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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 17 number 4 december 2012
Restoring our belief in the world – this is the
power of modern cinema (when it stops being
bad). Whether we are Christians or atheists, in
our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons
to believe in this world.
Gilles Deleuze1
For a time, the film is the universe, the world
or, if you like, nature.
Andre Bazin2
. . . the cinema is in itself already a kind of
miracle
Andre Bazin3
The work of Andre Bazin presents us with a
paradox. His essays have been revered as
perhaps the most influential in the history of film
studies, and at the same time renounced as
representing what ‘‘modern’’ film theory has
defined itself against.4 Commencing with some
of Bazin’s own disciplines in Cahiers du cinema
during the early 1960s, and continuing with the
rise of structuralist, semiological, and psycho-
analytic theory in the 1960s and 1970s, each new
generation of film theory seems to have repeated
this ritual renunciation.5 Bazin’s writings have
thus been criticised for many things: for being
insufficiently political, ignorant of ideological
structures of representation, for advocating a
pernicious ‘‘medium essentialism,’’ or maintain-
ing an implausible, naively realist ontology of the
cinematic image.6 Yet Bazin’s remarkable fusion
of film criticism and theoretical reflection has also
inspired some of the most important philosophers
to have written on film. Stanley Cavell and Gilles
Deleuze, for example, both owe a debt to Bazin,
and address in their work one of the questions that
also moved him: why does film matter? What is
its philosophical-cultural significance?7
There are a number of issues that unite Bazin
with Cavell and Deleuze. The first is their shared
concern with the ontology of the cinematographic
image. The second is their complex relationship,
both critical and transformative, with the idea of
cinematic realism; the way cinema, thanks to its
‘‘automatism,’’ can open up and expand our sense
of ‘‘reality’’ to encompass perception, affect, and
thought. The third concerns the power of cinema
to confront our disorientation in a world in which
the inherited paradigms of perception, represen-
tation, and action are in crisis.8 Whether couched
in terms of realism (Bazin), scepticism (Cavell),
nihilism (Deleuze), or the power of the image to
reveal the world anew (Bazin, Cavell, and
Deleuze), these shared concerns centre on the
relationship between cinema and belief: how does
the image carry, depict, and elicit conviction for
us? What can cinema do when inherited
robert sinnerbrink
CINEMATIC BELIEFbazinian cinephilia andmalick’s the tree of life
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/12/040095^23� 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2012.747332
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paradigms of representation (what Deleuze calls
the sensory-motor action schema) begin to break
down? Can cinema restore a sense of belief in the
world as image; a mass of images in which we no
longer quite believe? If cinema, as Bazin argues,
can embalm time through the power of images,
can it also give us, in Deleuze’s words, ‘‘reasons
to believe in this world’’ – a belief in the world
mediated by images, precisely when the cinema’s
power to elicit and carry conviction has begun
to wane?
Given the so-called ‘‘crisis’’ in film theory, the
digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed
interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film
philosophy, Bazin’s thought appears ripe for
retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the
renaissance of philosophical film theory, as I shall
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 also to satisfy our
desire for myth – to allow an aesthetic over-
coming 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 it 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 also
call a Bazinian cinephilia, will be Terrence
Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose
ambition is to create a mythology – personal,
historical, and cosmological – capable of reani-
mating belief in cinema and in the world.
bazin’s redemption of cinematic reality
Why has Bazin provoked such polarised
responses? There are many answers one might
give. Here I shall emphasise what we might call
Bazin’s heresies: his belief in the revelatory power
of the cinema to reveal neglected or obscured
dimensions of reality; his advocacy of aesthetic
criticism over abstract theorisation; his concern
to reflect philosophically on film in ways that are
more than academic, that are culturally and
morally significant. From this point of view,
Bazin is better regarded, I suggest, as a film
philosopher, developing theoretical insights via
detailed film criticism, rather than a more
traditional philosopher of film, advancing inde-
pendent arguments on settled technical or
conceptual problems concerning the nature of
the medium.9 Bazin’s originality is to combine
film criticism with theoretical reflection in lucid
prose that is at once aesthetically revealing and
philosophically enlightening. His work thus
exemplifies what many philosophical film theor-
ists are calling for today, a meeting of theory and
criticism in ways that might contribute, as Jeffrey
Crouse suggests, to the re-enchantment of film
studies.10
In recent philosophical film theory, however,
especially among analytic theorists (Carroll’s
critique, for example), Bazin is presented as a
pioneering but misguided ‘‘naıve realist’’ who
argues for a ‘‘strong’’ ontological realism. On this
view, call it the ontological-aesthetic reading,
Bazin’s error was to isolate the ontological basis
of cinema (its photographic character) and to
argue that films that best harness this photo-
graphic realism – capturing a profilmic reality
through long takes, depth of field, natural
lighting, outdoor settings, naturalistic perfor-
mances, and unified composition – are aestheti-
cally superior because truer to the ‘‘essence’’ of
the medium as such.11 The other significant
interpretative tendency was to construe Bazin’s
thought as the expression of a phenomenologi-
cally grounded Catholic personalism (influenced
by Emmanuel Mounier),12 one that motivated
Bazin’s embrace of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomen-
ology and Sartre’s account of imagination,
coupled with a theologically charged preference
for humanist and personalist aesthetics and left-
Catholic morality and politics (exemplified by
Italian neo-realism).13 Both readings were chal-
lenged by French Marxist and structuralist film
critics in the 1960s, and by psychoanalytic-
semiotic theorists of the 1970s.14 Taken together,
Bazin’s ‘‘naıve realism,’’ his commitment to
phenomenology, and religious humanism, pre-
sented a ready target for the so-called ‘‘Grand
Theory’’ that followed in his wake.
Unfortunately some critics continue to con-
strue Bazin’s concerns with realism as a set of
purely ontological theses concerning the putative
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cinematic belief
‘‘essence’’ of the cinematic medium, paying scant
attention to the manner in which these theoretical
reflections on film are situated within his critical
discussion of particular films, styles, or genres.15
Far from separating criticism from theorisation,
Bazin’s reflections on realism encompass at once
an aesthetic, a psychological drive, a concern with
ontology, and a moral-ethical perspective.
Bazinian realism refers not only to the ontological
dimensions of the cinematic image but also to an
aesthetic style or practice aiming at aesthetic and
moral authenticity; a rich and complex rendering
of cinematic (and psychological) reality, moti-
vated by a psychological desire to preserve
experience against the inexorability of time and
death. This is the desire behind the development
of cinema as well as of painting and photography:
‘‘What a strange vanity painting is,’’ Bazin
remarks, citing Pascal, ‘‘if we do not see, beneath
our absurd admiration, a primitive need to
vanquish time through the immortality of
form!’’16
bazin’s belief in cinema
This desire for reality is linked with the
unavoidable belief that accompanies cinematic
images, even those we take to be artificial,
fictional, or stylised. Although I may be aware
that a photographic or cinematographic image is
constructed, I nonetheless invest it with an
authenticity or veracity. This is the aesthetic
power of the image to reveal the world in a way
that carries conviction:
Whatever the objections of our critical
faculties, we are obliged to believe in the
existence of the object represented: it is truly
re-presented, made present in time and
space . . . The most faithful drawing can give
us more information about the model, but it
will never, no matter what our critical faculties
tell us, possess the irrational power of
photography, in which we believe without
reservation.17
There are a number of notable features in this
passage. The first is the implicit contrast that
Bazin draws between our intellectual apprehen-
sion (our critical faculties) and our perception of
an object; the image gives us an apprehension of
the real itself, carrying conviction for us despite
‘‘what our critical faculties tell us.’’ Although I
know I am looking at an image, I take the
objects it depicts to have existed at a certain
time and place, namely when the photograph
was taken. A photograph of my child does not
present me with a mere likeness; I see my
daughter, and believe that it is her. I say,
‘‘that’s my daughter at age two,’’ not ‘‘that’s a
good likeness of her, as she was at two.’’ A
drawing or painting may present us with more
information about its object, but it can never
carry the perceptual veracity, the existential
conviction, that a photographic image could
(even though I know, obviously enough, that the
image of my daughter is just that – an image).
Bazin is clear that this belief in the existence of
what we see in the image is an unavoidable
conviction that persists despite rational reflec-
tion. He thus proposes a psychological and
aesthetic thesis concerning its power to carry
perceptual conviction: a pre-reflective belief in
the veracity of what we perceive through the
image.18 That is the real magic of movies: their
capturing of contingency and authenticity; their
elicitation of belief through the power of images
alone. The key to Bazin’s valorisation of
(aesthetic) realism is belief: the psychological
propensity to invest the image with a sense of
reality, the conviction that it bears the trace of a
former presence, coupled with the aesthetic
pleasure of responding to a meaningful (cine-
matic) world that also bears upon our shared
cultural-historical experience.19
As a number of theorists have argued, the
received view of Bazin as a naive ontological
realist – that film records a pre-given reality, thus
demands an aesthetic of cinematic realism – is
misleading.20 Daniel Morgan, for example, has
launched a convincing critique of the received
view, arguing that the ontology of the photo-
graphic image orients, but does not determine,
Bazin’s account of realism.21 Indeed, ‘‘realism,’’
Morgan argues, is less the name of a theoretical
position than of an ontological and aesthetic
problem that will preoccupy Bazin throughout his
career: it is not the name of a particular ‘‘style,
lack of style, or set of stylistic attributes, but a
process, a mechanism – an achievement.’’22
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Bazin confirms this kind of claim in remarks such
as the following:
There is no one realism, but many realisms.
