My paper for this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, coming up next month in Boston, will focus on the two films that got a lot of side-by-side attention at last year’s Cannes festival, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Since a few of my favorite bloggers have also discussed them side by side, I thought I’d share my preliminary thoughts about them here.
The two films play a key role in the final chapter of my (forthcoming) Ecologies of the Moving Image, but as I’m still thinking these themes through, I will be interested in responses I get at the SCMS (or here).
Here’s my original conference abstract, scheduled as part of the first of the Ecocinema panels; see here for the other papers from these panels and related eco-themed ones.
From Environmental Films to Eco(philosophical) Cinema
Ecocinema has tended to be defined thematically as “cinema with ecological themes,” i.e., as “environmental films,” or formally as (something like) “cinema that takes ecology seriously.” Following these two trends, good ecocinema might be defined either as cinema that successfully promotes ecological themes or cinema that has ecologically beneficial effects, or that at least minimizes its ecologically harmful effects. But these two approaches neither take cinema nor ecology seriously enough.
This paper argues on behalf of an engagement with philosophy, including both film-philosophy and ecophilosophy. It insists that eco-film critics need to think through both the film/cinema object (what is cinema and how is it changing in the digital era?) and the eco-subject (what is ecology, and how can both films and their viewers be considered ecological and ecologically?). Proposing that a genuine “ecocinema” requires an engagement with eco/cinema philosophy, it asks what kinds of films might result from such an engagement. It compares James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2010) in light of these concerns.
I’ve decided to jettison the parts about Avatar and Darwin’s Nightmare, though they take up substantial sections of the “eco-trauma” chapter of my book, and instead to focus on the Malick and von Trier films.
I should mention that by the point I get to these two films in my book, I’ve made a serious case for an ecophilosophical viewing practice, which pays attention to the aesthetics, ethics, and “ecologics” of film’s firstness (its spectacle, its shimmering “thereness”), secondness (its narrative one-thing-after-anotherness), and thirdness (the meanings that emerge out of our encounters with it; those new to C. S. Peirce’s categories can get a quick primer on them and on my use of them in these earlier posts).
I’ve also made a pitch by this point for an understanding of the moving image that is enriched by a Jungian — or, more precisely, a James Hillmanite (Corbinite-Neoplatonic-Bachelardian and post-Jungian) — understanding of the image as something that sweeps us up and takes us elsewhere, if we allow it to do that. Hopefully that’ll be more clear by the end of this…
To the films, then.
Between Malick and von Trier
Comparing Melancholia and The Tree of Life became a critic’s game in the days following their premieres one day apart from each other at Cannes. For a glimpse of that, see here, here, and here.
Both of these films, in my reading of them, present a force that we can move with. They are moving concept-images — images of movement in a moving universe. But where The Tree of Life presents a cinematic image intended to move us toward movement, Melancholia presents something more like an image intended to help us reach a defiantly resistant stasis in a universe that moves so powerfully it can and will destroy us.
Both films are about troubled human characters and their relationships with others, and in particular with familial others; they are comments on the family. Both also render their familial reference points at once both foreign and cosmic. Here I disagree with Anthony Paul Smith’s argument that Malick’s film presents a “nuptial theology” celebrating the family, and agree more with Michael Pearl’s reply to that argument (though I find Smith’s other arguments to be very perceptive, especially about Melancholia; and see my earlier piece on the nature-grace dyad).
The family is central to both films. In von Trier’s hands it is torn to shreds, even as it remains in place right through to the end (an end that kills it). In Malick’s it is probed and struggled with, remaining as a shadowy and ambivalent presence hovering over everything, even as the film’s final moments suggest a homecoming festival for it and everything else in the universe.
Neither film approaches anything like perfection: Malick’s features overgrown limbs flailing around uncontrollably as the film pursues its idea of beauty — I’m thinking of the CGI dinosaurs and the resurrection ending on the beach — while Von Trier’s is shot through with overbearing cliches (which I found easy to ignore, but some critics haven’t).
But cinema (as I argue in my book) is not about perfection. It is about movement, extension, and the ongoing process by which meaning and affect are generated out of this movement.
Tree of Life extends itself like a flowering vine groping toward an elusive sun. As Kent Jones puts it in Film Comment, the film “doesn’t move forward but pulses, like a massive organism, and its beginning and end point are the same: a ball of primal energy in the blackness, ready to generate more theophanies.” It comes not in isolated images but “in bursts of attentively covered emotion and energy,” recalling the instants, the crunching impact moments, that swirl within our own episodic memories of childhood, but following a rhythm, “the film’s signature action” as Jones puts it, “of dilation and contraction, optically, formally, and thematically.”
