scholarly journals At the Margins of the World: The Nature of Limits in Terrence Malick’s "The Thin Red Line"

Text Matters ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Lord

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is an anti-war film which can be read as an Orphic narrative meditating on the relationship between humans and “nature.” Many scholarly readings of the film have been attracted by analyzes that explore the influences of Cavell and Heidegger on Malick (Critchley, Furstenau and MacCavoy, Sinnerbrink). Kaja Silverman’s recent opus, Flesh of My Flesh (2009), contains a chapter titled “All Things Shining.” She elegantly examines how Malick’s film explores the theme of “finitude.” She argues that, ontologically speaking, human existence gains a more intense “glow” when humans are made aware of their mortality. The present becomes paramount. But like Orpheus, the present seeks to make amends with the past. Taking Silverman’s analysis one step further involves exploring finitude through the film’s many animal, arboreal and geological images. Nature can be read as a “margin” that more fully enhances the film’s exploration of connection and finitude. To this end, the opening chapter of Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (1986) is invaluable. Entitled “Tympan,” Derrida’s introductory essay introduces a wealth of ecological metaphors. These stimulate an interaction between Silverman’s model of finitude, Derrida’s surprising ecologies at the margin and Malick’s quest for what shines in all beings.

Author(s):  
Todd Decker

Hymns for the Fallen listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to stimulate reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies—such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper—as well as lesser known films, Todd Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich, culturally resonant aspect of the cinema, not only invokes the realities of war, but also shapes the American audience’s engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all three elements of film sound—dialogue, sound effects, music—and considers how expressive and formal choices on the soundtrack have turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the commercial space of the cinema.


1893 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 401-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl A. von Zittel

In a spirited treatise on the ‘Origin of our Animal World’ Prof. L. Rütimeyer, in the year 1867, described the geological development and distribution of the mammalia, and the relationship of the different faunas of the past with each other and with that now existing. Although, since the appearance of that masterly sketch the palæontological material has been, at least, doubled through new discoveries in Europe and more especially in North and South America, this unexpected increase has in most instances only served as a confirmation of the views which Rutimeyer advanced on more limited experience. At present, Africa forms the only great gap in our knowledge of the fossil mammalia; all the remaining parts of the world can show materials more or less abundantly, from which the course followed by the mammalia in their geological development can be traced with approximate certainty.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-234
Author(s):  
Joseph J. Merry ◽  
Donna Bobbitt-Zeher ◽  
Douglas B. Downey

In many parts of the world, fertility has declined in important ways in the past century. What are the consequences of this demographic change? Our study expands the empirical basis for understanding the relationship between number of siblings in childhood and social outcomes among adults. An important recent study found that for each additional sibling an individual grows up with, the likelihood of divorce as an adult declines by 3%. We expand this work by (a) determining whether the original pattern replicates in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and (b) extending the analysis beyond divorce to consider whether growing up with siblings is related to prosocial adult behaviors (relationships with parents, friends, and views on conflict management with one’s partner). Our results confirm a negative association between number of siblings and divorce in adulthood. We find mixed results related to other prosocial adult behaviors.


2014 ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Religion and education are a topic that has emerged relatively recently in the Ukrainian information, research, and educational space. The relationship between religion and education meditated before, but usually in a negative sense. New circumstances also dictate new approaches to the stated topic. Polyphony of thoughts holds in itself and explicit criticism of any possibility of coexistence of religion and education, vulgarly linking religion with obscurantism, which can not bear any enlightenment, blurring the brain of a person. Such pre-historic estimates of religion are less and less popular in society, which in those years has "opened" a religion (as opposed to the present and still existing perception of it as a fantastic reflection in the heads of people of those external forces that prevail over them) as a spiritually rich reality as something that fills the meaning of human existence, defines the vocation of the person asserting it in the world, in society, in their own lives.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Sigrún Alba Sigurðardóttir

The past 20 years have seen a shift in Icelandic photography from postmodern aesthetics towards a more phenomenological perspective that explores the relationship between subjective and affective truth on the one hand, and the outside world on the other hand. Rather than telling a story about the world as it is or as the photographer wants it to appear, the focus is on communicating with the world, and with the viewer. The photograph is seen as a creative medium that can be used to reflect how we experience and make sense of the world, or how we are and dwell in the world. In this paper, I introduce the theme of poetic storytelling in the context of contemporary photography in Iceland and other Nordic Countries. Poetic storytelling is a term I have been developing to describe a certain lyrical way to use a photograph as a narrative medium in reaction to the climate crisis and to a general lack of relation to oneself and to the world in times of increased acceleration in the society. In my article I analyze works by a few leading Icelandic photographers (Katrín Elvarsdóttir, Heiða Helgadóttir and Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir) and put them in context with works by artists from Denmark (Joakim Eskildsen, Christina Capetillo and Astrid Kruse Jensen), Sweden (Helene Schmitz) and Finland (Hertta Kiiski) artists within the frame of poetic storytelling. Poetic storytelling is about a way to use a photograph as a narrative medium in an attempt to grasp a reality which is neither fully objective nor subjective, but rather a bit of both.