Every era seeks its own, meaning the
technology and the aesthetic which can best
record, hold onto and recreate whatever we
wish to retain of reality.23
‘‘Realism,’’ for Bazin, is not a position that can be
understood independently of film criticism or of
historical context; rather, it is a complex
phenomenon provoking, as Cavell puts it, an
experience of ‘‘ontological restlessness.’’24 This
restlessness involves the challenge of articulating
the relationship that photographic and cinemato-
graphic images bear to reality, but also of
specifying what these different ‘‘realisms’’ mean
with reference to the style of particular auteurs
(that of de Sica differing from that of Rossellini,
for example), where each realism corresponds to
different demands and possibilities, be they
historical, aesthetic, technological, or economic
(in post-war Europe, for example).25 What Bazin
means by ‘‘realism,’’ then, is to describe how
filmmakers, in varying contexts, seek to render
filmed reality significant within a cinematic
world, be it fictional or documentary.
‘‘Realism’’ does not refer simply to the faithful
rendering of a profilmic reality but to the manner
in which that reality is rendered significant on
film. As Morgan suggests, it refers to how the
singular features of an image or an expression of
cinematic style – camera movements, mise-en-
scene, lighting, setting, and performance – are
transformed aesthetically into significant ‘‘facts’’
within a cinematic world.26 We should add that
style is not restricted to these ‘‘manipulable’’
dimensions of the image but also encompasses the
‘‘automatic’’ aspects of profilmic reality captured
by the camera, which are open to aesthetic
transformation through specific techniques of
cinematic presentation. In short, drawing on
Morgan’s reading, we can say that ‘‘realism’’ is a
complex phenomenon embracing the ‘‘auto-
matic’’ capturing of a profilmic reality, the
rendering of a cinematic world through signifi-
cant ‘‘facts’’ within that world (expressing
psychological, moral, social, or existential atti-
tudes or beliefs), and the acknowledgement of the
specificities of the cinematic medium (its render-
ing of time, place, movement, gesture and
expression). As Morgan puts it:
The work of style is to generate a social fact by
taking up an attitude towards physical reality,
showing it in a particular way. As Bazin notes,
realism is a way of ‘‘giving reality meaning’’27
. . . Facts do not enter a film with a pre-existent
meaning that is simply reproduced; they
emerge in the way style confers (new)
signification on physical reality.28
In this manner, cinematic style is a way of
lending significance to a filmed reality, of
rendering it as a complex cinematic world that
bears meaningfully upon shared social and
cultural concerns. It involves the cinematic
creation of ‘‘facts’’ that present compositional
details of the image so as to render these
meaningful through a particular kind of cine-
matic style; an aesthetic composition, transforma-
tion, and expression that can be specific to
distinctive cinematic worlds and indeed to
particular auteurs. Realism is an aesthetic
achievement concerning the constitution of cine-
matic reality. As Bazin writes:
The dispute over realism in art derives from
this misunderstanding, from the confusion
between the aesthetic and the psychological –
between true realism, which is a need to
express the meaning of the world in its
concrete aspects and in its essence, and the
pseudo-realism of trompe l’œil (or trompe
l’esprit), which is content with the illusion of
form.29
True realism attempts to express a meaningful
world, indeed a cinematic (fictional) world,
through a transformative vision and a distinctive
set of aesthetic techniques. And it does so with as
much authenticity as possible, combining con-
crete detail, unity of composition, with openness
to interpretation. As I shall discuss in more detail
with regard to Malick’s The Tree of Life, Bazin
champions the aesthetic capacity of film to
transfigure the capturing of time, place, and
action into expressions of unique cinematic
worlds – worlds that can reveal personal reflec-
tion, cultural memory, our encounter with
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cinematic belief
nature, engagement with history, or spiritual-
moral experience.
bazin’s realism revisited
Nonetheless, it is true that Bazin also underlines
the ontological aspect of the image, the causal
process that links the image with what it depicts.
The point is that Bazin’s interest in the
ontological aspects of the image is not separate
from his aesthetic and moral concerns.
Unfortunately, however, these have often been
ignored in the rush to construct Bazin as a ‘‘pure’’
theorist concerned chiefly with ontological mat-
ters. Certain passages from Bazin’s canonical
‘‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’’ essay, for
example, are the source of what Morgan calls the
‘‘index argument’’: the view that cinematic
images are akin to what Peirce called indexical
signs (such as footprints, weather vanes, and
smoke), which remain causally linked with what
they depict.30 Although there are a number of
versions of this argument, some emphasising the
causal link between image and object, and others
underlining the identity relationship between
them, they share the conviction that images are
distinguished ontologically by their intimate
relationship with their referents.31 Cinematic
images, from this perspective, can be understood
as direct presentations of ‘‘objects themselves,’’
which suggests some kind of identity relation
between image and object.32 The following
passage (interpreted in a reductive manner) is
often cited as evidence for Bazin’s position as an
ontological realist:
Only the photographic lens gives us an image
of the object that is capable of relieving, out of
the depths of our unconscious, our need to
substitute for the object something more than
an approximation. That something is the
object itself, but liberated from its temporal
contingencies. The image may be out of focus,
distorted, devoid of colour and without
documentary value; nevertheless, it has been
created out of the ontology of the model. It is
the model.33
Given Bazin’s subtly phrased prose, it is not
surprising that the standard view emphasises the
causal link between image and referent.
Indeed, some philosophers have reinterpreted
Bazin’s claims as instantiating the ‘‘transparency
thesis’’: the view that the image literally presents
the object itself, that we ‘‘see through’’ the image
and see the object as such.34 From this point of
view, Bazin holds a questionable account of the
ontological status of photographs and moving
images, collapsing the distinction between image
and object, and confusing the causal link between
them with their ontological identity.
Such a critique would no doubt be relevant
were Bazin engaged solely in technical arguments
concerning the ontological status of photographs.
We should note, however, that Bazin is urging
something quite different from what philosophers
such as Carroll claim of his work (an ontology of
the image largely divorced from aesthetic or
moral concerns). Bazin’s concern with realism,
rather, is more engaged with the psychological
and existential needs that the image serves.
Indeed, Bazin claims that the photographic and
cinematic image – for ‘‘cinema appears to be the
completion in time of photography’s objectiv-
ity’’35 – satisfy the psychological, even ‘‘uncon-
scious,’’ desire for the image as a substitute for
the object. When viewed from this perspective,
the photographic image presents an object that
has overcome its temporal contingencies.
Whatever its superficial characteristics, the
photograph depicts an object that has been
liberated from its temporal anchoring in a
(former) hic et nunc.36 It is in this sense that
Bazin claims the image is the model: I take it to
be such, despite its status as an image, because it
gives me a visual surrogate of an absent object,
one liberated from the flow of time. This
psychological desire for a visual substitute
offers a way of overcoming the existential sense
of loss with which time threatens consciousness.
As Bazin remarks:
The need for illusion in painting has been a
constant preoccupation since the sixteenth
century. It is an entirely psychological need,
inherently non-aesthetic, whose origins can
only be traced to a mind-set steeped in
magic.37
Cinema is a modern ‘‘primitivist’’ manifestation
of magic achieved by technological means.38
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The magic of the image is its power to overcome
our fear of death, to satisfy the desire to preserve
evanescent experience. Bazin’s famous ‘‘mummy
complex’’ links the origin of our desire to make
images with the satisfaction of ‘‘one of human
psychology’s most fundamental needs: to defend
against time.’’39 The image is a talisman replacing
the tangible object, a magical artefact dispelling
my fear of death.40 Despite the narrow contem-
porary focus on Bazin’s ontology of the image,
these psychological, existential, anthropological
dimensions of Bazin’s concern with realism are
not to be gainsaid.
