Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film

Steven Rybin is assistant professor of film at Georgia Gwinnett College and author of The Cinema of Michael Mann (2007).

• Chapter 1 AcknowledgementsChapter 2 IntroductionChapter 3 Chapter One: Voicing Meaning: On Terrence Malick's CharactersChapter 4 Chapter Two: On BadlandsChapter 5 Chapter Three: On Days of HeavenChapter 6 Chapter Four: On The Thin Red LineChapter 7 Chapter Five: On The New WorldChapter 8 Postscript: On The Tree of LifeChapter 9 Terrence Malick FilmographyChapter 10 BibliographyChapter 11 IndexChapter 12 About the Author

A painstaking craftsman, Malick has made only a handful of films in his career, but each bears the mark of a deeply individualistic director who makes only films in which he is really invested. He has completed five feature films in all--he is a meticulous auteur indeed--and this makes him an ideal subject for this detailed, compact book, as each film can have a chapter all to itself. Rybin (Georgia Gwinnett College) offers persuasive readings of Badlands (1973), which is based on the Charles Starkweather murder spree in Nebraska; the romantic period drama Days of Heaven (1978); the epic WW II narrative The Thin Red Line (1998); the underrated The New World (2005), which looks at the founding of the American colony at Jamestown, Virginia; and The Tree of Life (2011), a family drama set in 1950s Texas, which takes on cosmic overtones as the film progresses. This is a concise, measured, intelligent study of Malick's work, ideal for a course on his films or as an introduction for the general reader. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; professionals; general readers.