Tracing An Ecstatic Movement: The Recent Cinema of Terrence Malick

Please join the Department of Communication and Culture Film Studies Program and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities to hear the second of two talks on film–Dr.Lee Carruthers’ talk entitled “Tracing An Ecstatic Movement: The Recent Cinema of Terrence Malick” Abstract: The cinema of Terrence Malick has garnered much critical attention on the basis of its intellectual and aesthetic richness. Within the available literature, however, there is a tendency to hold these valences separate, suppressing the film-specific qualities of Malick’s work so as to privilege a generalized thematic content. Thus Malick’s films are broadly characterized as ‘poetic’ or ‘philosophical’, yet are rarely assessed as dynamic experiences of cinema. Given the aesthetic depth of the director’s corpus, this oversight is surprising. More specifically, this critical lapse motivates a question that is significant for philosophers and film scholars alike: how can we discover what is profound in Malick’s cinema — its philosophical inflection, perhaps— while engaging its distinctive filmic character? Carruthers’ lecture responds to this question through a close analysis of the most recent films, The Tree of Life (USA, 2011), and To the Wonder, (USA, 2012), locating the philosophical import of Malick’s work in its sensuous orchestration of sounds and images. Bio: Dr.Lee Carruthers’ monograph, Doing Time: Timeliness and Contemporary Cinema is forthcoming with SUNY Press. This film-phenomenological study analyzes the rich experiences of temporality that contemporary film generates for viewers, examining the cinema of Terrence Malick, François Ozon, Steven Soderbergh, and Tsai Ming-liang. Presently, she is developing a new book exclusively on Malick’s cinema.

Location:

BioSciences 587A

Speaker:

Dr. Lee Carruthers

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/tracing-ecstatic-movement-recent-cinema-terrence-malick