Receptivity, Simultaneity: The Thin Red Line as Ecological Cinematic Poesis

Abstract

I adapt Robert Sinnerbrink's notion of cinematic poesis by arguing that Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line constitutes an example of ecological cinematic poesis: a style of filmmaking that works in concert with the limits and potentialities of the filmmaking as a medium. This cinematic bearing emerges in a new way following Malick's return to Hollywood, where a combination of factors spur the emergence of a radical Emersonian practice of cinematic receptivity. I draw on oral histories, and the film itself, to demonstrate how Malick's creative process consistently tends towards an ethos of poverty. To further pattern and illuminate the ecological stakes of this Emersonian stance, I draw on the complementary framework of second-order systems theory, and in particular, on Niklas Luhmann's concept of simultaneity. In so doing, I outline the layered nature of Malick's cinematic praxis – a doubled Emersonian receptivity which not only invites defamiliarizing depictions of warfare and the nonhuman, but also welcomes, and toys with, the otherness haunting technical images and human cognition. As such, The Thin Red Line, and its immediate counterparts, perform the ecological work of reframing the conditions of wonder, asking us to marvel not at what we have seen, but what we haven’t.