There are, of course, other ways of defending
Bazin’s insight than treating it as a psychological
or existential claim. As Morgan points out, the
‘‘indexical sign’’ reading of Bazin gets into
difficulty, for an indexical sign cannot be ‘‘the
object itself.’’ So how is this claim to be
understood? Morgan responds by giving it a
Cavellian interpretation, emphasising the role of
intersubjective ‘‘acknowledgement’’ as a condi-
tion of knowing.41 According to this perspective,
what the image depicts is a ‘‘social fact’’ rather
than a brute existent; a case of acknowledging
shared meaning rather than knowing a discrete
object. It expresses an intersubjectively shared
form of intelligibility that reveals an item’s social
and cultural meaning.42 It is in this sense that we
can say that the image is the model; it acknowl-
edges its own status as a cinematic image, but also
presents us with a meaningful ‘‘fact’’ within a
cinematic world. The image draws attention to,
acknowledges so to speak, that what we are seeing
is a cinematic artefact; but it also reveals the
object, action, or event in its rich singularity or
expressive potential, as acknowledging both its
reality and its expressivity.
cinematic love andmythic time
There is one important issue, however, that
Morgan’s ‘‘Cavellian’’ reading leaves open: the
question of time.43 For Bazin, the cinema is
distinguished by its capacity to both reveal and
overcome time: to reveal the significance of time
and its unity with place via the presentation of
action within a particular setting, but also to
overcome the loss of meaning or attenuation of
experience brought about by the passage of time.
Cinema, from this point of view, transforms
photography’s static ‘‘embalming’’ of time into a
capturing of duration, what Bazin called the
‘‘mummification of change’’:44 a presentation of
duration preserving conscious experience through
moving images.
The ontological mystery of cinematic images
concerns their depiction of a past that is no longer
present, yet in a present always on the verge of
escaping into an anonymous past. The time of the
cinematic image remains a present that holds the
viewer in thrall, revealing what the habituation of
perception obscures from ordinary vision. In
Bazin’s words:
Only the impassive lens [objectif], in stripping
the object of habits and preconceived notions,
of all the spiritual detritus that my perception
has wrapped it in, can offer it up unsullied to
my attention and thus to my love.45
The aesthetic power of photography, and by
extension of the cinema, is to reveal reality anew;
to alter our habituated perception and thus
transfigure our experience (to offer it to our
love). It does so by revitalising our experiential
link with the world, removing all the spiritual
detritus that obscures a more authentic presenta-
tion of the object. Film reanimates our visual
attention, re-enchants our perception of the
world; it can retrieve our receptivity, our sense
of wonder, in the face of perceptual routines,
affective indifference, and sceptical disbelief.
In its best instances, the cinema, Bazin says,
‘‘more than any other art is particularly bound up
with love’’ – that sensuous love of the world, a
belief in its reality, that we have forgotten or
lost.46 This is the more philosophical sense of
what we today call ‘‘cinephilia,’’ which celebrates
the philia – the desire or love that underlies more
abstract or distanced knowledge – that its
devotees claim has been forgotten in film
theory, but which in its broader sense captures
the deeper source of the impulse to create and
become captivated by images at all. What we
desire in film, what we want to know, is how to
regard the world with love. From this more
expansive perspective, we could say that film
philosophy is the self-consciousness of cinephilia;
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the love of cinema and of the experience if affords
us – its love of the world rendered through
images – raised to the level of conceptual self-
reflection. As we shall see with Malick’s The Tree
of Life, it is this aspect of Bazin’s belief in
cinema – belief in the aesthetic powers of film,
belief elicited by the authenticity of the image,
and belief that narrative cinema can depict – that
Malick’s ‘‘hymn to life’’ expresses with sublime
enthusiasm (in the Greek sense): a cinephiliac
love of the world revealed through images, a love
that also demands and inspires thought.
What cinema adds to photography, moreover,
is the power of revealing, as well as resisting,
time: the capacity for aesthetic transformation
through temporal transcendence. The cinematic
image, Bazin tells us, reveals ‘‘the object itself,’’
and does so by liberating it from all its ‘‘temporal
contingencies.’’ What it reveals is a cinematic
reality that is both expressive and independent of
temporality in the phenomenological sense of the
time that we experience ordinarily. Cinematic
images, in expressing a world, take objects or
actions ‘‘out of time,’’ revealing these anew in a
unique time that is no longer a part of history, a
time that has confounded past and present in
order to become, so to speak, ‘‘mythic.’’
Mythic time, as anthropologists and folklorists
observe, is ahistorical, ‘‘timeless,’’ cyclical, non-
linear, symbolic, and often supernaturally
inflected; it is the time before historical time
(or after) that accounts for the emergence of the
gods, the origin of the cosmos, and the end of
times.47 It coalesces originary time with the
present, opening up an experience of the sacred
in which not only are the gods symbolically
represented but actually experienced as presences
playing a guiding role within human experi-
ence.48 Part of the ‘‘magical’’ aspect of cinema,
for Bazin, is that it opens up, through technology,
a dimension in which a trace of originary time
and mythic meaning becomes manifest: a time
that is both within and without history; a
time that confounds past and present, that
transfigures ordinary perception revealing its
deeper aesthetic, existential and moral signifi-
cance. The remarkable thing about the cinema is
that is achieves this effect automatically, thanks
to the technological rendering of reality through
the moving image. Here we find a link between
Bazin and Cavell’s claims concerning the
‘‘mythical’’ character of (narrative) film, what
Bazin calls the ‘‘myth of total cinema’’ and Cavell
calls the magical aspect of movies: the coin-
cidence of automatism and expression, of
mechanism and meaning, of technology and
magic.49
This deeper time is experienced as duration: a
present that opens up onto layers of past,
historical and cultural memory, yet which
captures and preserves the contingency and
singularity of a contingent moment, a unique
experience, or singular event. Against the more
familiar idea that photographic images anchor us
to an ‘‘it was,’’ namely the time of the object
photographed,50 for Bazin the magic of cinema,
its technology of transformation, is that it opens
up different kinds of temporal relationship
between the viewer and the image-world. As
Morgan remarks,
Bazin seems to be saying that photography
removes the object from any specific position
in time. The objects a photograph presents
may not exist in the present, but they are not
exactly in the past, nor are they in any other
time. They are real but outside (historical)
time altogether.51
The play between presence and absence in the
cinematic image – which renders absent beings
‘‘spectrally’’ present – is mirrored in the play
between present and past in the moving image
(which reveals a past that is no longer present,
but in a present that is forever slipping away into
an anonymous past, or what we might call
cultural memory). This disruption of the
‘‘ordinary’’ experience of time opens up the
possibility of new kinds of temporal relationships
(compare Deleuze’s claims in Cinema 2 concern-
ing the advent of post-war time-image cinema).
This ‘‘ahistorical’’ time is the temporal anomaly
that grants the cinematic world a distinctively
‘‘mythic’’ quality – expressing a time that is both
perpetually past and permanently present, yet
which is also neither of these in any discrete
manner, evoking a ‘‘once upon a time’’ that is
both historical and ahistorical (of its time but also
transcending it). Watching a movie is an episode
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in an individual viewer’s personal experience that
also partakes of a collective memory or con-
tributes to a shared cultural archive. What these
different forms of temporality might be remains
ontologically obscure in Bazin’s writings, yet they
are what make the cinema potentially transfor-
mative of our habitual ways of perceiving, feeling,
and thinking. These multiple senses of duration –
a coexistence of layers of time, past and present,
mythic and historical time – are also a feature of
Malick’s The Tree of Life, which explores this
Bazinian ‘‘mythic’’ aspect of movies in dramatic
fashion.
bazinian cinephilia
Bazinian belief is a matter not only of cinematic
images but of cultural-historical meaning. It is
the mythic power of cinema, its capacity to elicit
and sustain belief, which explains Bazin’s insis-
tence on the aesthetic and moral importance of
realism. So what of Bazin’s aesthetics of belief?
There are at least three senses of the concept
relevant to his work: (1) belief in the aesthetic-
moral possibilities of cinema, its power of
aesthetic revelation, which is expressed in
Bazin’s championing of criticism, of theorising
via criticism; (2) belief aroused by the cinematic
image, its power of ontological revelation, which
is expressed in Bazin’s championing of realism,
the carrying of conviction in regard to a
(fictional) world; and (3) belief within cinematic
narrative, its power of depicting belief, expressed
most explicitly in spiritual-religious films, which
both narrate the experience of faith or belief
while at the same time enacting or manifesting a
belief in the power of cinema itself (as I shall
discuss in The Tree of Life). The concept of
belief, for Bazin, refers to cinema’s power to
reveal reality anew; to transform our experience,
to transfigure our spirit, which is the true
vocation of art.
This merging of aesthetic concerns with
spiritual transcendence has been a recurring
theme in the reception of Bazin’s work. Indeed,
the question of Bazin’s spiritualism has often
served as a critical reference point both for his
defenders and for his critics.52 Although Bazin’s
spiritual-religious sensibilities imbue his writing
with an authenticity, eloquence, and moral
purpose that elevate it above the impersonal
pedantry of conventional academic prose, the
spiritual or religious dimension of Bazin’s work
nonetheless remains a challenge and an enigma.
