Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Taking the question in my subtitle from the first line of Jacques Rancière’s book, The Future of the Image (2003), I explore the juxtapositions of image, word and sound in Terence Malick’s Voyage of Time (2016) in terms of the variable range of effect, and the political significance of responses within that range. The cinematographic approach to space-time in the documentary film that was for Malick himself a forty-year odyssey is heavily charged with ethnic-aesthetic configurations of feeling and meaning that bear particular relation to the environmental arts and humanities. This arguably demands an ecocritical approach to cinematic experience, which also entails an ecocritical dialogue with Rancière’s theses in The Future of the Image, testifying as it does to the generic interplay of the idyllic, the elegiac and the apocalyptic in its story of life/nature/the universe; all three being genres that have a long history in the European literary tradition. The emphatic insistence on temporal flux in the montage of moving images signals the philosophical relevance of Bergson and Deleuze when asking what kind of imaginative use is being made of the visual medium. Do Malick’s powerful images conjure an alternate reality of their own as well as an alternative history, inviting us to experience la durée within the recent tradition of the experimental, environmental documentary? If so, what may be the implications for our understanding of the moving image?