The film is, as I’ve argued, about flow — the flow of images, fragments, glimpses, memories, feelings, dreams, etc. — and about realization, which is another word for Peircian thirdness. It is about the process of asking questions (through the film’s many offscreen voices) and awaiting their answers, of frustration building when the questions and the still seething traumas underlying them are met with silence, and yet of allowing the arrival of those answers — as the kinds of strangers who enter through the back door of the childhood home that keeps being set alight in one’s memory. And it is about their quiet convergence despite all.
The beauty of the film, for me, is in the way the movement of the images takes you, and the way, when you allow yourself to be taken, you go places that are new and unexpected.
Melancholia works similarly, though here the movement is very different. It’s not a movement somewhere, but a movement coming toward you from somewhere. The blue planet Melancholia, which comes from behind the sun and hurtles slowly on a collision course toward the Earth, is a mesmerizing metaphor for von Trier’s, or anyone’s, depression. It’s a double to the known world, a hidden, deadly intruder destined to come and destroy with a sharp, unfeeling, and deadly blow to the head; a herald and medium of utter extinction.
But where a Buddhist or Lacanian reading of extinction as the shadow of reality would have sufficed, von Trier insinuates a gnostic dualist thread whereby, in Justine’s words, “life on earth is evil” and deserves to be destroyed. Here is where von Trier’s gnosticism parts ways most obviously with Malick’s Heideggerian panentheism.
For Malick the dominant concept-image, the film’s overall, synthetic visual metaphor, is the movement toward the Tree of Life, or the tree’s movement toward the sun, or something like that. This is the Peircian movement from firstness to secondness to thirdness, from chance/possibility/virtuality (firstness) to the rough-and-tumble of actuality (secondness) through to the dawning meaning that opens up before us (thirdness) even as it keeps withdrawing. Malick is a poet of Withdrawing Being and of the process by which we might open ourselves to it.
For von Trier, two concept-images dominate. The first is Melancholia itself, the intruding entity, the Other, as it slowly approaches Earth. The second is Justine’s “magic cave,” which she builds out of sticks and words to shelter her nephew Leo from the incoming abyss. This is what we are capable of doing in the face of extinction: we can build a magic cave. (Which is cinema, among other things.) Or, as Samuel Beckett is supposed to have put it, “I can still crawl.” It’s not nothing, and we can build it as beautifully, as crudely, or as defiantly as we like.
The two films that lurk conspicuously behind both The Tree of Life and Melancholia (like twin planets hiding behind the sun) are Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The latter is about a planet that also acts as a double to the earth, tearing down psychological illusions but ultimately swallowing those who orbit it — rather like the extraterrestrial space (and the computer HAL) that swallows, or attempts to swallow, the astronauts who venture into it in Kubrick’s film.
(The idea that Tarkovsky’s planet Solaris is cinema, or our relationship to cinema, is an idea that I take from Steven Dillon’s book The Solaris Effect. I rework that idea to focus on Tarkovsky’s Stalker and its “Zone,” but the same can be said of von Trier’s magic cave and Malick’s tree. All of them take us into a Zone where, if we open ourselves emotionally, surprising things may happen.)
As in Solaris, the planetary double in Melancholia is an instrument of seduction, of destruction, and of realization: it tears down illusions, renders them impotent, and swallows us in its embrace. Melancholia is, if anything, a more stark, direct, and atheistic version of Solaris‘s embrace. It is a direct hit, which leaves nothing behind.
And yet, despite the bleak nihilism of its seeming message, it is quite possible to leave the theater, as The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman did, feeling “light, rejuvenated and unconscionably happy.” Or as the LA Times’ Betsy Sharkey did.
And while this probably isn’t what either of them had in mind, seeing this killer of planets — not in the frenetic guise of a Hollywood action-packed adventure, but in the slow and deliberate grace of its arrival — makes extinction thinkable and affectively imaginable in a way that only cinema can. It is as simple and powerful a strike at the anthropocentric worldview as has ever been cinematically conceived. (Steven Shaviro seems to be getting at that here.)
What makes the two films ecophilosophical is that they provide a flow of affectively powerful images that render real a certain relationship between subjectivity — or what I call (in my book) subjectivation and anthropomorphosis — and the larger processual ecologies of the Earth and universe.
Tarkovsky’s Stalker (which I analyze here) presents us with a downward view of this relationship, as in the Stalker’s dreaming — of what we don’t know, or perhaps it is dreamless sleep — as the camera pans across objects and processes expressive of their own elusive temporalities, in the film’s famous “dream sequence.”
The Tree of Life presents a view that seems to be arching its head upward, toward a light that is visible through the branches of a tree, but always elusive, so we have to twist ourselves in circuitous contortions to keep moving along with it.
With Melancholia, the little traumas of life are subsumed into a singularly high-impact, planeticidal event, with the result that the gaze becomes a gaze inward into the traumatic abyss of extinction.
But extinction as an image is never mere extinction. If I can claim to have been moved by von Trier’s image of a massive blue planet closing in on the Earth and finally decimating it, this is to say that I have moved along with that image and have in some sense lived and experienced it. Having been so moved, and having given that image the power to transform me, I am no longer in the place where I began. This collision, or at least my response to it, has become a cognitive and affective virtuality for me (in the Deleuzian sense), an imaginal reality (in Corbin’s/Hillman’s sense), something I can feel for and about because I have practiced this feeling while, and after, watching it. I have moved along a vector that has made that set of possibilities mine.
This does not, of course, mean that such a planetary collision has become any more likely than it ever was. But it does mean that I am now more prepared to respond to it, were it to ever arise. This preparation is not mere imagination, as if what I have lived in my imagination is unreal. It is an exercise of real imagination, which means the development of a kind of muscle that poises me for an engaged responsiveness to a certain present or future possibility.
The cinematic is an exercise in such virtuality. Cinema is not unique in this: storytelling, literature, theater, and performative arts in general all provide for some kind of movement along these lines. But cinema is distinctive in its fusion of visual and sound images in temporally sequenced forms. It is the most direct form of moving image that we ourselves can move with, cognitively and affectively, as we watch and as those images continue to percolate in us afterward.
Both of these films (like the others I mentioned) present ecophilosophically potent moving images. It is the discipline of thinking and feeling with those images, as we move on the vectors that they make available, that can make for an ecophilosophical cinema. Between these two very different sets of vectors (Malick’s and von Trier’s) lies a universe of possibilities.
I’m not clear how much this is meant to be descriptive vs prescriptive but I think that this
“It is an exercise of real imagination, which means the development of a kind of muscle that poises me for an engaged responsiveness to a certain present or future possibility” is a real leap, the response-abilities that go along with movie watching are not the same as those that would be involved with an event that is experienced as real or even in generating one’s own imagination/images, I think you might need to do more work seeing how neurophenomenology could flesh out active-imagination, to dream the dream on takes something like heideggerian craftyness.
http://dlmiller.mysite.syr.edu/LegendeImage.htm
dmf – It is intended as prescriptive, a matter of ecophilosophical viewing practice, rather than as descriptive (what viewers actually do). And I wouldn’t advocate that we do it with all films. But I would suggest that there are films that warrant a deeper engagement of this sort than others, and that when we do that we enable their images to work with/on us and vice versa.
But your point about the response-ability that goes with movie-watching being different from that of live events is well taken.
very good, I’m looking forward to hearing more about how such work would take shape, not so sure if we can prejudge which movies/images will be moving (take hold/possession) or not that seems pretty ego-centric, there is something to the (for lack of a better name) willing-suspension-of-disbelief aspect of film watching (and novel reading) that might be worth investigation but my immediate sense is that films in-themselves do too much work for the viewer to be very useful seed-crystals/spurs but as a film buff I would like to be wrong.
A few questions to you, then:
1) Are there films which have changed the way you think/feel about something (let’s call it object/event/phenomenon X)? If so, then those films have been moving (for you), in the sense that I’m using the word.
2) From reflecting on and generalizing about those films, have you gained any insight at all that would help you to pay attention to how that “movement” occurs as it occurs? If so, then you have some ability to judge which movies/images are moving (to you).
Since film viewing is not a sudden, accidental, and completely ephemeral act — it generally involves some planning in advance and some reflection in the midst of — then you would already have some means for doing what I’m describing here, i.e., for paying attention to how films move you and how they might thereby alter your orientation/poisedness toward some object/event/phenomenon. The fact that you are a film buff supports this hypothesis.
That’s not to say that everyone does that. But it is to say that it’s an ability that can be cultivated. What I’m trying to suggest is that this process can work in a direction that I’m calling “ecophilosophical” because it has to do with our feeling/understanding about the relationship between human possibility (becoming/subjectivation) and the becoming of the earth and universe.
I acknowledge that that’s a complicated hypothesis, but I hope you can at least follow my thinking here. Thanks for the questions.
1) no, I have never had how I feel/think about something changed by a movie, only intensified but this, like most affect is fleeting. Next time someone tells you that a film/book “changed” their lives ask them exactly how.
