Terrence Malick and the Examined Life (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Martin Woessner

$65.00

Publication Date: March 25th, 2024

Publisher:

University of Pennsylvania Press

ISBN:

9781512825602

Pages:

416

Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

Terrence Malick is one of American cinema's most celebrated filmmakers. His films--from Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) to The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree of Life (2011), and, most recently, A Hidden Life (2019)--have been heralded for their artistry and lauded for their beauty, but what really sets them apart is their ideas. Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is the most comprehensive account to date of this unparalleled filmmaker's intellectual and artistic development.

Utilizing newly available archival sources to offer original interpretations of his canonical films, Martin Woessner illuminates Malick's early education in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford as well as his cinematic apprenticeship at the American Film Institute to show how a young student searching for personal meaning became a famous director of Hollywood films. Woessner's book presents a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of the many texts, thinkers, and traditions that made this transformation possible--from the novels of Hamlin Garland, James Jones, and Walker Percy to the philosophies of Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, and S ren Kierkegaard to road movies, Hollywood Westerns, and the comedies of Jean Renoir. Situating Malick's filmmaking within recent intellectual and cultural history, Woessner highlights its lasting contributions to both American cinema and the life of the mind.

Terrence Malick and the Examined Life suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer.

About the Author

Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History and Society at The City College of New York (CUNY), Center for Worker Education, and author of Heidegger in America.

Terrence Malick and the Examined Life (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Description

About the Author

Other Books in Series

The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Christian Human Rights (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos, and God (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

History After Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Secularism and Hermeneutics (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)

Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)