A Mud Doctor Checking Out the Earth Underneath
Ruminations on Malick’s Days of Heaven and Loht’s Phenomenology of Film
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21720319 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jason M Wirth (0000-0003-2557-2315, Seattle University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 98-112 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Film-Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1466-4615 • E-ISSN: 1466-4615 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/film.2024.0257 |
| OpenAlex | W4390770216 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene
Anthropocene · Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Heaven · Literature · Theology · Artistic and Creative Research · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |