Cinematic Belief

Abstract

Given the so-called “crisis” in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their power to reveal reality under a multiplicity of aspects but to satisfy our desire for myth – to allow an aesthetic overcoming of the limits of consciousness and memory. The question I wish to explore is whether cinema has the power to restore our belief in reality, in the worlds that film can reveal, in the experience that it can capture and transfigure. My case study for exploring this question, the question of belief in cinema or what we could call a Bazinian cinephilia, will be Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose sublime aesthetics and unorthodox religiosity has provoked polarised critical responses, but whose remarkable ambition is to create a mythology – personal, historical, and cosmological – capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world.