ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 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

he 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 Bazins own disciplines in Cahiers du cinema
during the early 1960s, and continuing with the
rise of structuralist, semiological, and psychoanalytic theory in the 1960s and 1970s, each new
generation of film theory seems to have repeated
this ritual renunciation.5 Bazins 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 maintaining an implausible, naively realist ontology of the
cinematic image.6 Yet Bazins 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

robert sinnerbrink
CINEMATIC BELIEF
bazinian cinephilia and
malicks the tree of life
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, representation, 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

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/12/040095^23 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2012.747332

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cinematic belief
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 Deleuzes words, reasons
to believe in this world a belief in the world
mediated by images, precisely when the cinemas
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, Bazins 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 overcoming 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
Malicks The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose
ambition is to create a mythology personal,
historical, and cosmological capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world.

bazins 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
Bazins 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 independent arguments on settled technical or
conceptual problems concerning the nature of
the medium.9 Bazins 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 theorists 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 (Carrolls
critique, for example), Bazin is presented as a
pioneering but misguided nave realist who
argues for a strong ontological realism. On this
view, call it the ontological-aesthetic reading,
Bazins error was to isolate the ontological basis
of cinema (its photographic character) and to
argue that films that best harness this photographic realism capturing a profilmic reality
through long takes, depth of field, natural
lighting, outdoor settings, naturalistic performances, and unified composition are aesthetically superior because truer to the essence of
the medium as such.11 The other significant
interpretative tendency was to construe Bazins
thought as the expression of a phenomenologically grounded Catholic personalism (influenced
by Emmanuel Mounier),12 one that motivated
Bazins embrace of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology and Sartres account of imagination,
coupled with a theologically charged preference
for humanist and personalist aesthetics and leftCatholic morality and politics (exemplified by
Italian neo-realism).13 Both readings were challenged by French Marxist and structuralist film
critics in the 1960s, and by psychoanalyticsemiotic theorists of the 1970s.14 Taken together,
Bazins nave realism, his commitment to
phenomenology, and religious humanism, presented a ready target for the so-called Grand
Theory that followed in his wake.
Unfortunately some critics continue to construe Bazins concerns with realism as a set of
purely ontological theses concerning the putative

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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,
Bazins 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, motivated 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

bazins 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 apprehension (our critical faculties) and our perception of
an object; the image gives us an apprehension of

97

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,
thats my daughter at age two, not thats 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 reflection. 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 Bazins 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 (cinematic) 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 photographic image orients, but does not determine,
Bazins 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

cinematic belief
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 cinematographic 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-ensce`ne, 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
Morgans reading, we can say that realism is a
complex phenomenon embracing the automatic capturing of a profilmic reality, the
rendering of a cinematic world through significant facts within that world (expressing
psychological, moral, social, or existential attitudes or beliefs), and the acknowledgement of the

specificities of the cinematic medium (its rendering 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 meaning27
. . . 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 cinematic style; an aesthetic composition, transformation, and expression that can be specific to
distinctive cinematic worlds and indeed to
particular auteurs. Realism is an aesthetic
achievement concerning the constitution of cinematic 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 lil (or trompe
lesprit), 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 concrete detail, unity of composition, with openness
to interpretation. As I shall discuss in more detail
with regard to Malicks 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 reflection, cultural memory, our encounter with

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nature, engagement with history, or spiritualmoral experience.

bazins 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 Bazins 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 matters. Certain passages from Bazins 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 Bazins 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 Bazins subtly phrased prose, it is not

surprising that the standard view emphasises the
causal link between image and referent.

