Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Terrence Malick: A Philosophical Cinema?
- Malick as filmmaker and philosopher
- Can film 'do philosophy'?
- Malick's Cinematic Ethics

Chapter 1: Approaching Cinematic Ethics: Badlands and Days of Heaven
- Badlands: Myth, history, and violence
- Days of Heaven: Myth, love, and tragedy
- A 'negative' cinematic ethic

Chapter 2: Philosophy Encounters Film: The Thin Red Line
- What is a 'Heideggerian' cinema?
- Malick as phenomenologist of finitude
- Malick as cinematic philosopher
- The Thin Red Line's 'Vernacular Metaphysics'
- The Thin Red Line as Existential Ethics

Chapter 3: Philosophy Learns from Film: The New World
- Exploring Cinematic Worlds
- Romanticism, Nature, Culture
- Mythic History and Cinematic Poetry
- Exploring Cinematic Romanticism

Chapter 4: Cinema as Ethics: The Tree of Life
- From 'film as philosophy' to cinematic ethics
- The Tree of Life and Cinematic Belief
- Aesthetic experience and transformative ethics
- Appendix: Voyage of Time

Chapter 5: Discourses on Love: Malick's 'Weightless' Trilogy
- Malick's 'weightless' or 'faith and love' trilogy (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song)
- Love sick: a Kierkegaardian critique
- Poetic phenomenologies of loving experience
- Myth, Narrative, and Abstraction: the challenge of Malick's late films

Conclusion: Malick's cinematic ethics (a philosophical dialogue)
- The rationalist sceptic versus the romantic idealist (three questions):
1) How to avoid naïve romanticism, aesthetic pretentiousness, and religious mysticism?
2) Malick's 'religious' turn: are his films still philosophical?
3) Is a cinematic response to nihilism enough?
- Cinematic thinking as ethical experience

Bibliography
Index