PUSHING MIXED CINEMATIC MODES TO THE EXTREME: KNIGHT OF CUPS AND SONG TO SONG AS THE WATERSHED OF TERRENCE MALICK’S FRAGMENTED CINEMATIC AESTHETICS

초록

In 2012 the renowned American director Terrence Malick shot two films back-to-back with Knight of Cups released in 2015 and Song to Song in 2017 that together marked a watershed in his career as an auteur in which the aesthetics of style of the director are usually celebrated. Staged within the world of the film and music industries respectively, these two feature films polarized both films critics and audiences at the time as either revelatory or pretentious due to Malick’s reflexivity of his cinematic style reaching its apotheosis. This article, through a comparative, formalist analysis of these two films, examines how Malick’s cinematic signature differs from his previous films through a singular combination of three narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking respectively in an extreme, fragmented manner: 1) His narrative approach to scene design privileges a series of moments or episodes of the characters’ experience rather than comprised of a clear dramatic arc of cause and effect. 2) He documents nature as an idealized spectacle or landscape autonomous from the characters that that calls the viewer’s attention to itself by its stunning pictorial compositions. 3) His multiple, character voice-overs are structured as a stream-of-consciousness of thoughts and musings that are detached from the dramatic moments portrayed on screen. Altogether, they challenge the limitations of the narrative feature film form as a cinematic experience for the viewer.

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