“Strangers and pilgrims”: The migrant archetype in the cinema of Terrence Malick
The migrant archetype is a prevailing motif of the cinema directed by Terrence Malick to date: most of his main characters share the condition of being displaced or nomadic people. This article is focused on analysing six films –belonging to different periods of Malick’s filmography– in which this c...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2019 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Navarra |
| Repositorio: | Dadun. Depósito Académico Digital de la Universidad de Navarra |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:dadun.unav.edu:10171/57870 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/10171/57870 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Terrence Malick migrants United States Puritanism John Bunyan Transcendentalism Stanley Cavell migrantes Estados Unidos puritanismo trascendentalismo |
| Sumario: | The migrant archetype is a prevailing motif of the cinema directed by Terrence Malick to date: most of his main characters share the condition of being displaced or nomadic people. This article is focused on analysing six films –belonging to different periods of Malick’s filmography– in which this condition is significantly emphasized: Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2015). The aim of this study is to reflect upon the central role of the migrant archetype in the works of Malick, showing to what extent the essential features of this archetype are inherited from United States mythology. In the end, this connection between film and myth is due to a common ground: on one hand, the thought of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson about the idea of America, revisited in the last decades by the philosopher Stanley Cavell; on the other, the legend of the first New England settlers, in which the biblical theme of exodus and the figure of the pilgrim are fundamental. Thus, I aim to prove how –and explain on what grounds– both in the construction of Malick’s migrant characters and in the mythic representation of the American migrant the same feature stands out: the condition of “stranger and pilgrim”. |
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