2) I haven’t had this experience and I would say that it is questionable about whether or not generalizing reflection can in fact change our in the moment, as it happens, capacities for awareness, not just a challenge for film but also for all forms of learning about vs learning how.
3) if I’m reflecting in the midst of a film than to some degree it has lost me or I have lost it
not unlike perhaps Dewey’s noticing that we reflect when things go wrong or Heidegger on broken tools.
4) there is a danger in film, as in gossip and plays, of a kind of catharsis that allows one to feel as if one has already done something to a kind of resolution and now are free to move onto something else to return to the habitual and the settled, interpretation/dreamwork is an artificial act which highlights/foregrounds/amplifies certain aspects of a lived experience to create an intensity that grabs the analysand by resonating with their history, hitting habits at their own level and in this way is not unlike film but without the narrative arc which the engaged/spurred analysand than invents (remember here Derrida and invention as in-coming) on the fly out of their en-theos-iasm.
No doubt there are people whose lives are radically altered by images but these experiences are not the norm and would be worth serious investigation.
this is exciting work that you are undertaking thanks for sharing it.
not sure why my reply to your ?s is in moderation limbo but that’s where it can be found, a bit of performative synchronicity perhaps.
dmf – You raise some challenging points and I appreciate the opportunity to grapple with them.
Re (1): “Next time someone tells you that a film/book “changed” their lives ask them exactly how.”
This is one of the things I do in the first class of my Ecopolitics & Cinema course, which I’ve taught four times now. I’ve got a range of answers, and a general agreement that in fact there are films that have “changed” (affected) most people, leaving an imprint on them that they consider to be in some sense significant. It’s not a scientific methodology on my part, and it’s likely that the way I ask the question elicits a certain type of response. But it’s helped me develop my theoretical framework, which relies to some extent on “ethnographic” (interview, classroom “focus group”) data.
Re (2) and (3): Here I will disagree with you (I think). Habits do change, and conscious awareness of our habitual behavior can contribute to changing them. (This is a key Peircian idea that is basic to my theoretical framework; not that that makes it impervious to criticism, but just to let you know where it’s coming from.) You write:
“if I’m reflecting in the midst of a film than to some degree it has lost me or I have lost it”
I think this may depend on your definition of “reflecting.” If you mean that there are only two options — a fully captive attention that does zero reflecting, or a reflective attention that has “lost” the captivity required to successfully watch/enjoy (?) a film — then I would argue that there is no clear and sustainable boundary separating these two, and that if there is, our attention will be crossing that boundary fairly frequently. (Your inclusion of “to some degree” might point to that.)
Our minds wander, but they also continue to think while viewing a film, and that thinking can sometimes include the awareness that “I am here in this theater watching this film (and enjoying/not enjoying it for reason x, y, or z).” Some viewers — perhaps critically “trained” viewers (like film critics, film students, et al.) — likely do a lot more of that than others.
Part of any normative theory of film viewing — a theory that suggests that it’s better (more useful, more productive, etc.) to watch a film in certain ways than in others — is the assumption that we can actually change what we take in: e.g., we can get better at recognizing things like lighting choices (made by the filmmakers), camera angles, editing speeds, the acting of specific actors (doesn’t everyone who goes to see the latest movie by their favorite actor do this?), and so on. Being a film buff, as you called yourself, means being someone who enjoys films and appreciates them in ways above the norm. Surely it’s something that one cultivates and isn’t just born into. And most theories of film (and courses/programs in film studies) at least implicitly acknowledge this “learnable” dimension of watching films.
I like your analogy to Heidegger’s broken tools. The analogy works particularly well for those times when the viewing experience is disrupted by technical glitches, e.g., when the volume suddenly drops out, the film goes off the reel, the DVD starts skipping, etc. But these aren’t the only times when we become reflexively aware of watching a film. I would argue that there’s a spectrum of awareness, from “fully captive” or “focused/involved in the film world” to “fully free (not at all involved in the film world),” and that it’s possible for combinations, rhythms of involvement, etc. Certain kinds of films (e.g. documentaries, experimental films) and viewing conditions (in the living room with three kids crawling over you, on an airplane screen with the pilot’s voice breaking in to announce things, in an avant-garde film club, etc.) tend to elicit more fragmented or hybrid viewing/involvement patterns than others.
Re (4): I like your references to analysis, Derrida, etc. And I agree with you that images that genuinely “move” people, and that move them significantly and deeply, are not the norm. I’m just starting with those that do, and then generalizing by saying that all images do that to some, even imperceptible, degree, because that is their (and our) very nature.
