Last week, we finally saw some footage of Terrence Malick‘s coming film The Tree of Life. As a director, Malick has only released a few films, starting with Badlands and Days of Heaven in the 1970s, The New World in the late 1990s and The Thin Red Line in 2005.
A philosopher by training — he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1965, with a degree in philosophy — and an existentialist by choice — he translated Heidegger‘s The Essence of Reasons into English —, Malick’s films usually explore different approaches to the search for meaning in life and existence, emphasizing the dialectical tension that emerges as life sorts out through the notion of evil as one of our most eternal universals.
In The Tree of Life, Malick seems to go on in his attempts to explore the meaning of human existence. However, his exploration seems to part from a purely philosophical inner-realm and onto a more eco-, cosmological holistic one. We’ll see how far this turn will take us.
Here is the trailer:
