Cinematic Belief - Robert Sinnerbrink.pdf

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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cinematic belief

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

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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).


34 See Scruton; andWalton.


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.


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.


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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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Younger, Prakash. ‘‘Re-thinking Bazin throughRenoir’s The River. Part 1: Bazin and The River as aProblem in the History of FilmTheory.’’ OffscreenJournal 7.7 ( July 2003): n. pag.Web.1June 2012.

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Robert Sinnerbrink

Department of Philosophy

Building W6A, Balaclava Rd

Macquarie University

North Ryde, NSW 2109

Sydney

Australia

E-mail: [email protected]

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