"A flawed film that everyone should see" is about the best distilled description of this wonderful work.A genuine work of art in an age of flippant texting style communication and attention spans to match.
Music also plays a large part with touching , tender scores as seen in the video below:
Malicks Films obliquely phrase questions, leaving the responsibility of answering them to the viewer No one will be too exuberant in praising the execution of the plot in the film , but then again , how exactly do you phrase a spiritual question to a mainly modern secular audience.
According to Karen Armstrong take on George Steiners Real Presences what he call "the indiscretion of serious art and literature and music " , which " queries the last privacies of our existence".Such Art , Steiner argues , tells us in effect : "change your life".It is an encounter with a transcendent dimension that breaks into "the small house of our cautionary being".Once we have listened to the summons of such art , this house is not "habitable in quite the same way as it was before."
When Heidegger made the mistake in the 1930s , admittedly a very big mistake hard to live down,a becoming a full pledged Nazi replete with persecuting Jews in his sphere of academic influence , including his early teacher Husserl , his later work , especially in the fields of aesthetics and the nature of truth failed to have the influence , post-war that it merited.In its stead the work of Sartre took the lead , with the inherit weakness that it took an atheistic hue with the corollary negative attendant trapping of making the debate for truth in the post-modernist orbit into a materialist sphere , with the spiritual component being seen as an optional luxury add-on , a surplus and if needs be expendable dimension , but not essential to the pursuit of the essential nature of truth.
As Eagleton has observed , and Vattimo has documented , the eclipsing of Heideggers later correctives on Phenomenology by the likes of Sartre have yielded a very sorry birth to the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens , who have gone the whole hog in pursuit of materialism to an extent even the concept of Faith is an abomination to be railed against in the relentless drive to a material evolutionary road.In creating the very parody of the concepts they purport to erase , Dawkins and Hitchens have created a crass , gross and boorish atheistic fundamentalism preachermen set condemning all non-adherents into a secular Hell.Materialism has so infected their dogmatic ideology they have become an intellectual equivalent to what Monetarism has become to financial markets.It is no surprise that this elitist cabal of material atheists have taken advantage of the current governments policy to create an elite university charging the highest allowable rate , as opposed to joining the camp to spread universal access to higher education that a more altruistic philosophy would encourage.This rabid brand of atheism , which is actually related to and borne out of aggressive capitalism ( which makes some of their left orientated supporters position a little odd) is not a new concept , but an age old material contagion which Dostoyevsky explored in Demons, of a vanity ego-ridden self-declared elite claiming to champion the very people they despise.
Fortunately later Heidegger is making a comeback as Post-Modernism and its ertwhistle champions are being exposed as morally amd materially bankrupt.Terence Malick is a student of Heidegger and according to Hwanhee Lee "Malicks understanding of cinema seems to be influenced by Heideggers contention that it is a cardinal symptom of modernity...to apprehend reality as something to be differentiated from how it appears to a subjective consciousness and that reality is understood at its most fundamental level as something to be mastered."
This fundamental divergence of treating reality as a material to be mastered , rather than a grace to be revered has the ultimate fundamental weakness of recognising the Human as a commodity , rather than a material, moral and spiritual three-dimensional being.
Malick seeing "God in science and Science in God" presents no problems to a Jewish or Muslim audience , some of the more notable Jewish and Muslim scholars were also avant garde Scientists, but in the West the state ordained version of Religion , the Manichean dogma of the clerical elite and the early relationship between state and religion in Power politics has destroyed this most natural and harmonious symbiosis , pitting Church and science at odds with each other.One of the films most penetrating questions posed is can Science and Religion get their latent state harmonious symbiotic relationship back?.To Muslims and Jews this is a rhetorical question.
Below is a review of the film by Mark Kermode:
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