I started teaching a course called Philosophy and Film in 2018. It wasn’t the most original idea, but I figured it might prove popular and get students into our interdisciplinary program—and maybe even keep them there. In an academic environment increasingly governed by austerity budgets and their enforcers, enrollments are everything. I was doing my part to keep the humanities alive, gambling that Plato and Descartes might go down a little easier wrapped up in Westerns, thrillers, and rom-coms.
The packaging seemed to work: I got enough students in seats to run the class. In the spirit of welcoming these new recruits into what I started calling, in my first lecture, “The Examined Life,” I suggested they think of philosophy as something popular rather than intimidating or esoteric. Like moviegoing, I said, the life of the mind was for anybody and everybody: philosophy was not some technical discourse or discipline meant only for specialists, but what the French intellectual historian Pierre Hadot famously called “a way of life.”
Unsure if this pitch would work, I thought it best to kick off the semester with something approachable, something that wouldn’t send folks rushing to the registrar’s office to drop the class. So I asked my students to compose personal essays about their most memorable moviegoing experiences. It was supposed to be an easy task, what contemporary pedagogical lingo calls a “low-stakes” assignment. Even if students had never heard of Socrates, surely they had seen, at least once in their life, a Saturday afternoon matinee. All they had to do was write about it.
I got the anticipated recapitulations of horror pics and action flicks, and far too many synopses of superhero movies. (There are only so many essays a person can read about The Dark Knight before going totally batty.) But it wasn’t just the films my students had seen that I wanted to know about; it was also their experiences viewing them. Did they remember when and where and why they started going to the movies? And with whom? Did they recall how they felt when the lights went down, or when they came back up? Had a movie ever changed their life? I don’t recall anyone going so far as to admit that, exactly, but I do remember reading about weekend trips to the cinema with parents and siblings, about the suspense and excitement of sneaking into movies at the local multiplex with high-school friends, about awkward first dates and raucous late-night screenings. Some of the older students penned nostalgia-tinged odes, rich with detail, to the grand old movie palaces of their childhoods, places demolished years, if not decades, ago. I relished those.
What I had not anticipated was that, for some of my students, this crowd-pleasing assignment would be something of a challenge. One of them, much younger than the rest, stopped me after class. “I’ve watched plenty of movies,” she said, “but I’ve never seen one in a theater.” Every movie she had watched in her life had been on a laptop, on her bed, by herself. “Did this count as a ‘moviegoing experience’?” I reassured her that it did and told her to write about it. But heading home on the subway that night, I couldn’t help thinking that my idea of moviegoing as a communal, democratic activity was heading for an unceremonious extinction. And indeed, when I finally got the chance to teach Philosophy and Film again three years later, in the middle of the pandemic, we were all watching movies alone on our laptops.
Mercifully, my students didn’t ask me about my most memorable moviegoing experience. It would be hard to choose because I more or less grew up at the movies. But the film that first showed me what cinema could be was Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), a movie I walked into more or less by accident on a date back in high school, at a multiplex that no longer exists. I had never seen anything like it. Blue’s imagery and music were as foreign to my moviegoing sensibilities as its French dialogue and the unpronounceable name of its director. Still, I was captivated.
Blue is a film about loneliness and isolation, loss and grief. Universal themes, you might say, though everyone experiences them differently. After losing her husband and her only child in a terrible automobile crash, Julie becomes something of a blank slate. (She’s played by a young Juliette Binoche, who leaves an imprint on the brain and the heart, if not also the soul.) In shock, Julie struggles to restart her life. With no ties to bind her, she can do or be anything she desires. She is grieving, but she is also free—totally, terrifyingly free.
The first installment of Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, which dramatizes the ideals associated with the French Republican tradition and the tricolor flag—liberty (blue), equality (white), fraternity (red)—Blue was an exploration of freedom made by a Polish director working in Paris not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m not sure I understood all that when I was a teenager. And I certainly had no way of knowing back then that Blue, like so many of Kieślowski’s previous films—most notably his unparalleled television adaptations of the Ten Commandments, Dekalog (1988)—would be so counterintuitive. Kieślowski’s homage to liberty was more of a warning than a celebration: unfettered, atomistic freedom, it suggested, is in fact no freedom at all. Or as Adam Kirsch put it recently in a New York Review of Books essay about the trilogy, “Total freedom is even more intolerable than the absence of freedom.”