99

Indeed, some philosophers have reinterpreted

Bazins 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). Bazins 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 photographys objectivity35 satisfy the psychological, even unconscious, 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

cinematic belief
The magic of the image is its power to overcome
our fear of death, to satisfy the desire to preserve
evanescent experience. Bazins famous mummy
complex links the origin of our desire to make
images with the satisfaction of one of human
psychologys 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 contemporary focus on Bazins ontology of the image,
these psychological, existential, anthropological
dimensions of Bazins concern with realism are
not to be gainsaid.
There are, of course, other ways of defending
Bazins 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 condition 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 items social
and cultural meaning.42 It is in this sense that we
can say that the image is the model; it acknowledges 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 and mythic time

There is one important issue, however, that
Morgans 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
photographys 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
Bazins 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 presentation 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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sinnerbrink
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 selfreflection. As we shall see with Malicks The Tree
of Life, it is this aspect of Bazins 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
Malicks 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, nonlinear, 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 experience.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 significance. The remarkable thing about the cinema is
that is achieves this effect automatically, thanks
to the technological rendering of reality through

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the moving image. Here we find a link between

Bazin and Cavells 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 coincidence 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 Deleuzes claims in Cinema 2 concerning 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

cinematic belief
in an individual viewers personal experience that
also partakes of a collective memory or contributes to a shared cultural archive. What these
different forms of temporality might be remains
ontologically obscure in Bazins writings, yet they
are what make the cinema potentially transformative 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
Malicks 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 Bazins insistence on the aesthetic and moral importance of
realism. So what of Bazins aesthetics of belief?
There are at least three senses of the concept
relevant to his work: (1) belief in the aestheticmoral possibilities of cinema, its power of
aesthetic revelation, which is expressed in
Bazins championing of criticism, of theorising
via criticism; (2) belief aroused by the cinematic
image, its power of ontological revelation, which
is expressed in Bazins 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 cinemas 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 Bazins work. Indeed,
the question of Bazins spiritualism has often
served as a critical reference point both for his
defenders and for his critics.52 Although Bazins
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 Bazins work
nonetheless remains a challenge and an enigma.
Here again the concept of belief in cinema offers
a productive perspective, a way of acknowledging
Bazins 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 manifestations. Such is the philosophical meaning of
Bazins 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: malicks the tree of life

It is from this point of view that I wish to turn to
Terrence Malicks 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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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 aesthetic possibilities of film. In this regard Malicks
film echoes Bazins desire to show how cinema is
an idealist and technological miracle; a cinephiliac medium of aesthetic revelation capable of
evoking personal, historical, even cosmic
memory. Malicks 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 Jacks (Hunter
McCracken) attempts to reconcile his fathers
(Brad Pitt) egoistic self-interest with his mothers
(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 Bazins
remarks on Bressons Diary of a Country Priest
(1950) resonates well with Malicks numinous
hymn to life. It too is
a new form of drama, one that is specifically
religious, or better yet, theological: a phenomenology of salvation and grace.54

It is in The Tree of Lifes mythic evocation of

cosmic, historical, and personal memory, its
phenomenological capturing of contingency, the
radiance of nature, the epiphanies of the everyday, 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.

103

our picture is a cosmic epic, a hymn

to life55
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-ofage/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-inspiring 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 Malicks 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 ambivalent about The New World, Malicks 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 dOr at Cannes. Indeed, as Kent
Jones remarks, Malicks intense interest in
origins of violence, of the universe itself
has made his last three films anomalous in
modern culture58 not least, I would add,
because of their aesthetic figuration of metaphysical 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 films
spiritual-religious dimensions. Repeating the

cinematic belief
reception history of Malicks other films, critical
responses to The Tree of Life stand polarised
between rapturous celebration and sarcastic
ridicule. Noted critic Roger Ebert, for example,
praised Malicks 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 films 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 combined with a glut of classical religious music.62
Taubins complaints concerning Malicks 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 films aesthetic as
compromised by its spiritual-religious commitment. What separates the perspectives of Ebert
and Taubin, then, is less a dispute over the films
aesthetic qualities than a dispute over its status as
a religious work of art.64 Indeed, it is precisely
The Tree of Lifes Christianity or rather its
religiosity more broadly construed that lies at
the heart of the films polarised reception:65 the
question whether acknowledging the films religiosity 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 films religiosity. There are four
that a survey of the films 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
films religious content in favour of its aesthetic
merits (the aestheticist reading); and (4)
acknowledgement of the films 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 films aesthetic virtues; alternatively, one can
criticise the films alleged aesthetic vices as a way