Here again the concept of belief in cinema offers
a productive perspective, a way of acknowledging
Bazin’s belief in cinema as a medium of aesthetic,
moral, philosophical, even spiritual disclosure. As
Crouse puts it:
[I]f for Bazin, a left-wing Catholic, film is the
best means of art for capturing objective
reality, going deeper, at least in his view, it is
also the most fitting device for recording the
ever-changing face of God in the world.53
For Bazin, cinema is the artform most intimately
affiliated with love, not only in the romantic but
in the metaphysical and moral senses of philia
and agape; a non-egoistic love of, or towards,
others, a love that is desirous of understanding
the world in all its human and natural manifesta-
tions. Such is the philosophical meaning of
Bazin’s cinephilia: not simply a nostalgic love
for cinema, in the sense of an impassioned
engagement with the medium, but a profound
love of the world expressed aesthetically
through the revelatory power of film – its
capacity for aesthetic revelation, capturing of
duration, evocation of memory, and celebration
of contingency.
‘‘love everyone’’: malick’s the tree of life
It is from this point of view that I wish to turn to
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011),
approaching it as a revelatory exploration of
belief in cinema or poetic expression of Bazinian
cinephilia. As both a religious work of art and a
meditation on belief, The Tree of Life has been at
once highly praised and sharply dismissed. An
interesting question to consider here is why the
film has generated such polarised responses. My
contention is that these responses, both rapturous
and rancorous, turn on the question of belief, a
question posed and exposed by the film in a
number of ways: can film depict belief, spiritual
experience, and love in a manner that transcends
our cultural scepticism? Is belief in cinema still
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cinematic belief
possible? Can it give us ‘‘reasons to believe in this
world’’? With its fusion of moral, historical, and
metaphysical-spiritual visions, The Tree of Life
aims to cultivate belief in this world, thereby
challenging our endemic scepticism, whether
towards religion, mythology, love, or the aes-
thetic possibilities of film. In this regard Malick’s
film echoes Bazin’s desire to show how cinema is
an idealist and technological miracle; a cinephi-
liac medium of aesthetic revelation capable of
evoking personal, historical, even cosmic
memory. Malick’s wager is that, despite our
pervasive cultural and moral scepticism, cinema,
as a poetic machinery for the creation of
revelatory images, can still elicit and sustain
belief, giving us ‘‘reasons to believe in this
world.’’
The key to the film, I suggest, is the complex
dialectic between the way of Nature and the way
of Grace. These two paths through life compose a
dynamic relationship articulated at a number of
levels in the film, from the personal to the
metaphysical. It links the young Jack’s (Hunter
McCracken) attempts to reconcile his father’s
(Brad Pitt) egoistic self-interest with his mother’s
(Jessica Chastain) love and mercy; it relates the
sublimity of nature in its elemental power, the
blind striving of life struggling to exist, with a
transcendent dimension of spirit that unites us
with the cosmos as a whole. One of Bazin’s
remarks on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest
(1950) resonates well with Malick’s numinous
‘‘hymn to life.’’ It too is
a new form of drama, one that is specifically
religious, or better yet, theological: a phenom-
enology of salvation and grace.54
It is in The Tree of Life’s mythic evocation of
cosmic, historical, and personal memory, its
phenomenological capturing of contingency, the
radiance of nature, the epiphanies of the every-
day, and its commitment to the transformative
aesthetic power of cinematic experience, that we
find the most powerful resonances between
Malick and Bazin – a ‘‘phenomenology of
salvation and grace’’ that enacts a shared belief
in cinema as a medium of (aesthetic, moral, even
spiritual) revelation.
‘‘our picture is a cosmic epic, a hymnto life’’55
Given its remarkable coalescence of genres and
styles, it is not surprising that The Tree of Life
has polarised critics. In part this is due to its
complex, symphonic structure, combining at least
three dimensions: an evocative (and partly
autobiographical) family melodrama/coming-of-
age/memory film set in 1950s and 1960s Texas (as
well as in the present), featuring Hollywood stars
Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain; a
sublime ‘‘creation’’ interlude on the origins of the
universe and evolution of life on earth, combining
Kubrick-style cosmic meditation with awe-inspir-
ing nature documentary; and a romantic-religious
hymn celebrating existence, acknowledging grace
in the face of suffering, and the life-affirming
power of spiritualised love. Such a film clearly
challenges philosophically minded critics. The
latter were enthused by Malick’s existentially
charged war movie The Thin Red Line (1998),
with its Heideggerian meditations on being, and
its Emersonian evocations of ‘‘one big soul’’ and
‘‘all things shining.’’56 They were more ambiva-
lent about The New World, Malick’s mythic love
story and historical costume drama, with its
romantic-elegiac explorations of the tragic
encounter between cultural-historical worlds and
poetic meditations on our historical dwelling in
nature.57 They have been struggling, however, to
find philosophical grounds to acknowledge The
Tree of Life, despite its success in winning the
2011 Palme d’Or at Cannes. Indeed, as Kent
Jones remarks, Malick’s ‘‘intense interest in
origins – of violence, of the universe itself’’ –
has made his last three films ‘‘anomalous in
modern culture’’58 – not least, I would add,
because of their aesthetic figuration of metaphy-
sical ideas. It is this fascination with metaphysical
origins that has made Malick, as Jones observes,
‘‘such a revered figure to some, such a suspect
one to others.’’59 Indeed, Jones is not alone in
detecting what he describes as ‘‘a strain of
embarrassment in some of the more hostile
reactions to The Tree of Life.’’60
One explanation for this hostility would be to
point to the anxiety generated by the film’s
spiritual-religious dimensions. Repeating the
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reception history of Malick’s other films, critical
responses to The Tree of Life stand polarised
between rapturous celebration and sarcastic
ridicule. Noted critic Roger Ebert, for example,
praised Malick’s work as ‘‘a film of vast ambition
and deep humility, attempting no less than to
encompass all of existence and view it through
the prism of a few infinitesimal lives.’’61 By
contrast, Amy Taubin, another noted critic, took
precisely the opposite view, complaining that
‘‘the film’s attempt to represent the presence of
the Creator in all living things from the Big Bang
to the End of Time relies on an aesthetically
insufferable pile-on of maudlin voiceover com-
bined with a glut of classical religious music.’’62
Taubin’s complaints concerning Malick’s use of
voiceovers (used far less than in The Thin Red
Line) and challenging musical repertoire63 are
representative of a common strain of critical
rejection – criticising the film’s aesthetic as
compromised by its spiritual-religious commit-
ment. What separates the perspectives of Ebert
and Taubin, then, is less a dispute over the film’s
aesthetic qualities than a dispute over its status as
a religious work of art.64 Indeed, it is precisely
The Tree of Life’s ‘‘Christianity’’ – or rather its
religiosity more broadly construed – that lies at
the heart of the film’s polarised reception:65 the
question whether acknowledging the film’s reli-
giosity is compatible with critical appreciation of
its aesthetic or philosophical qualities.
It is interesting to note the interpretative
strategies that critics have deployed in order to
deal with the film’s religiosity. There are four
that a survey of the film’s critical reception
reveals: (1) uncritical affirmation of the film
because of its religious content (the ‘‘Christian’’
interpretation of the film); (2) uncritical rejection
of the film for essentially the same reason (the
anti-religious response); (3) disavowal of the
film’s religious content in favour of its aesthetic
merits (the ‘‘aestheticist’’ reading); and (4)
acknowledgement of the film’s aesthetic merits
and transformation of its religious content into
generic or ‘‘post-secular’’ forms of spirituality
(the ‘‘revisionist’’ approach).66 One common
move is to downplay the religiosity and praise
the film’s aesthetic virtues; alternatively, one can
criticise the film’s alleged aesthetic vices as a way
of rejecting its religiosity. The difficulty, how-
ever, is that these two aspects are inextricably
entwined (e.g., the pointed use of voiceover in the
film). The Tree of Life’s religiosity therefore
poses a problem, not only for evaluating aesthetic
responses to the film but for understanding the
relationship between film, philosophy, and
religion.
belief in cinema: the tree of life asmythic work
In a brief but rich essay, ‘‘Cinema and
Theology,’’ Bazin identified three ways, histori-
cally speaking, in which film has tackled religious
themes: by retelling the Christ story, the
‘‘stations of the cross’’ film; by hagiography,
the melodramatic ‘‘lives of the saints’’ movie; or
by dramatising the spiritual, psychological, and
social struggles of the priest, the most exemplary
instance of which is Bresson’s masterpiece Diary
of a Country Priest (1951).67 There is a fourth
way, however, which Bazin does not mention, and
which pertains to a number of films made since
the 1960s. This is what we might call the ‘‘post-
secular’’ religious film that explores the spiritual-
existential struggle of an individual over ques-
tions of faith and belief, his or her experience of,
or encounter with, what Rudolf Otto called ‘‘the
numinous’’: the awe-inspiring, terrifying but also
fascinating encounter with a transcendent reality,
with the sacred understood as the ‘‘wholly
other.’’68 Films dealing with the experience of
the numinous no longer deal with a saint, priest,
or the Church, but rather with everyday
characters in the grip of an existential struggle,
undergoing a shattering but transformative
encounter with something overwhelming or
incomprehensible. The aesthetic experience such
films afford can evoke a sense of the numinous,
without necessarily being reducible to a specific
theological system, although they clearly affiliate
themselves in different ways with various reli-
gious traditions.69
This is clearly the case with The Tree of Life.
