Seite - 202 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

thus is an emblem of the treatment of Native Americans by a colonizing power. Elliston sees Malick as more of a theologian than a philosopher and argues that the female protagonist of this film embodies that perspective: “Human love stands at the center of The New World, but the figure of Pocahontas is the narrative lens which refracts that love. She loves the world (and the people in it) and even in rejection reaches toward the light present within it. Consequently, she emerges as a Christological figure – a figure who in suffering invites others into the light” (199). While each essay in this book deserves treatment, two points of criticism are in order. First, there is certainly description of both the aesthetics and the beauty of film in this book, but the book as a whole neglects to focus on the particularly filmic ways in which theology can be done.5 The editors point in their preface to how they are framing this book in terms of “Malick as a theological auteur” (the title of part II), but insofar as the book does not deepen that meaning in visual or technical terms (like camera movement), Bazin’s critique of auteur theory still stands. Much more could be done in deepening this point of what makes Malick a theological auteur and to convince a viewer of this. Film is not the same as text or even music. There are certainly hints, such as Barnett’s examination of wind (104–105) or Candler’s discussion of Smetana’s symphonic poems Má vlast and Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa” (211), but more could be said. The second criticism furthers the point of the first one. In Paul Martens con- tribution, he mentions in a footnote the “contest” between Simon Critchley’s thesis of “film as philosophy” and Robert Sinnerbrink’s Heideggerian Cinema6 (170). This contest points to an underlying claim about whether Malick is theo- logical or not, without rather pointing out that the films are theological. This is a crucial distinction, undervalued throughout the book. Reading the biographical Malick into the films, as Part I of this book does (“An Introduction to Terrence Malick – Scholar, Filmmaker”), does not make him a theologian (or a philoso- pher). This relation to the film as philosophy thesis, whether Heideggerian or Deleuzian or Kierkegaardian, or to a new film as theology thesis as this book seems to support should have been a claim all of the authors of this volume struggle with instead of taking it for granted. Strangely enough, while writing this review, one of the authors went on a pil- grimage to the Black Forest in Germany to see Heidegger’s hut in Todtnauberg, where he wrote Being and Time. The frames of the landscape mirrored in some ways that of the beginning of Knight of Cups. I stepped into unknown territo- ry, where an author had lived and composed a work. After days of cloudy and foggy travails, the sun shone at the moment we were on the right path. At the 5 As do, for example, Hamner 2014 and Rothman 2016. 6 Critchley 2009; Sinnerbrink 2006; see also Furstenau/MacAvoy 2007. 202 | Michael Funk Deckard and Cassie Overcash www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 198–203