Abstract
Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2013) considers the relationship of Divine Love with the individual soul, and its corresponding relationships to the other as neighbor. In this article, I analyze the congruency of Malick’s form and content by correlating the relationship of his dynamic, existential filmmaking style with the film’s phenomenologically constructed plotline. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness and Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love contribute to my analysis, aiding our understanding of love’s sheer gratuity and sacrificial labor, amid inevitable idolatry and despondency, in To the Wonder’s intersecting narratives. While Marion helps us comprehend the affective qualities of “saturated phenomena” in the film’s formal dimensions, Kierkegaard elucidates the film’s many iterations of love. Malick aesthetically demonstrates the reciprocity of love and the experience of wonder as contingent operations, making To the Wonder a cinematic phenomenology of the fractured yet indissoluble dimensions of love.
Highlights
Religions 2016, 7, 76; doi:10.3390/rel7060076 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religionsTerrence Malick’s film To the Wonder (2013) begins with a black screen and the word “Newborn.”1Shot on a digital handheld camera, our first images appear as shaky, unclear and discolored, giving us the appearance of pedestrian immediacy
We have considered the finesse Malick has employed in structuring his films, but why is the way they are composed so important as it pertains to their “givenness”? What are the affective qualities of
“saturated phenomena” that Malick seems so intent on capturing?5 Philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, who originated the term in question, intimates complex realities that border the unintelligible in his study of art and revelation
Summary
Religions 2016, 7, 76; doi:10.3390/rel7060076 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions. Malick’s modus operandi is inherited from several key contributions in the history of cinema, especially cinéma vérité techniques from the French New Wave film directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Malick requires his actors to improvise, exploring land and space with the texts that they have read, as a kind of phenomenological exercise in discovering their characters as they film This opening frame is identical to the opening of Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), sharing the same opening line, and a black screen with the viewer opening their eyes onto the world. Malick his team of editors based on their sensibilities extra footage the orchestrates narrative within the spontaneously curated vignettes Life they splicecontributing scenes together, Malick’s films a series “consecutive by collectively telling a editormaking explains that. Did this event ever happen at all? Or was it a seaside mirage, a dream of the possible, an icon of what their love could become?
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