The Tree of Links: Terrence Malick Studies

Frame grab from The New World (Terrence Malick, 2004)

For me the most powerful films are, and always will be, those of a singular gaze where the human eye can be felt, where it is allowed to go uninhibited, without question and without anyone second guessing its accuracy.

[Filmmaker Brad McGann on Malick's Days of Heaven in ‘Southern Superstition’, Take, Issue 27, Winter 2004/5, p. 19. cited by Duncan Petrie]

Film Studies For Free is off to the beach and won't be posting for a few weeks. But, dry those tears! FSFF always likes to leave its readers with something to remember it by. And this year's pre-vacation posting will hopefully do the trick. 

Below, you will find a sublime, transcendent, rare, totally indulgent, and almost religiously good list of links to online and openly accessible studies of the work of American filmmaker Terrence Malick, together with some reviews of his 2011 Palme D'Or winning opus The Tree of Life which are of scholarly interest. Scroll right down to the end for five of Matt Zoller Seitz's great video essays on Malick's work.

Don't say that FSFF doesn't love you, because, despite its occasional confusion with double-negatives, it does! Ciao!

• Michael Atkinson, 'The Shadow Army: Ruminations on a phantom version of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line', Moving Image Source, October 27, 2008
• Michael Atkinson, 'The Tree of Life', Sight and Sound, August 2011
• Adam Batty, 'Unless you love, your life will flash by. Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life', Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second, July 9, 2011 
• John Bleasdale, 'The Tree of Life', Alternate Takes, May 21, 2011
• John Bleasdale, 'Please Make More Films: On The Cinema of Terrence Malick [ed. by Hannah Patterson]', Film-Philosophy, 9.33, 2005
• J.E.J. Cain, 'Writing in his musical key": Terrence Malick's vision of The Thin Red Line', Film Criticism v. 25 no. 1 (Fall 2000) p. 2-24
• Hubert I. Cohen, 'The Genesis of Days of Heaven', Cinema Journal - 42, Number 4, Summer 2003, pp. 46-62
• Simon Critchley, 'Calm: On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line', Film-Philosophy, 6.38, 2002
• Charlotte Crofts, 'From the" Hegemony of the Eye" to the" Hierarchy of Perception": The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image In Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven', Peer-reviewed draft prior to corrections / typographical setting, published in Journal of Media Practice, 2:1, 19-29
• Adrian Danks, 'Death Comes as an End: Temporality, Domesticity and Photography in Terrence Malick's Badlands', Senses of Cinema, Issue 8, 2000
• Bilge Ebiri, 'English Speakers: The prison of language in Terrence Malick's The New World', Moving Image Source, October 27, 2008
• Michael Filippidis, 'On Malick's Subjects', Senses of Cinema, Issue 8, 2000
• Patrick ffrench, 'Potential Not To Be: Bersani and Dutoit's Forms of Being', Film-Philosophy, 9.3, 2005
• Kenji Fujishima, 'The Cleveland Orchestra: Bruckner: (R)evolution', Slant Magazine , July 13, 2011
• Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy, 'Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line', Vertigo, Vol. 2, Issue 5, 2003
• Daniel Garrett, 'The American Sublime, the Sublime American: The New World by Terrence Malick', Cinetext, July 8, 2006
• Janine Gericke, 'The Tree of Life (2011)', Film International, June 15, 2011
• Angela Havel and Aaron Snyder and T. Oates, 'The Similarities in Terrence Malick's Films: An Iconography [Part 1]', Terrence Malick Page, 2001 And Part 2 
• Stuart Kendall and Robert Deane Tucker, 'Introduction', in eds. Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2011)
• Michael King, ''Badlands: shoot first from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, pp. 5-6
• Michael Koresky, 'Design for Living: The Tree of Life', Reverse Shot, Issue 29, 2011 
• Dimitrios Latsis, 'Rosy-Fingered Dawn: The Natural Sublime in the work of Terrence Malick', Refractory, vol. 17, July 2010
• Hwanhee Lee, 'Terrence Malick', Senses of Cinema, Issue 23, 2002
• Hwanhee Lee, 'On the Objects in Days of Heaven', Offscreen, December 31, 2007 
• Rose Lucas, 'Theatres of Extremity: War and Subjectivity in The Thin Red Line', Xchanges, vol. 4, no. 2, February 2005
• Oliver Lyttleton, 'The Lost Projects And Unproduced Screenplays Of Terrence Malick', The Playlist at indieWire, July 12, 2011 
• James MacDowell, 'The New World', Alternate Takes, February 21, 2006
• James MacLeod, 'Narrative Vistas: Subversive Voice‐over in Terrence Malick', Philament SENSE & SENSATION – August 2009
• Adrian Martin, 'Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick', Rouge, 10, December 2006 
• Richard Neer, 'Terrence Malick’s New World ', Nonsite.org, Issue 2, 2011
• S. Brent Plate, 'Terrence Malick and an imaginary history of the universe', Visualizing the Buddha, July 11, 2011
• Dana Polan, 'Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick’s War Movie', in Elsaesser, Thomas, Noel King, Alexander Horwath (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
• Jeff Reichert, 'Children of the Evolution: The Tree of Life', Reverse Shot, Issue 29, 2011
• Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk, 'Apprehending Beauty [on Chion on The Thin Red Line]', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
• Peter Rist, 'The Tree of Life', Offscreen, June 7, 2011
• Bill Schaffer, 'The Shape of Fear: Thoughts after The Thin Red Line', Senses of Cinema, Issue 8, 2000
• Nathan Scheider, 'Mobilize and Contemplate: What’s spiritually at stake in The Tree of Life?', Visualizing the Buddha, June 6, 2011
• Robert Sinnerbrink, 'A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line', Film-Philosophy, 10.3, December 2006
• Robert Sinnerbrink, 'From Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence Malick’s The New World Viewed', Screening the Past, Issue 26, 2009
• David Sterritt (July 2006). 'Film, Philosophy and Terrence Malick', Undercurrents. FIPRESCI, Issue 2, July 2006
• Eric Syngle, 'The Earth Trembles [on The Thin red Line]', Reverse Shot Online, July/August 2003
• Eleftheria Thanouli, 'The Thin Red Line and the World War II Hollywood Tradition', Kinema, May 6, 2005
• Keith Uhlich, 'The Space Between Spaces: The Tree of Life', Reverse Shot, Issue 29, 2011 
• Beverley Walker, 'Malick on Badlands', Sight and Sound, 44:2:82-83, Spring 1975
• Chris Wisniewski, 'A Stitch in Time: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and The New World', Reverse Shot, Issue 22 
• Chris Wisniewski, 'Known Unknowns: The Tree of Life', Reverse Shot, Issue 29, 2011
• Genevieve Yue, 'Garden of the World: The Tree of Life', Reverse Shot, Issue 29, 2011
• Robert Zaller, 'Adam without Eve: Terrence Malick returns to Eden [on The Tree of Life]', Broad Street, June 28, 2011
• Matt Zoller Seitz, 'All things shining', Complete Terrence Malick video essay, Salon, June 1, 2011 
• Matt Zoller Seitz, 'The Whispering Wind: The New World', Reverse Shot, Issue 27