of rejecting its religiosity. The difficulty, however, is that these two aspects are inextricably
entwined (e.g., the pointed use of voiceover in the
film). The Tree of Lifes 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 as

mythic work
In a brief but rich essay, Cinema and
Theology, Bazin identified three ways, historically 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 Bressons 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 postsecular religious film that explores the spiritualexistential struggle of an individual over questions 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 religious traditions.69
This is clearly the case with The Tree of Life.
The films 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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sinnerbrink
multivalent notion that spans many of the major
world religions, various mythological accounts of
the origin of life, but also refers to Darwins
conception of evolutionary development.71 This
coalescence of meanings in the title of the film
combining Christian, mythological, and evolutionary 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
OBrien family. Given the complexity of the film,
with its mythic coalescing of narrative layers,
temporal series, and personal, historical, and
metaphysical dimensions, some further description 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 OBriens
(Sean Penn) spiritual-existential crisis on the
anniversary of his younger brothers death (killed
when he was nineteen). Set during the course of
this one day, a troubled and lost OBrien
recollects, via a complex use of episodic flashbacks, 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 OBrien familys story depicts mainly
through visual style, mise-en-sce`ne, 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 reenchanted universe; a naturalised cosmos developing with evolutionary vitality and imbued with
aesthetic grandeur and spiritual wonder.

105

This third story culminates in an eschatological

myth (Jacks transcendent vision of the end of
time), which brings together the familial
melodrama, historical Fall, and the mythicspiritual 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 Gods 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 earths
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 Wilfreds Opus 161 (1965))73 is accompanied by signature Malick background sounds of
susurrating nature (wind, waves, and bird cries).
Taken by some critics as a depiction of Gods
presence, the image, as Kent Jones remarks,
highlights Malicks 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 Malicks 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 everyday 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

cinematic belief

Fig.1. The luminous realism of Malicks cinema.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.

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), Jacks voiceover, like that of his
own mother, hovers between recollection and
meditation, voice of conscience and silent prayer.
Like all voiceovers in Malicks films, the voice
both belongs to a particular character and serves
to articulate a communal experience; it narrates a
particular characters 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 experience transcending the particularities of psychology, place, or history.
The mythic use of voiceover continues with the
introduction of Jacks 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 mans palace there are two ways through
life: the Way of Nature and the Way of Grace.
You have to choose which one youll follow.
Grace doesnt 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 reconciled. 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 attunement 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 interpreters point out, Mrs OBriens description of
the contrast between the two ways through life is
reminiscent of medieval mystic Thomas a`
Kempiss account in The Imitation of Christ
(Book 3, chapter 54).75 The way of Nature is that

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sinnerbrink

Fig. 2. His lifelong quest to reconcile Nature and Grace. TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.

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 OBrien, the stern, egoistic, disciplinarian 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 OBrien says,
Nature torments itself, ignoring the beauty and
glory shining through all things). The film does
not simply endorse the mothers grace and
forgiveness, however, which Mr OBrien at one
point calls nave, against the fathers 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 mothers grace is tested by the
tragic loss of her beloved younger son R.L.,
which she takes as Gods personal slight against
her, while the father struggles with his own

107

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, Jacks 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 OBrien 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

