Page - 199 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

In her contribution to this volume, M. Gail Hamner writes, The camera cuts sharply to a brightly lit highway tunnel and tracks down the tunnel in rapid motion, as if the camera is bolted to the hood of the car. The flooding light we are barreling toward at the end of the tunnel cuts to the back of a toddler’s head with the beach stretching out before him or her, and this image of a small head and body then sequence to a number of quickly shifting images of sky, trees, and chil- dren. (262) Her analysis of this film puts into words what is difficult to express about these films, and what is most entrancing: nature, identity, spiritual journey. Each of these aspects of the Bunyan passage as well as Hamner’s description of the camera are simultaneously the macrocosmic journey of the universe, the per- sonal struggle, and a religious or theological search for meaning. Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick is a welcome edited volume intro- ducing various themes in Malick’s filmography, which at the time this work was published included eight feature-length films and one IMAX documentary film, Voyage of Time (US 2016). Besides the documentary film and Malick’s most recent Song to Song and A Hidden Life, all of the films are given theological treatment from a variety of perspectives that cannot be easily unified. With thir- teen contributors, including three chapters from the editors themselves, this makes for a dizzying array of theologies and readings of Malick’s own quite broad-ranging oeuvre from early 17th-century Virginia (The New World, US 2005) to the 1920s Texas panhandle (Days of Heaven, US 1978) or East Asia during the Second World War (The Thin Red Line, US 1998). For those familiar with his films, this book will deepen their knowledge of various theological in- terpretations. For those unfamiliar, it might be worthwhile to watch the film before reading the chapter devoted to that film. But since watching a Malick film is rather like entering a thicket of philosophical, religious, moral, and filmic themes, this book is no different: “Infamous difficulty”, to use the words of one author from the volume, Jonathan Brant (146), who takes up an earlier in- terpretation by Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacAvoy.1 This book, then, does for Malick’s films what Rowan Williams says about scripture and tradition: “They need to be made more difficult before we can accurately grasp their simplici- ties” (147). In order to give a sense of the structure and arguments of this book, we will choose four contributions on which to focus, which is not to say that these are any more profound or important than the others. In “The Divine Reticence of 1 Compare, however, with Leithart 2013 (Peter Leithart also contributes to this volume), for a monograph interpretation of one of Malick’s films with themes such as “water”, “flame”, “music”, “hands”, and “memory”, in which a single Malick film is analyzed and made easier to understand. Book Review: Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick | 199www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 198–203