The film’s opening quotation cites the Book of
Job, situating the film within a Christian
theological tradition (the Tree of Life found in
the Garden of Eden70); yet its title evokes a
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cinematic belief
multivalent notion that spans many of the major
world religions, various mythological accounts of
the origin of life, but also refers to Darwin’s
conception of evolutionary development.71 This
coalescence of meanings in the title of the film –
combining Christian, mythological, and evolu-
tionary senses – is reflected in its synthesis of
disparate styles and genres. There are, I suggest,
at least three narrative/mythic dimensions of The
Tree of Life – the familial melodrama, the
historical-spiritual Fall or loss of the American
Dream, and the cosmological creation myth
combining spiritualism and naturalism – all of
which are woven together in the story of the
O’Brien family. Given the complexity of the film,
with its ‘‘mythic’’ coalescing of narrative layers,
temporal series, and personal, historical, and
metaphysical dimensions, some further descrip-
tion of its structure seems warranted.
All three dimensions coexist and communicate
with each other in a topology that could be called
mythopoetic (combining myth and poetry). (1)
The first layer is the familial melodrama, which
centres on middle-aged architect Jack O’Brien’s
(Sean Penn) spiritual-existential crisis on the
anniversary of his younger brother’s death (killed
when he was nineteen). Set during the course of
this one day, a troubled and lost O’Brien
recollects, via a complex use of episodic flash-
backs, the lost life and joy of his childhood,
growing up with his two brothers, stern father
(Brad Pitt) and serene mother (Jessica Chastain)
in Waco, Texas, during the 1950s.72 (2) The
second layer is the historical-spiritual story, the
way the O’Brien family’s story depicts – mainly
through visual style, mise-en-scene, framing,
composition, and inspired use of light – a
‘‘Fall’’ narrative from the romanticised historical
‘‘Eden’’ of the 1950s Midwest to the spiritually
destitute space of contemporary urban America,
marked by the imposing, geometrically ordered
glass and steel architecture of downtown
Houston. (3) The third layer is the cosmological
creation myth, interpolated within the familial
melodrama and historical ‘‘Fall’’ stories, which
evokes the sublime emergence of life within a re-
enchanted universe; a naturalised cosmos devel-
oping with evolutionary vitality and imbued with
aesthetic grandeur and spiritual wonder.
This third story culminates in an eschatological
myth (Jack’s transcendent vision of the ‘‘end of
time’’), which brings together the familial
melodrama, historical ‘‘Fall,’’ and the mythic-
spiritual quest in an overwhelming experience of
spiritual reconciliation through love.
This decidedly mythic tenor of the film is
signalled in its opening sequence, which frames
what follows as a response to God’s challenge to
Job, defying him to comprehend all of the
vastness and wonder of creation, whether, as a
mere mortal, he could have witnessed the
emergence of life from the primordial darkness:
Where were you when I laid the earth’s
foundation . . . while the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for
joy? (Job 38.4, 7)
A numinous image of coloured light set against a
dark background (a ‘‘Lumia’’ image from
Thomas Wilfred’s Opus 161 (1965))73 is accom-
panied by signature Malick background sounds of
susurrating nature (wind, waves, and bird cries).
Taken by some critics as a depiction of God’s
presence, the image, as Kent Jones remarks,
highlights Malick’s fascination with light, indeed
his neo-Platonic, theophanic equation between
light and life.74
Such theophanic cinematography also
expresses, I would add, the intimate relationship
between cinema, nature, and the everyday. This is
the luminous ‘‘realism’’ of Malick’s cinema; its
Bazinian power to capture an aesthetically
transfigured reality – attentive to contingency,
nature, and mood – through radiant images of
place and duration. Almost every outdoor shot in
the film, for example, displays the setting or
rising sun, in the background yet shining
brilliantly through trees, radiating across faces,
a benevolent eye or face illuminating the every-
day world – images that give thanks to the sheer
beauty of existence, what Heidegger called the
ontological, or better, ontopoetical power of
beauty to reveal the truth of beings, to manifest
the beauty of ‘‘all things shining.’’
Still in mythic mode, the film proper begins
with a typically Malickian voiceover, belonging to
the adult Jack, pitched as a meditation directed at
an unnamed presence: ‘‘Brother, Mother. It was
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they who led me to your door.’’ The line recalls
the image of an empty door frame in the desert
wilderness, before which we see Jack hesitate at
decisive moments in the film. Like Pocahontas/
Rebecca in The New World, whose voiceover
invocations call for her ‘‘Mother’’ (her own and
mother earth), Jack’s voiceover, like that of his
own mother, hovers between recollection and
meditation, voice of conscience and silent prayer.
Like all voiceovers in Malick’s films, the voice
both belongs to a particular character and serves
to articulate a communal experience; it narrates a
particular character’s story, witnessing his or her
subjective experience, while also taking on an
‘‘any person whatever’’ role: that of a mythic
narrator witnessing a shared or collective experi-
ence transcending the particularities of psychol-
ogy, place, or history.
The mythic use of voiceover continues with the
introduction of Jack’s mother. Her childhood
recollections as a girl are sequenced in lyrical
images flowing from girlhood to married life,
accompanied by a voiceover that invokes the
duality of nature and grace that lies at the heart of
the film:
In man’s palace there are two ways through
life: the Way of Nature and the Way of Grace.
You have to choose which one you’ll follow.
Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts
being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts
insults and injuries. Nature only wants to
please itself. Gets others to please it too.
Likes to lord it over them. To have its own
way. It finds reasons to be unhappy, when all
the world is shining around it and love is
smiling through all things.
The duality of Nature and Grace, usually
personified by characters both in communion
and conflict with each other, features in a number
of Malick films. It is evident in contrast between
Wit and Welsh in The Thin Red Line, Smith and
Pocahontas in The New World, even Kit and
Holly in Badlands. There is opposition and
conflict but also interweaving or entwining of
these twinned poles; they are intimately related,
mutually transforming, but never fully recon-
ciled. This is true of The Tree of Life, which
makes explicit the dialectic between Nature and
Grace within a religious-mythic frame, while at
the same time exploring their complex attune-
ment in a dynamic ‘‘unity of opposites.’’ Malick
both evokes and subtly shifts the religious
dimensions of this relationship, demonstrating
that their initial opposition reveals a more
complex dialectic as the film unfolds.
It is clear, nonetheless, that The Tree of Life
articulates the relationship between the way of
Nature and the way of Grace within a Christian
theological framework. As a number of inter-
preters point out, Mrs O’Brien’s description of
the contrast between the two ways through life is
reminiscent of medieval mystic Thomas a
Kempis’s account in The Imitation of Christ
(Book 3, chapter 54).75 The way of Nature is that
Fig.1. The luminous ‘‘realism’’of Malick’s cinema.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
cinematic belief
106
cinematic belief
of self-preservation, the struggle for survival,
rational egoism; the way of Grace, by contrast, is
that of self-transcendence, openness to the world
(or God), and selfless love. The traditional
understanding, as in Thomas a Kempis, is that
we must overcome the way of Nature and choose
that of Grace instead. At first blush it might
appear that the film takes the same view. The
contrast between Nature and Grace, for example,
seems mapped directly on to the characters of Mr
and Mrs O’Brien, the stern, egoistic, disciplinar-
ian Father vs. the loving, forgiving, gracious
Mother; or between young Jack torn between
these two conflicting impulses in contrast with
the aesthetic sensitivity of his younger brother,
the budding guitarist, named in the credits as
‘‘R.L.’’ (Laramie Eppler).
At the same time, however, the film also
complicates this contrast, showing how Grace and
Nature coexist, struggling and vying with each
other, Grace having need of Nature, and Nature
being imbued with Grace (as Mrs O’Brien says,
Nature torments itself, ignoring the beauty and
glory shining through all things). The film does
not simply endorse the mother’s grace and
forgiveness, however, which Mr O’Brien at one
point calls ‘‘naıve,’’ against the father’s ‘‘fierce
will’’ and desire to ‘‘lord it over others’’ – his way
of preparing his sons for the way of the world. On
the contrary, the mother’s grace is tested by the
tragic loss of her beloved younger son R.L.,
which she takes as God’s personal slight against
her, while the father struggles with his own
suppressed vulnerability, his thwarted musical
ambitions and evident aesthetic, even moral
pleasure in the transports of music, a poignant
reminder of a life path not taken. Neither
character is entirely representative either of
nature or of grace, even though each clearly
decides in favour of one path over the other, the
family being where both paths encounter each
other. Like ‘‘this war at the heart of nature’’ (The
Thin Red Line), or the struggle between British
Colonists and Algonquin ‘‘Naturals’’ in The New
World, the ways of Nature and Grace remain
locked in a dialectical embrace, each pole
depending on the other yet maintaining itself in
a relation of dynamic tension with its opposite.