cinematic belief
fortune and happiness but loss and despair, the
sudden death of Mrs OBriens beloved youngest
son. This shattering event is announced by the
mothers 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 Jacks
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 brothers 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 Jacks life,
linking the plenitude of his childhood in the
1950s with the barrenness of the contemporary
world, enveloping Jacks personal sense of
despair and involuntary memory within a
mythic origin and end of time.
The sons death is the crucial event that
defines this family odyssey, Mrs OBrien 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 OBrien questions God, asking
plaintively, What did you gain? The grandmother (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
brothers loss still affecting Jack in his adult life,
as he struggles with his sceptical despair:
Worlds 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 brothers
death, a loss that has marked his whole life: I
think about him every day and I shouldnt have
said what I said. Its just this day. Set during the
course of this one day, the film spanning Jacks
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 Jacks
reverie: Find me, says the boy, perhaps R.L.
This image of the lost brother will recur at the
end of the film, during Jacks epiphanic vision of
spiritual reconciliation through love.
This familial drama and spiritual quest
narrative is interrupted, however, by one of the
films most controversial sequences: what we
might call the cosmological, or better, cosmopoetical creation myth, an extraordinary fusion of
abstract imagery, animation, nature footage, and
metaphysical speculation.77 Critics have claimed
that this sequence is filtered through Jacks
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 OBriens voiceover, 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 OBriens words echo the quotation
from the Book of Job that opens the film
(Where were you when I laid the earths
foundation . . .?) What follows, so to speak, is
Malick playing God: showing Mrs OBrien (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. Malicks
images of origin span the abstract depiction of

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sinnerbrink
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 evolution 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 cosmological myth. TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.

Fig. 4. The mythopoetic power of cinema.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.

109

cinematic belief

Fig. 5. A Bazinian cinephilia.TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.

Fig. 6. Cinematic thinking: Nature and Grace. TheTree of Life, Fox Searchlight, 2011.

of nature with a revelatory power that inspires

conviction images with the power, to use
Deleuzes phrase, to give us reasons to believe in
this world. The realism of Malicks 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 reenchanted 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, Malicks
film embodies Bazins 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 reenchantment of the everyday world, and for a
mythic history and cosmopoetics that, taken
together, reveal the philosophical meaning of
Bazinian cinephilia.
Here, Malicks vision of a reconciliation
between naturalism and scientism, art and
science, religion and philosophy, echoes one of
Bazins influences, the unorthodox Jesuit, philosopher, palaeontologist, and mystic Pierre

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sinnerbrink
Teilhard de Chardin. As Jeffrey Crouse notes,
Teilhards 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 transpersonal 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 Teilhards 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 Teilhards noosphere;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

111

melodrama, historical recollection, and cosmopoetical 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.

notes
The Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery
Project scheme (DP1092889) supported the
authors research for this essay. The views
expressed herein are those of the author and are
not necessarily those of the ARC.
1 Deleuze,Cinema 2 172.
2 Bazin,Theatre and Film (2) 197.
3 Idem,Cinema and Theology 61.
4 As Joubert-Laurencin remarks, [f ]ew intellectuals have suffered a more difficult, contorted,
and contradictory reception than has Bazin in his
native France these past fifty years (Andrew and
Joubert-Laurencin xiii). This difficult reception is
echoed in the anglophone world, as Hunter
Vaughan observes: Bazin has received one of the
most systematic drubbings in twentieth-century
cultural studies (100).
5 See Younger, Re-thinking Bazin. See also
Carroll; Henderson, Two Types of Film Theory;
Macbean; and Michelson.
6 See the critiques of Bazin by Carroll;
Henderson; Macbean; MacCabe; and Wollens
influential interpretation.
7 See Cavell16, 20, 21, 39,166; and Deleuze,Cinema
1 16, 24. Compare Cavells remark: Why are
movies important? I take it for granted that in various obvious senses they are. That this can be
taken for granted is the first fact I pose for consideration; it is, or was, a distinctive fact about
movies (4). I discuss this issue further in
Sinnerbrink 90 ^116.
8 See Cavell 16 ^ 41, 60 ^73; and Deleuze, Cinema 1
1^12, 58 ^72, 201^19.
9 See Sinnerbrink 7^ 8.
10 Crouse, Because we need him now: reenchanting film studies through Bazin. See also

