Page - 173 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

between images. Narrative-based films, then, legitimate a necessary order of causality. Politically speaking, they often work within the realm of established forms, reinforcing the perceived necessity of certain social arrangements and institutions. Yet the political upshot of Malick’s visionary cinema is the denial of such a necessary order. Any object, event, or feeling is rather the occasion for a surprising, undetermined effect. Sometimes that effect is to challenge the social order and the political norms that ground it. Sometimes that effect is to throw society’s present arrangements into doubt, and even into crisis. For the viewer of the kind of cinema of exemplarity I am identifying with The Tree of Life, any reaction to Malick’s film can become the occasion for any outcome at all. Any instant may become for the viewer an occasion for transformation, whether that be personal, social, or both.12 It is a fundamental quality of the Augustinian tradition to be bound up by narrative logic and structuring, a fact which has been noted by myriad schol- ars of religion and culture. Paul Ricoeur, for instance, argued Augustine, in his 12 I borrow the language of “occasionalism” from Tyrus Miller (Miller 2005), whose analysis of the cinema of Stan Brakhage and romantic politics is of a similar mind to my analysis of Malick here. My highlighting the Emersonian vision as undergirding Malick’s The Tree of Life could just as well serve to highlight that which undergirds Brakhage’s films. Fig. 2a–b: The Tree of Life juxtaposes the birth and progress of the physical universe with the more modest (but no less complicated) universe of the O’Brien family (Terrence Malick, US 2011), 00:23:03; 01:20:56. Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in The Tree of Life | 173www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185