Indeed, Jack’s story is precisely that of the
struggle between these two ways, his lifelong
quest to reconcile Nature and Grace (‘‘Father,
mother: always you struggle inside me’’) – to
rediscover the glory that imbues the world and
nature with light and love.
Mrs O’Brien describes the ‘‘two ways’’ through
life as a spiritual teaching that has proven
important for how she has lived her life. Her
challenge, however, is to maintain grace and love
in the face of senseless suffering and loss. The
important point in her voiceover thus comes at
the end of this opening sequence, where she
concludes her meditation with a recollection
prompting an avowal of faith: ‘‘They taught us
that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes
to a bad end. I will be true to you, whatever
comes.’’ ‘‘Whatever comes,’’ however, is not
Fig. 2. His lifelong quest to reconcile Nature and Grace.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
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fortune and happiness but loss and despair, the
sudden death of Mrs O’Brien’s beloved youngest
son. This shattering event is announced by the
mother’s silent reading of a telegram delivered to
the family home, and a devastating phone call to
the father drowned out by the drone of propeller
engines.76 This overwhelming loss – almost
unspeakable, unintelligible, hence the silence or
noise accompanying the images of the mother and
father as they receive the news – threatens to
destroy the family, transposing the lesson of Job
to an ordinary family in the American Midwest.
Waves of grief reverberate throughout Jack’s
adult life, which is materially and professionally
successful but emotionally and spiritually void.
His enduring melancholy culminates in the day
that frames the entire movie, presumably the
anniversary of his brother’s death. We see Jack
waking with a start in his austere, architecturally
designed home, his wife silent, withdrawn; unable
to communicate his emotion, Jack lights a
solitary candle in commemoration of his lost
brother and, perhaps, his own childhood self.
This one day, a spiritual moment of vision or
Kierkegaardian Augenblick in which all is
transfigured, reverberates throughout Jack’s life,
linking the plenitude of his childhood in the
1950s with the barrenness of the contemporary
world, enveloping Jack’s personal sense of
despair and involuntary memory within a
mythic origin and end of time.
The son’s death is the crucial event that
defines this family odyssey, Mrs O’Brien and Jack
both struggling to reconcile this loss with belief
in a benevolent God. In a significant moment
during her grieving, while reciting a comforting
prayer, Mrs O’Brien questions God, asking
plaintively, ‘‘What did you gain?’’ The grand-
mother (Fiona Shaw) tries to counsel her,
advocating a Christian stoicism in the face of
pain and suffering: ‘‘The Lord gives and the Lord
takes away . . . sends flies to wounds he should
heal.’’ The waves of grief reach across time, his
brother’s loss still affecting Jack in his adult life,
as he struggles with his sceptical despair:
‘‘World’s going to the dogs. People are greedy,
just getting worse,’’ he murmurs in a voiceover
recalling his character Welsh in The Thin Red
Line. Ascending in a glass lift in his austere
modernist building, he apologises to his father for
their exchange of harsh words about his brother’s
death, a loss that has marked his whole life: ‘‘I
think about him every day and I shouldn’t have
said what I said. It’s just this day.’’ Set during the
course of this one day, the film spanning Jack’s
memory of his childhood in the 1950s, as well the
origin and end of time, Jack is a character in
despair, without purpose or a home, suffering
from his own ‘‘sickness unto death.’’ In a black
suit, wandering in a spiritual wasteland, he
questions an unknown other (his brother, his
deeper self, God): ‘‘How did I lose you?
Wandered. Forgot you.’’ Remembering his
brother, we see an image of the young R.L.
shrouded in a curtain, being kissed by a
messenger figure and prepared for death. An
important image, in long shot, of a young boy
standing alone on a beach shore, concludes Jack’s
reverie: ‘‘Find me,’’ says the boy, perhaps R.L.
This image of the lost brother will recur at the
end of the film, during Jack’s epiphanic vision of
spiritual reconciliation through love.
This familial drama and spiritual quest
narrative is interrupted, however, by one of the
film’s most controversial sequences: what we
might call the cosmological, or better, cosmopoe-
tical creation myth, an extraordinary fusion of
abstract imagery, animation, nature footage, and
metaphysical speculation.77 Critics have claimed
that this sequence is filtered through Jack’s
consciousness, his boyish fascination, typical of
the 1950s, with space, dinosaurs, the universe,
and the like (although it is R.L. that we see
reading a book about space travel).78 It is
introduced, however, via Mrs O’Brien’s voice-
over, the mother recast in the role of Job,
questioning God for inflicting so much suffering
upon a faithful servant: ‘‘Lord. Why? Where were
you?’’ Mrs O’Brien’s words echo the quotation
from the Book of Job that opens the film
(‘‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s
foundation . . .?’’) What follows, so to speak, is
Malick playing God: showing Mrs O’Brien (and
the viewer) what no mortal could ever see, a
cosmopoetical myth of creation, a re-enchanted
vision of the universe combining evolutionary
naturalism with spiritual sublimity. Malick’s
images of origin span the abstract depiction of
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cinematic belief
the numinous origin of things, images of creation
and the emergence of matter, the evolution of life
from the primeval chaos, the appearance of
dinosaurs on earth, including a startling ‘‘state
of nature’’ sequence in which a dinosaur
(a Troodon confronting an injured
Parasaurolophus) displays a moment of animal
grace, a mythic depiction of a meteor hitting the
earth, extinguishing the dinosaurs, destroying in
the blink of an eye what had taken eons to evolve.
What the cosmological myth shows is how
nature and grace coexist within a dynamic unity
of opposites; a pre-Socratic vision combining
Heraclitean cosmic fire with Empodocles’ divine
principles of love (philia) and strife (neikos) as
the basic impulses attracting and separating
matter in the universe. It shows how a
naturalistic-scientific understanding of the evolu-
tion of life in the universe is compatible with a
sense of spiritual transcendence, an experience of
the numinous. And finally, it shows how the lives
of an ordinary family are dwarfed, yet also
enveloped, by a sublime vision of re-enchanted
nature (and spirit) in which human joy and
suffering have their place. The sublimity of the
cosmos, from the overwhelmingly vast to the
infinitesimally small, echoes the sublimity of
mind or spirit – indeed, the miracle of the
cinema – that can contemplate and reveal such
wonders in the form of moving images.
Here, Malick and Bazin come together, both
sharing a conviction in the mythopoetic power of
cinema to reveal reality anew, to transfigure the
everyday, to illuminate aspects of the world and
Fig. 3. The cosmologicalmyth.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
Fig. 4. Themythopoetic power of cinema.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
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of nature with a revelatory power that inspires
conviction – images with the power, to use
Deleuze’s phrase, to give us ‘‘reasons to believe in
this world.’’ The ‘‘realism’’ of Malick’s creation
sequence, combining cosmological speculation,
evolutionary naturalism, science fiction grandeur,
and spiritual sublimity, attempts to convey the
Grace in Nature and the Nature underlying
Grace. The film offers a mythic vision of a re-
enchanted cosmos of which human beings, with
their pain and suffering, hope and joy, are a tiny
but significant part. Malick thus creates a
cinematic ‘‘aesthetic mythology’’ (as the
German Romantics called it) that strives to
overcome the dichotomy of Nature and Grace,
marrying the universal and the particular, but
also reason and faith, art, religion, and science in
a vision of mythic wholeness. These are images
that attempt, as Bazin put it, to ‘‘wipe the
spiritual grime from our eyes.’’ Indeed, Malick’s
film embodies Bazin’s vision of cinema as a
technological miracle expressing a love of reality,
of nature and spirit combined. Its beauty
expresses cinematically an ontological care for
the singularity of the moment, for the re-
enchantment of the everyday world, and for a
mythic history and cosmopoetics that, taken
together, reveal the philosophical meaning of
Bazinian cinephilia.