cinematic belief
the recent essay collection Opening Bazin, edited
by Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin;
the 2007 Bazin special issue of Film International
edited by Jeffrey Crouse; Ivone Margulies edited
volume Rites of Realism; Philip Rosens Change
Mummified; Daniel Morgans Rethinking Bazin;
William Rothmans Bazin as Cavellian Realist;
and Richard Rushtons The Reality of Film 42^78.
Christian Keathley has explored the relationship
between Bazin and cinephilia (see his Cinephilia
and History) while Prakash Younger has retrieved
Bazin as an exemplar of cinephilosophy or film
philosophy.
11 See Carroll 108 ^ 09.
12 Mourniers Christian personalism was an
important influence on Bazin, in particular the
valorisation of individual moral autonomy, creative
freedom, and social responsibility against the
abstract universalism, impersonal institutions,
and depersonalisation wrought by capitalism. See
Mournier.
13 See Andrew, Andre Bazin.
14 As Colin MacCabe remarks: Bazins Catholic
humanism and realist aesthetic had banished him
from the theoretical reading lists of the 1960s and
1970s (75).
15 Carroll, for example, sharply distinguishes criticism from theory, remarking that Bazins astuteness as a critic makes up for his weakness as a
theorist: What fails as theory may excel as criticism (171).

25 See Bazins essays De Sica and In Defence of

Rossellini. Against the standard reading, Morgan
(451) makes the point that Bazins ongoing dissatisfaction with his various accounts of the ontology
of the image is evident in his recurrent use of
metaphors to capture films relationship with reality (as mummy, mould, death mask, mirror,
equivalent, substitute, and asymptote).
26 Morgan 463ff.
27 Ibid. 461. The internal Bazin quotation is from
Bazins Jean Renoir 84.
28 Morgan 463.
29 Bazin,Ontology 6.
30 Morgan 447ff.
31 See Wollen, Doane, and Mulvey for differing
examples of this approach. Wollen presents an
indexical reading of Bazin via Peirce, Doane
emphasises the capturing of contingency, whereas
Mulvey takes up the relationship between Bazin,
Freud, and Barthess Camera Lucida. See Gunning
for a recent critique of the index argument.
32 As Bazin himself will claim: There is an ontological identity between the object and its photographic image (In Defence of Rossellini 98).
33 Bazin,Ontology 8.
34 See Scruton; and Walton.
35 Bazin,Ontology 8.

17 Ibid. 8.

36 Bazin seems to suggest that the image reveals

the universal in the particular, the coincidence of
shared aesthetic meaning and sensuous
particularity.

18 Sartre makes a similar point inThe Imaginary.

37 Bazin,Ontology 5^ 6.

16 Bazin,Ontology of the Photographic Image 4.

19 Rosen (Belief in Bazin 107ff.) makes the point

that Hugh Grays translation of the term croyance
as faith rather than belief in key texts has
obscured the importance of belief while giving
Bazins essays an overly religious tone.
20 Dudley Andrew has challenged the received
view over many decades. See his Andre Bazin and
A Film Aesthetic to Discover.
21 See Morgan.
22 Ibid. 445.

38 See Moore for a fascinating discussion of

cinema as modern magic or technological
phantasmagoria.
39 Bazin,Ontology 3.
40 For discussions of death and loss in Bazins
writings see Smith; and Oeler.
41 Morgan 469ff. See also Rothman.
42 See Morgan; Rothman; and Rushton 44 ^78.

23 Bazin,William Wyler 52.

43 For an interesting discussion of time in Bazin

see Carruthers.

24 Cavell 16 ^17. See Morgan 451.

44 Bazin,Ontology 9.

112

sinnerbrink
45 Ibid.
46 Crouse (9) praises this as the most jaw-dropping idea I have ever encountered in film studies.
47 Cf.
The crucial difference between historical and
mythic time interpretation is related to the
model used for comprehending temporality.
Historical time is linear, continuous, and is
composed of unique events, but mythical
time is cyclical and repetitive. The latter
encompasses and unites two temporal
dimensions: the original time and the present. (Pentikainen 235)
48 See Allen (190):
Mythic time is sacred time, mythic history is
sacred history . . . mythic space is sacred
space . . . In Eliades interpretation of the
nature, structure, function and meaning of
myth, mythic believers actually become contemporaneous with the supernatural beings
and other sacred realities described in their
myths.
Many aspects of this mythic mode of presentation
and experience will also be apparent in Malicks
The Tree of Life.
49 Cf. Cavell:
The idea of and wish for the world
re-created in its own image was satisfied at
last by cinema. Bazin calls this the myth of
total cinema . . . What is cinemas way of satisfying the myth? Automatically, we said . . . It
means satisfying it without my having to do
anything, satisfying it by wishing. In a word,
magically. (39)
50 See Rosen,Change 29.
51 Morgan 452.
52 See Bill Nicholscriticism that Bazins theory of
film presents us with: [a] dual and perhaps contradictory approach combining transcendent spiritualism and sociology (151).
53 Crouse 9.
54 Bazin,Diary of a Country Priest and the Robert
Bresson Style 150.
55 Quoted from Malicks press release on the film
before its public release.

