Seite - 198 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

Michael Funk Deckard and Cassie Overcash Book Review Christopher B. Barnett / Clark J. Elliston (eds.): Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick London / New York: Routledge, 2017, xxvii + 289 pp., ISBN 978-1-138-82169-9 The pilgrim’s progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream, wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey and safe arrival at the desired country. After this voice-over at the opening of Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, US 2015), a camera pans on a landscape with a sea and desert below mountains, with a sole male moving downwards. Three cuts show his back and hands, his front with a small pool in the background, and him walking before a black car passes along a road. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s musical prologue sets the tone. The viewer is led into an allegorical world, an unknown destination, while Terrence Malick’s previ- ous films, particularly Tree of Life (US 2011) and To the Wonder (US 2014), were explorations in the life of the filmmaker (the former of his childhood and the lat- ter of his marriage and divorce, in the sense of Proust’s Bildungsroman on film). The voice-over continues to describe this pilgrimage in the words of John Bunyan: As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den and I laid me down in that place to sleep. And as I slept I dreamed a dream. I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place with his face from his own house, book in his hand and a great burden on his back. To say that Malick’s own journey has been an allegory of this kind is to overinter- pret the film. That being said, the release of three films in five years, all seeming- ly autobiographic, is a record. And with Song to Song (US 2017) as well as the Criterion Collection release of Tree of Life in 2018 with 50 additional minutes added to the film, and A Hidden Life (US/DE 2019) to be shown at Cannes Film Festival, Malick fans are well satiated if productivity represents quality. The lone character at the beginning of Knight of Cups speaks: “All those years […] living the life of someone I didn’t even know.” DOI: 10.25364/05.05:2019.2.12 198 | Michael Funk Deckard and Cassie Overcash www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 198–203