Belief in this World: Aesthetic Mythology in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

Dr Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University)

Rooms: Ballarat, rm 503; North Sydney rm 16; Canberra Signadou Bldg rm 110; Melbourne: room 7.03, level 7, 250 Victoria Pde; Brisbane rm AC22; Strathfield conference Room B.

Please note: the Melbourne venue will be at level 7, 250 Victoria Pde; the venue at North Sydney is Level 16, Tenison Woods House. 

Abstract:

In their philosophical engagement with cinema, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze address a fundamental question: why does film matter? One of the issues that concerns them is the relationship between cinema and belief: can cinema, with its power of aesthetic mythmaking and disclosure of alternative realities, restore the broken link between us and the world? As Deleuze puts it, does modern cinema has the power to give us “reasons to believe in this world”, an aesthetic response to our pervasive scepticism, our cultural-historical nihilism? My case study for exploring the relationship between cinema and belief will be Terrence Malick’s remarkable symphonic tone poem, The Tree of Life (2011), a film whose sublime ambition is to enact an aesthetic mythology capable of inspiring belief in this world. At once a religious-metaphysical work and a meditation on the origins and ends of life, The Tree of Life also expresses a profound love of the world, affirming its dialectic of nature and grace via the revelatory powers of cinema.