Here, Malick’s vision of a reconciliation
between naturalism and scientism, art and
science, religion and philosophy, echoes one of
Bazin’s influences, the unorthodox Jesuit, philo-
sopher, palaeontologist, and mystic Pierre
Fig. 5. A Bazinian cinephilia.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
Fig. 6. Cinematic thinking: Nature and Grace.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.
cinematic belief
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cinematic belief
Teilhard de Chardin. As Jeffrey Crouse notes,
Teilhard’s influence ‘‘animates the whole of
Bazin,’’ his teleological version of Bergsonian
creative evolution linking the development of
life in the universe with ‘‘the inspired articles
of Christian revelation.’’79 From the emergence
of matter in the cosmos (the geosphere), the
biological evolution of life (the biosphere), of
human consciousness and its technologically
mediated development into a sphere of trans-
personal consciousness (the noosphere), creative
evolution, for Teilhard, aims at and would
eventually reach what he called the ‘‘Omega
Point’’: the ultimate merging of creation,
humanity, and God.80 Teilhard’s vision of a
cosmic mind/global brain or noosphere offered
Bazin – and perhaps also Malick – a striking
concept/metaphor to capture the revelatory
powers of the cinema: a spiritual technology or
brain-screen capable of uniting the disparate
consciousnesses of millions of individuals, one
which makes possible the contemplation of
nature, the rendering of subjective experience,
and the aesthetic revealing of reality in its
multifarious facets.81 Indeed, for Bazin, the
cinema, ‘‘was already a means of personalizing
the universe, a preview of Teilhard’s noo-
sphere’’;82 a statement that could well be applied
to The Tree of Life, a film embodying what
Bazin once described as essential to cinema,
namely the love ‘‘for creation itself.’’83
It is in these senses that The Tree of Life
exemplifies a Bazinian cinephilia or cinema of
belief: a belief in this world, comprising the
conflicting powers of Nature and Grace; a belief in
love, in the philosophical-spiritual sense of agape;
a cinematic love of nature and of the world,
expressed in the radiant cinematography of
Emmanuel Lubezki, capturing the everyday in
its contingent beauty, its breathtaking singularity;
and a belief in the revelatory power of cinema, its
capacity to challenge our scepticism towards
moral, aesthetic, or spiritual authenticity. From
this point of view, The Tree of Life expresses
thought in images, what we could call a cinematic
thinking: a meditation on childhood, grief, and
loss; a metaphysical speculation on the origin and
end of life; a symphonic poem on the meaning of
suffering, death, and love. By merging familial
melodrama, historical recollection, and cosmopoe-
tical myth, The Tree of Life is a moral and
aesthetic profession of belief. It expresses a
Bazinian cinephilia, a love of the
world; celebrating its beauty and
its darkness, its history and its
memory, in numinous images of
gravity and grace.
notesTheAustralianResearchCouncil (ARC)DiscoveryProject scheme (DP1092889) supported theauthor’s research for this essay. The viewsexpressed herein are those of the author and arenot necessarily those of the ARC.
1 Deleuze,Cinema 2172.
2 Bazin,‘‘Theatre and Film (2)’’ 197.
3 Idem,‘‘Cinema and Theology’’ 61.
4 As Joubert-Laurencin remarks, ‘‘[f ]ew intellec-tuals have suffered a more difficult, contorted,and contradictory reception than has Bazin in hisnative France these past fifty years’’ (Andrew andJoubert-Laurencin xiii). This difficult reception isechoed in the anglophone world, as HunterVaughan observes: ‘‘Bazin has received one of themost systematic drubbings in twentieth-centurycultural studies’’ (100).
5 See Younger, ‘‘Re-thinking Bazin.’’ See alsoCarroll; Henderson, ‘‘Two Types of Film Theory’’;Macbean; and Michelson.
6 See the critiques of Bazin by Carroll;Henderson; Macbean; MacCabe; and Wollen’sinfluential interpretation.
7 SeeCavell16, 20, 21, 39,166; andDeleuze,Cinema1 16, 24. Compare Cavell’s remark: ‘‘Why aremovies important? I take it for granted that in var-ious obvious senses they are. That this can betaken for granted is the first fact I pose for consid-eration; it is, or was, a distinctive fact aboutmovies’’ (4). I discuss this issue further inSinnerbrink 90^116.
8 See Cavell 16^41, 60^73; and Deleuze,Cinema11^12, 58^72, 201^19.
9 See Sinnerbrink 7^8.
10 Crouse, ‘‘Because we need him now: re-enchanting film studies through Bazin.’’ See also
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the recent essay collection Opening Bazin, editedby Dudley Andrew and Herve¤ Joubert-Laurencin;the 2007 Bazin special issue of Film Internationaledited by Jeffrey Crouse; Ivone Margulies’ editedvolume Rites of Realism; Philip Rosen’s ChangeMummified; Daniel Morgan’s ‘‘Rethinking Bazin’’;William Rothman’s ‘‘Bazin as Cavellian Realist’’;and Richard Rushton’s The Reality of Film 42^78.Christian Keathley has explored the relationshipbetween Bazin and cinephilia (see his Cinephiliaand History) while PrakashYounger has retrievedBazin as an exemplar of ‘‘cinephilosophy’’ or filmphilosophy.
11 See Carroll108^09.
12 Mournier’s Christian personalism was animportant influence on Bazin, in particular thevalorisation of individualmoral autonomy, creativefreedom, and social responsibility against theabstract universalism, impersonal institutions,and depersonalisation wrought by capitalism. SeeMournier.
13 See Andrew, Andre¤ Bazin.
14 As Colin MacCabe remarks: ‘‘Bazin’s Catholichumanism and realist aesthetic had banished himfrom the theoretical reading lists of the1960s and1970s’’ (75).
15 Carroll, for example, sharplydistinguishes criti-cism from theory, remarking that Bazin’s astute-ness as a critic makes up for his weakness as atheorist: ‘‘What fails as theory may excel as criti-cism’’ (171).
16 Bazin,‘‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’’ 4.
17 Ibid. 8.
18 Sartremakes a similar point inThe Imaginary.
19 Rosen (‘‘Belief in Bazin’’ 107ff.) makes the pointthat Hugh Gray’s translation of the term croyanceas ‘‘faith’’ rather than ‘‘belief’’ in key texts hasobscured the importance of belief while givingBazin’s essays an overly ‘‘religious’’ tone.
20 Dudley Andrew has challenged the receivedview over many decades. See his Andre¤ Bazin and‘‘A Film Aesthetic to Discover.’’
21 See Morgan.
22 Ibid. 445.
23 Bazin,‘‘WilliamWyler’’ 52.
24 Cavell16^17. See Morgan 451.
25 See Bazin’s essays ‘‘De Sica’’ and ‘‘In Defence ofRossellini.’’ Against the standard reading, Morgan(451) makes the point that Bazin’s ongoing dissatis-faction with his various accounts of the ontologyof the image is evident in his recurrent use ofmetaphors to capture film’s relationship with rea-lity (as mummy, mould, death mask, mirror,equivalent, substitute, and asymptote).
26 Morgan 463ff.
27 Ibid. 461. The internal Bazin quotation is fromBazin’s Jean Renoir 84.
28 Morgan 463.
29 Bazin,‘‘Ontology’’ 6.
30 Morgan 447ff.
31 See Wollen, Doane, and Mulvey for differingexamples of this approach. Wollen presents an‘‘indexical’’ reading of Bazin via Peirce, Doaneemphasises the capturing of contingency, whereasMulvey takes up the relationship between Bazin,Freud, and Barthes’s Camera Lucida. See Gunningfor a recent critique of the index argument.
32 As Bazin himself will claim: ‘‘There is an onto-logical identity between the object and its photo-graphic image’’ (‘‘In Defence of Rossellini’’ 98).
33 Bazin,‘‘Ontology’’ 8.
34 See Scruton; andWalton.
35 Bazin,‘‘Ontology’’ 8.
36 Bazin seems to suggest that the image revealsthe‘‘universal’’ in the particular, the coincidence ofshared aesthetic meaning and sensuousparticularity.
37 Bazin,‘‘Ontology’’ 5^6.
38 See Moore for a fascinating discussion ofcinema as modern magic or technologicalphantasmagoria.
39 Bazin,‘‘Ontology’’ 3.
40 For discussions of death and loss in Bazin’swritings see Smith; and Oeler.
41 Morgan 469ff. See also Rothman.
42 See Morgan; Rothman; and Rushton 44^78.
43 For an interesting discussion of time in Bazinsee Carruthers.
44 Bazin,‘‘Ontology’’ 9.
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cinematic belief
45 Ibid.
46 Crouse (9) praises this as ‘‘themost jaw-drop-ping idea I have ever encountered in film studies.’’
47 Cf.
The crucial differencebetweenhistorical andmythic time interpretation is related to themodel used for comprehending temporality.Historical time is linear, continuous, and iscomposed of unique events, but mythicaltime is cyclical and repetitive. The latterencompasses and unites two temporaldimensions: the original time and the pre-sent. (Pentikainen 235)
48 See Allen (190):
Mythic time is sacred time, mythic history issacred history . . .mythic space is sacredspace . . . In Eliade’s interpretation of thenature, structure, function and meaning ofmyth, mythic believers actually become con-temporaneous with the supernatural beingsand other sacred realities described in theirmyths.
Many aspects of thismythic mode of presentationand experience will also be apparent in Malick’sThe Tree of Life.
