The The Conversion of Terrence Malick: A Worldview Translated into the Film Medium

Abstract

The fact that American filmmaker Terrence Malick devoted some years of his life to academic philosophy and translated into English Martin Heiddegger’s The Essence of Reasons is understood by some authors as an interpretive key to his cinema. This article draws upon the German philosopher’s concept of world, which lies at the core of the aforesaid text, and its presumed influences in the director’s filmography with the objective of questioning this connection and suggest, in turn, the hypothesis that Malick’s films are nurtured by a worldview of Christian roots. The feasibility of this hypothesis will be supported in a negative way, by identifying some deficiencies in the studies that connect Heidegger with Malick, and in a subsequent positive way, by analysing the meaning of his films from the experience of religious conversion that they seem to elicit in their viewers.