113

56 Cf. the famous voiceovers in The Thin Red Line:

Maybe all men got one big soul where everybodys a part of. All faces are the same man, one
big self. Everyone looking for salvation by himself.
Each like a coal drawn from the fire (Witt).Who
were you that I lived with, walked with? The
brother, the friend? Strife and love, darkness and
light ^ are they the workings of one mind, features
of the same face? Oh my soul. Let me be in you
now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the
things you made. All things shining (Train). The
phrase All things shining comes from James
Joness war novel The Thin Red Line, upon which
the Malick film is (loosely) based. The phrase one
big soul recalls Emersons over-soul, that which
unites men, nature, and God. See Emerson.
57 See my discussion of The New World in
Sinnerbrink. Richard Neer gives a finely nuanced
interpretation of the film that takes issue with
the imposition of philosophical readings that do
violence to the films aesthetic and cinematic
complexity.
58 Jones 26.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid. 24. Scott Foundas asks why MalicksTheTree
of Life received such a hostile response at Cannes,
whereas Apichatpong Weerasethakuls 2010 Palme
dOr winning Uncle BoonmeeWho Can Recall His Past
Lives,another meditative film about nature, death,
and possible afterlives,did not.Foundas 61.
61 See Ebert.
62 Taubin 57.
63 Most of the composers used in this sequence
are not classical but contemporary (Zbigniew
Preisner, Giya Kancheli, John Tavener, and Mother
Tekla). The sequence concludes with the Domine
Jesu Christe movement from Berliozs Grande
messes des morts (or Requiem) Opus 5 (1837).
64 While acknowledging the link between Malick
and neo-Platonist philosophers such as Johannes
Scotus Eriugena ^ in particular his theophanic
metaphysics of light as the expression of divine
life (all things are lights) ^ Jones dismisses the
description of TheTree of Life as a religious film in
the sense of one adhering to Christian doctrine. It
is more a cross, he claims, between Eriugenas
vision of life of earth and pre-orthodox
Buddhism, a work fixated not on the afterlife but
on the glory of this life (26).

cinematic belief
65 As Peter Bradshaw remarks: [p]eople would
repeatedly reproach me for my own laudatory
notice; this film, they said, was pretentious,
boring and ^ most culpably of all ^ Christian.
Didnt I realise, they asked, that Malick was a
Christian?
66 See Sterritt for an aestheticist reading of the
film that takes issue with Malicks alleged
theodicy. Jones acknowledges the films religiosity, as mentioned above, but rejects the attribution of a Christian meaning to the film. Pfeifer
hedges on the question of religiosity, contrasting
two contrary perspectives that the film attempts
(with difficulty) to reconcile: that of the idealist,
for whom The Tree of Life is an ineffable aesthetic
and emotional revelation of beauty and spiritual
truth; and that of the analyst, for whom the film
is a self-reflexive cinematic meditation on
memory, childhood, and history.
67 Bazin,Cinema and Theology 64.
68 See Otto. Otto popularised the concept of the
numinous (from the Latin, numen), which was
taken up by Carl Jung, C.S. Lewis, and in the religious studies of Mircea Eliade. It describes a shattering encounter with a transcendent dimension
beyond ordinary experience (the sacred as
wholly other) that resists description and comprehension. As a religious experience it is characterised both by a sense of terror (a fear and
trembling or mysterium tremendum) eliciting dread
or anxiety, as well as rapture or fascination evoking silent awe or wonder.
69 In this category we might include films such as
Kubricks 2001,Tarkovskys Solaris (1972) and Stalker
(1979), Kies lowskis The Double Life of Veronique
(1993), Apichatpong Weerasethakuls Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (2010), and
BelaTarrsTheTurin Horse (2011).
70 The Tree of Life is mentioned in the Book of
Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and hence are
cast out of the Garden of Eden: And the LORD
God said, Behold, the man is become as one of
us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put
forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live forever (Genesis 3.22, King
James edition). The film evokes this quest to
retrieve the fruit of the Tree of Life (eternal life),
but within the limits of our natural and historical
dwelling.