49 Cf.Cavell:
The idea of and wish for the worldre-created in its own image was satisfied atlast by cinema. Bazin calls this the myth oftotal cinema . . .Whatis cinema’swayof satis-fying the myth? Automatically, we said . . . Itmeans satisfying it without my having to doanything, satisfying it by wishing. In a word,magically. (39)
50 See Rosen,Change 29.
51 Morgan 452.
52 See Bill Nichols’criticism that Bazin’s theory offilmpresentsuswith: ‘‘[a] dual andperhaps contra-dictory approach combining transcendent spiritu-alism and sociology’’ (151).
53 Crouse 9.
54 Bazin,‘‘Diary of a Country Priest and the RobertBresson Style’’ 150.
55 Quoted fromMalick’s press release on the filmbefore its public release.
56 Cf. the famous voiceovers inTheThin Red Line:‘‘Maybe all men got one big soul where every-body’s a part of. All faces are the same man, onebig self. Everyone looking for salvation by himself.Each like a coal drawn from the fire’’ (Witt).‘‘Whowere you that I lived with, walked with? Thebrother, the friend? Strife and love, darkness andlight ^ are they theworkings of onemind, featuresof the same face? Oh my soul. Let me be in younow. Look out through my eyes. Look out at thethings you made. All things shining’’ (Train). Thephrase ‘‘All things shining’’ comes from JamesJones’s war novel The Thin Red Line, upon whichthe Malick film is (loosely) based.The phrase ‘‘onebig soul’’ recalls Emerson’s ‘‘over-soul,’’ that whichunitesmen, nature, and God. See Emerson.
57 See my discussion of The New World inSinnerbrink. Richard Neer gives a finely nuancedinterpretation of the film that takes issue withthe imposition of philosophical readings that doviolence to the film’s aesthetic and cinematiccomplexity.
58 Jones 26.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.24.ScottFoundasaskswhyMalick’sTheTreeof Life received such a hostile response at Cannes,whereasApichatpongWeerasethakul’s 2010 Palmed’OrwinningUncleBoonmeeWhoCanRecallHis PastLives,‘‘anothermeditative film aboutnature, death,andpossible afterlives,’’didnot.Foundas 61.
61 See Ebert.
62 Taubin 57.
63 Most of the composers used in this sequenceare not ‘‘classical’’ but contemporary (ZbigniewPreisner,Giya Kancheli, JohnTavener, and MotherTekla).The sequence concludes with the ‘‘DomineJesu Christe’’ movement from Berlioz’s Grandemesses desmorts (or Requiem) Opus 5 (1837).
64 While acknowledging the link between Malickand neo-Platonist philosophers such as JohannesScotus Eriugena ^ in particular his theophanicmetaphysics of light as the expression of divinelife (‘‘all things are lights’’) ^ Jones dismisses thedescription of TheTree of Life as a ‘‘religious’’ film inthe sense of one adhering to Christian doctrine. Itis more a cross, he claims, between ‘‘Eriugena’svision of life of earth and pre-orthodoxBuddhism,’’ a work fixated not on the afterlife but‘‘on the‘glory’of this life’’ (26).
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65 As Peter Bradshaw remarks: ‘‘[p]eople wouldrepeatedly reproach me for my own laudatorynotice; this film, they said, was pretentious,boring and ^ most culpably of all ^ Christian.Didn’t I realise, they asked, that Malick was aChristian?’’
66 See Sterritt for an ‘‘aestheticist’’ reading of thefilm that takes issue with Malick’s alleged‘‘theodicy.’’ Jones acknowledges the film’s religios-ity, as mentioned above, but rejects the attribu-tion of a Christian meaning to the film. Pfeiferhedges on the question of religiosity, contrastingtwo contrary perspectives that the film attempts(with difficulty) to reconcile: that of the idealist,for whomThe Tree of Life is an ineffable aestheticand emotional revelation of beauty and spiritualtruth; and that of the analyst, for whom the filmis a self-reflexive cinematic meditation onmemory, childhood, and history.
67 Bazin,‘‘Cinema and Theology’’ 64.
68 SeeOtto.Otto popularised the concept of thenuminous (from the Latin, numen), which wastaken up by Carl Jung, C.S. Lewis, and in the reli-gious studies of Mircea Eliade. It describes a shat-tering encounter with a transcendent dimensionbeyond ordinary experience (the sacred as‘‘wholly other’’) that resists description and com-prehension. As a religious experience it is charac-terised both by a sense of terror (a ‘‘fear andtrembling’’ ormysterium tremendum) eliciting dreador anxiety, as well as rapture or fascination evok-ing silent awe or wonder.
69 In this category wemight include films such asKubrick’s 2001,Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker(1979), Kies¤ lowski’s The Double Life of Veronique(1993), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s UncleBoonmeeWho Can Recall his Past Lives (2010), andBe¤ laTarr’sTheTurin Horse (2011).
70 The Tree of Life is mentioned in the Book ofGenesis, after Adam and Eve eat the forbiddenfruit of the Tree of Knowledge and hence arecast out of the Garden of Eden: ‘‘And the LORDGod said, Behold, the man is become as one ofus, to know good and evil; and now, lest he putforth his hand, and take also of the tree of life,and eat, and live forever’’ (Genesis 3.22, KingJames edition). The film evokes this quest toretrieve the fruit of theTree of Life (eternal life),but within the limits of our natural and historicaldwelling.
71 See Darwin’sThe Origin of Species (1859) chapterIV ‘‘Character of Natural Selection,’’ sub-sectionon ‘‘Divergence of Character.’’
72 Steven Rybin points out that Malick has com-posed the story of Jack’s childhood through flash-backs that go well beyond what the adult Jackcould remember (or what the young Jack couldhave experienced directly), thus exposing andexploring the inherent ambiguity of the flashbackas a way of communicating recollections of thepast in a manner that overflows individualmemory. In this way,TheTree of Life could be read,Rybin argues, as ‘‘a philosophical inquiry into thevery nature of the flashback as a source of mean-ing in film’’ (176).
73 Thomas Wilfred was an American-Danishartist who was a pioneer in creating ‘‘Lumia’’images or visual music; works of art composed oflight, colour, and form, using the colour organ or‘‘Clavilux.’’
74 Jones 24^26.
75 A point well made by Steven Rybin 172. Rybinalso notes that, unlikeThomas a' Kempis, ‘‘Malickis ultimately concerned to show us how both theethereally spiritual and the brutally natural areintertwined.’’ See also McAteer’s illuminating dis-cussion of the theology informing the Way ofNature/Way of Grace duality inTheTree of Life.
76 One intrepid viewer has shown that theWestern Union telegram Mrs O’Brien receivesstates that her son’s death took place in Mexico,on 6 February 1968, in an automobile accident(rather than by committing suicide, as Malick’sbrother Larry did while living in Spain andstudying guitar under Andre¤ s Segovia). See TheNiles Files.
77 Much of this footage is taken from a projectMalick had conceived in the twenty-year gapbetween Days of Heaven and TheThin Red Line, anexperimental documentary piece on the origin oflife in the universe entitled ‘‘Q.’’ Malick is report-edly working on a six-hour version of The Tree ofLife that includesmore extensive use of this mate-rial as well as much more narrative materialdepicting Jack’s childhood, adolescence, and youngadulthood.
78 See Pfeifer.
79 Crouse 9.Crouse alsopoints out (20) the signif-icance of Bergson’s Creative Evolution for Teilhard’s
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ideas concerning the reconciliation of science andtheology.
80 Crouse 9. See Teilhard’s posthumously pub-lished The Phenomenon of Man, which details theDarwinian evolutionary development of life andthe Lamarckian or convergent evolutionary devel-opment of culture towards a unified field of con-sciousness (God).
81 Deleuze (Cinema 2 215) takes up the term‘‘noo-sphere’’ in discussing therelationbetween thoughtand cinema; the noosphere is formedby the circu-lation of cinematic ‘‘noosigns’’ ^ expressing topo-logical, probabilistic, and irrational cuts/connections ^ that together compose a newimage of thought. The noosign, for its part, isdefined as ‘‘an image which goes beyond itselftowards something that can only be thought’’(Cinema 2 335).Deleuze takes theTeilhardian noo-sphere in a materialist direction, regrounding itsBergsonian version of ‘‘creative evolution’’ via theimmanent becoming of nature, removing its spiri-tualist dimensions of transcendence and thusblockingTeilhard’s teleological naturalist theology.
82 Andrew, Andre¤ Bazin 66^67; qtd in Crouse10.
83 ‘‘In the world of cinema one must have thelove of a De Sica for creation itself’’ (Bazin, ‘‘DeSica’’ 76).
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Robert Sinnerbrink
Department of Philosophy
Building W6A, Balaclava Rd
Macquarie University
North Ryde, NSW 2109
Sydney
Australia
E-mail: robert.sinnerbrink@mq.edu.au
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