Dialectical Modes of Nature in Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ is an article published recently in the Spring edition of the NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies. This article is part of a special section on 'Greenness' and on the relationship between media, ecology, and environmental criticism.
In the article I demonstrate that there are three different, interrelated modes of nature in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998). I suggest that these modes represent some of the different ways that human beings can be involved with nature and also the various ways human beings can know and experience nature. I further argue that this multifaceted presentation of nature is one way that Malick expresses a form of dialectical materialism in his work.
To read the article please follow this link:
http://www.necsus-ejms.org/dialectical-modes-of-nature-in-terrence-malicks-the-thin-red-line/
In this article, I examine Martin Lefebvre's distinction between setting and landscape (or, as he also formulates it, narrativised space and autonomous spectacle). I examine this distinction in order to think about some of the complex ways landscape can function in film.
I draw on the concept of Umwelt (surrounding-world) which the German film historian Lotte H. Eisner uses to analyse films from the Weimar period. Particularly focusing on Lupu Pick's Kammerspielfilm Sylvester (1924), Eisner shows how images of the surrounding-world in the film are not directly part of the narrative yet, at the same time, symbolically function to enhance or enlarge what is occurring in the drama.
One of my aims in drawing on the concept of Umwelt is to respond to Lefebvre's claim that there are not always fixed boundaries between setting and landscape or between 'narrational' and 'spectacular' modes of spectatorship.
In order to show how permeable the boundaries between narrativised space and autonomous spectacle can be, I tease out and develop one of the paradoxes that is implicit in Lefebvre's analysis of the desert terrain in Pier Paolo Pasonlini's Teorema (1968).
You can read the article here at Senses of Cinema (Issue 66, March 2013):
http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/feature-articles/umwelt-landscape-and-lupu-picks-sylvester/