71 See DarwinsThe Origin of Species (1859) chapter

IV Character of Natural Selection, sub-section
on Divergence of Character.
72 Steven Rybin points out that Malick has composed the story of Jacks childhood through flashbacks that go well beyond what the adult Jack
could remember (or what the young Jack could
have experienced directly), thus exposing and
exploring the inherent ambiguity of the flashback
as a way of communicating recollections of the
past in a manner that overflows individual
memory. In this way, The Tree of Life could be read,
Rybin argues, as a philosophical inquiry into the
very nature of the flashback as a source of meaning in film (176).
73 Thomas Wilfred was an American-Danish
artist who was a pioneer in creating Lumia
images or visual music; works of art composed of
light, colour, and form, using the colour organ or
Clavilux.
74 Jones 24 ^26.
75 A point well made by Steven Rybin 172. Rybin
also notes that, unlike Thomas a' Kempis, Malick
is ultimately concerned to show us how both the
ethereally spiritual and the brutally natural are
intertwined. See also McAteers illuminating discussion of the theology informing the Way of
Nature/Way of Grace duality inTheTree of Life.
76 One intrepid viewer has shown that the
Western Union telegram Mrs OBrien receives
states that her sons death took place in Mexico,
on 6 February 1968, in an automobile accident
(rather than by committing suicide, as Malicks
brother Larry did while living in Spain and
studying guitar under Andres Segovia). See The
Niles Files.
77 Much of this footage is taken from a project
Malick had conceived in the twenty-year gap
between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, an
experimental documentary piece on the origin of
life in the universe entitled Q. Malick is reportedly working on a six-hour version of The Tree of
Life that includes more extensive use of this material as well as much more narrative material
depicting Jacks childhood, adolescence, and young
adulthood.
78 See Pfeifer.
79 Crouse 9.Crouse also points out (20) the significance of Bergsons Creative Evolution for Teilhards

114

sinnerbrink
ideas concerning the reconciliation of science and
theology.
80 Crouse 9. See Teilhards posthumously published The Phenomenon of Man, which details the
Darwinian evolutionary development of life and
the Lamarckian or convergent evolutionary development of culture towards a unified field of consciousness (God).
81 Deleuze (Cinema 2 215) takes up the termnoosphere in discussing the relation between thought
and cinema; the noosphere is formed by the circulation of cinematic noosigns ^ expressing topological, probabilistic, and irrational cuts/
connections ^ that together compose a new
image of thought. The noosign, for its part, is
defined as an image which goes beyond itself
towards something that can only be thought
(Cinema 2 335). Deleuze takes theTeilhardian noosphere in a materialist direction, regrounding its
Bergsonian version of creative evolution via the
immanent becoming of nature, removing its spiritualist dimensions of transcendence and thus
blockingTeilhards teleological naturalist theology.
82 Andrew, Andre Bazin 66 ^ 67; qtd in Crouse10.
83 In the world of cinema one must have the
love of a De Sica for creation itself (Bazin, De
Sica 76).

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Robert Sinnerbrink
Department of Philosophy
Building W6A, Balaclava Rd
Macquarie University
North Ryde, NSW 2109
Sydney
Australia
E-mail: robert.sinnerbrink@mq.edu.au