One of the kinds of images I discuss in my book is images of the whole earth, and images of environmental/ecological disasters (positive and negative, or utopian and dystopian “images of ecology,” as Andrew Ross has called them). These are the environmental analogues to images of trauma/pain (such as those discussed by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, or in the field of trauma studies). They have left behind affective imprints on people.
Show someone a famous image of the whole earth (like “Earthrise”) or of the self-immolating monk from the Vietnam war – who lived through that era – and they will likely tell you that that image had a certain effect upon them and even go on enthusiastically to describe some of that effect. (People generally enjoy reflecting on the images that have affected them most.) Images have played an important role in generating environmentalist sentiments; moving images have been part of that. Advertisers know this well – it’s behind the success of many campaigns to sell SUVs (by showing people driving them real fast through the desert or to a clifftop view over a scenic vista).
One of the things I do when I teach about film is to encouraging a viewing practice that pays attention to our affective/emotional involvement in a film – without necessarily reducing that involvement. Certain forms of insight/mindfulness meditation aim to do that with all of our experience: to enable us to observe an experience as it arises, moves through our awareness, and passes away, but without attempting to guide it in any particular direction (e.g.,to reduce or inhibit it). It’s a skill that takes some practice, but it’s not entirely impossible to learn. It tends to result, initially, in an inhibition, if one is not used to doing it.
This is a little like learning how to ride a bike: if you’re paying attention to how your weight is distributed, you’re more likely to fall over than if you’re just moving toward the other side of the parking lot. But there are things that we do that make use of dual or multiple forms of cognition at once (certain forms of multi-tasking, such as dancing in a particular way and enjoying the music one is dancing to), and if we build on them, we can learn the same sort of thing for viewing films.
Thanks again for your great questions.
I my clinical/life experience is that habits are both more specialized (and often context/task dependent) and more recalcitrant (check out the research on cognitive biases) than the classical pragmatists (except Santayana) might have you believe and certainly Jung tended to be quite Romantic about this (Hillman is often more realistic here and if you haven’t read his 100yrs book you should) but they certainly can be refined/sublimated (have you read St. Fish’s Doing What Comes Naturally on rhetoric and change?) and occasionally people undergo significant gestalt-switches/con-versions. if you haven’t already check out the work of:
http://www.pacifica.edu/mary_watkins.aspx
ps Jung’s early work on feeling-toned-complexes is probably a good modern bridge into folks like Deleuze and even Shaviro.
http://innasense.org/
http://131.211.194.110/site1/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=e36e8532843648c2a1e36028859d1860
One might add the the film begins with a powerful quote about God from the (old testament) Book of Job and in the middle is a clear reference to a quote from St. Paul (about doing the very thing I do not want to do). The loss of the Paradise that is both the power and beauty of the created order after the loss of childhood innocence that is not merely developmental (because children grow up), but a product of choice (to, in this case,quite literally, “trepass” against our neighbor, as when the protagonist breaks into the woman’s house) cannot be ignored with doing violence to the film.
Ps You might be interested to know that I once worked for a Russian director who defected from the Soviet Union a few year before Tarkovsky, and knew him. He said T’s films were incomprehensible if one left out religious faith, but not because they were ABOUT faith in the shallow sense of having religious characters or rituals. Instead they pointed to the empty space from which it had receded. And so the main character in the Stalker held on to “faith” in that space he took people to, so that there would be **some** memory (“nostalgia” is the Russia term, but it does not mean what it means in English) of what was missing.
And so, he said, the ending of the film held all its meaning. What they had searched for and not found was seen in the daughter. In the family – the basic unity of society, which precedes the state – was the miracle. The use of telekinesis was only (in Flannery O’Connor’s sense) a way of “shouting” at people who could not hear, who had grown blind (referring to the Bible quote about those who have eyes do not see and those who have ears do not hear).
There’s a serious polarity in the reviews for this film, Melancholia, and I’m not surprised. If you’ve ever suffered depression this bleak movie will hit hard, and you’ll pick up on all of the subtle messages it sends out. It’s done so well it can’t be anything other than achingly familiar. The despondency, and the frustration the sufferer feels at their own despondency, in particular, is well conveyed.
Unfortunately I think a large chunk of the people who’ve seen this film (and there aren’t many who have, sadly) went to it expecting a slightly arty apocalypse movie. It’s not a smarter Deep Impact. The (blue) planet Melancholia is just a metaphor for depression. Unrelenting and irresistible, Melancholia has the main character in its thrall.
For those who don’t “get” this movie, no it’s not a pretentious, pseudo intellectual flick. Rather it’s a well crafted take on the fine detail of a subject matter that you have been fortunate enough to not have had to understand. Long may that be the case.