2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk G. Van der Merwe

Throughout its history, Christianity has stood in a dichotomous relation to the various philosophical movements or eras (pre-modernism, modernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism) that took on different faces throughout history. In each period, it was the sciences that influenced, to a great extent, the interpretation and understanding of the Bible. Christianity, however, was not immune to influences, specifically those of the Western world. This essay reflects briefly on this dichotomy and the influence of Bultmann’s demythologising of the kerygma during the 20th century. Also, the remythologising (Vanhoozer) of the church’s message as proposed for the 21st century no more satisfies the critical Christian thinkers. The relationship between science and religion is revisited, albeit from a different perspective as established over the past two decades as to how the sciences have been pointed out more and more to complement theology. This article endeavours to evoke the church to consider the fundamental contributions of the sciences and how it is going to incorporate the sciences into its theological training and message to the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S717-S717
Author(s):  
D.F. Burgese ◽  
D.P. Bassitt ◽  
D. Ceron-Litvoc ◽  
G.B. Liberali

With the advent of new technologies, the man begins to experience a significant change in the perception of the other, time and space. The acceleration of time promoted by new technology does not allow the exercise of affection for the consolidation of ties, relations take narcissists hues seeking immediate gratification and the other is understood as a continuation of the self, the pursuit of pleasure. It is the acceleration of time, again, which leads man to present the need for immediate, always looking for the new – not new – in an attempt to fill an inner space that is emptied. The retention of concepts and pre-stressing of temporality are liquefied, become fleeting. We learn to live in the world and the relationship with the other in a frivolous and superficial way. The psychic structure, facing new phenomena experienced, loses temporalize capacity and expand its spatiality, it becomes pathological. Post-modern inability to retain the past, to analyze the information received and reflect, is one of the responsible for the mental illness of today's society. From a temporality range of proper functioning, the relationship processes with you and your peers will have the necessary support to become viable and healthy.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


The relationship between humans and dogs has garnered considerable attention within archaeological research around the world. Investigations into the lived experiences of domestic dogs have proven to be an intellectually productive avenue for better understanding humanity in the past. This book examines the human-canine connection by moving beyond asking when, why, or how the dog was domesticated. While these questions are fundamental, beyond them lies a rich and textured history of humans maintaining a bond with another species through cooperation and companionship over thousands of years. Diverse techniques and theoretical approaches are used by authors in this volume to investigate the many ways dogs were conceptualized by their human counterparts in terms of both their value and social standing within a variety of human cultures across space and time. In this way, this book contributes a better understanding of the human-canine bond while also participating in broader anthropological discussions about how human interactions with domesticated animals shape their practices and worldviews.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Audrey Horning

The comments of Nicholas Sarkozy provide a powerful and forceful opening to Dr Richard's article and remind us of the potential significance of academic considerations of colonial legacies in the contemporary world. Dr Richard argues strongly against static conceptualizations of pre-‘Atlantic-era’ Africa and seeks to recast Africans not as victims, but as active ‘producers of history and culture’ (p. 26). In so doing he aligns himself with current trends in critical scholarship on colonial encounters in the Atlantic worlds of the last four centuries, scholarship that overtly criticizes dichotomous understandings of such encounters in favour of approaches that emphasize ambiguity (e.g. Hall 2000; Silliman 2001; 2009; Stahl 2007). Dr Richard's introductory suggestion that we should formulate ‘new questions instead of supplying different answers to the quandaries of an earlier generation of historians’ (p. 3) is clearly applicable to studies of colonial arenas beyond West Africa. In all parts of the world touched by European colonialism (including, of course, Europe itself) the ways in which scholars approach their subjects are very much conditioned by more widely held cultural memories, whatever the relationship of those memories may be to whatever may have occurred in the past.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD N. LANGLOIS

AbstractIn ‘Max U versus Humanomics: a Critique of Neoinstitutionalism’, Deirdre McCloskey tells us that culture matters – maybe more than do institutions – in explaining the Great Enrichment that some parts of the world have enjoyed over the past 200 years. But it is entrepreneurship, not culture or institutions, that is the proximate cause of economic growth. Entrepreneurship is not a hothouse flower that blooms only in a culture supportive of commercial activity; it is more like kudzu, which grows invasively unless it is cut back by culture and institutions. McCloskey needs to tell us more about the structure of the relationship among culture, institutions, and entrepreneurship, and thus to continue the grand project begun by Schumpeter.


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