It is only when Julie gives herself over to new interpersonal attachments, caring not just for herself, but also for new neighbors, friends, and loved ones, that she can be truly free. Blue turns Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty around: the negative freedom from restraints is no replacement for, and is in fact derivative of, the positive freedom to belong. This film about “the imperfections of human liberty”—as Kieślowski once described his picture—points the way toward equality and fraternity. And toward love, the kind of love that brings people and nations together. The crescendo of Blue, set to music composed by Kieślowski’s longtime collaborator, Zbigniew Preisner, is the oft-cited verse from Corinthians: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
It might sound cheesy, but one of the things I’ve always liked about moviegoing is the way it brings people together, often in rather unexpected ways. The best example of this, the one I tell people about whenever I can, is the only time I saw a movie in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It was late October, 2016, the before-times: before that election, before the pandemic, before the descent into chaos. A lot had changed in my life since seeing Blue, but I was still more or less a novice when it came to the movies; I’d never gone to film school or anything like that. I’d chosen history and philosophy instead, and been lucky enough to land a job teaching those subjects. Nonetheless, there was an American filmmaker who, like Kieślowski, seemed to be putting a lot of philosophy—and quite a bit of history, maybe even some theology—into his films. I thought I should try writing a book about him. Hence my pilgrimage, as I eventually came to think of it, to Atlantic City.
The Tropicana Resort and Casino was the only place within hundreds of miles where Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience was still playing. I’d missed Malick’s first foray into documentary filmmaking when the film played in Los Angeles and New York as part of a very limited release, so I was forced to catch a bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a lonely place at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. As I rode the gamblers’ express down the New Jersey Turnpike, I thought of Bob Rafelson’s 1972 film The King of Marvin Gardens—made from a script penned by Malick’s Harvard classmate and friend Jacob Brackman, the person who helped get him into film school. Starring Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, and Ellen Burstyn, and set in a cold, crumbling Atlantic City, it, too, is a film about loneliness, the kind of loneliness that often accompanies life on the margins of society and was such a hallmark of early 1970s American cinema.
My bus ticket included forty dollars’ worth of casino credit, which I managed to lose on the slot machines in about ten minutes. With time to kill before Voyage of Time started, I made my way outside. It was cold, and for long stretches, I was the only person on the beach. The desolation was palpable. Listless, I went back inside, slowly navigating my way through crowds of people and countless banks of flashing lights. The IMAX theater was tucked away in the farthest corner of the casino. I was not surprised to find it mostly empty: joining me for the noon screening were a mother with her little boy and an older gentleman sporting a baseball cap and a heavy winter coat. Just before the projector came to life, two couples who had clearly spent their night at the tables stumbled in, sharing the dregs of a bottle between them. That was it, just the eight of us, looking up at a giant screen in a massive auditorium.
Having seen and studied each of Malick’s previous films, I had a good idea of what to expect. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the audience who did. Judging by the perplexed—and very vocal—reactions of the couples in front of me, a fifty-minute meditation on the story of the universe may have been something of a buzzkill after a night of partying. But to me it was mesmerizing. A hallmark of Malick’s cinematic style is his interest in capturing the grandeur of nature—shining fields of wheat in Days of Heaven (1978), verdant jungle canopies in The Thin Red Line (1998), glistening waterways in The New World (2005)—and now, at last, his vision would appear on the kind of screen that could do it justice. How could any normal-sized movie-house, to say nothing of a laptop, capture the glittering glow of distant stars, the full force of erupting volcanoes, the graceful immensity of whales sliding through ocean currents?
Malick’s 2011 masterpiece, The Tree of Life, offered a preview of all this. Largely autobiographical, if not to say confessional, it depicts a rather typical American family at mid-century, whose members are no strangers to loss, grief, and loneliness. But surrounding the coming-of-age story at the heart of the picture are sequences that rival the outer-space poetry of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In them, we witness nothing less than the birth of the universe and the emergence and evolution of life on earth. Some of this is set to the music of Preisner, specifically a piece he composed as part of a requiem for Kieślowski, his friend and frequent collaborator who had suffered a fatal heart attack just three years after making Blue.
Malick placed the “Lacrimosa” movements from Preisner’s Requiem for My Friend into one of the most important sequences of what is probably his most important picture, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. This doesn’t mean we should view The Tree of Life as a lament, though—not only a lament anyway. The film opens with an epigraph from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth…when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” But instead of interpreting this Bible verse as a stern warning to the insufficiently devout, as have so many theologians throughout the centuries, Malick takes it as something of an invitation, an opportunity to imagine just what it might have looked like when the foundations of the earth were put into place.
Voyage of Time picks up where The Tree of Life left off. A work of profound curiosity and amazement, it also offers a tour of the cosmos. Malick contemplated it for decades. Some of his earliest ideas for the project, which eventually became the cosmology sequences in The Tree of Life, date back to the 1970s, when he was fresh out of the American Film Institute. He was still struggling to find his footing in Hollywood, but he knew what he wanted to do. He envisioned making something grand about the vast sweep of time and space, something that could depict what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once called the “miracle” of the world. Both before and after making Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven, the films that established his reputation, Malick repeatedly circled back to the idea of capturing the cosmos in all its splendor.
The project connected Malick’s past studies in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford to his current life as a Hollywood filmmaker. In the summer of 1980, some ten years or so after leaving academia behind and taking a brief, unsuccessful stab at becoming a journalist, he told a room full of philosophers—some of them his former teachers and mentors—that he had chosen to study philosophy in college because he wanted to better understand himself and his “place in the order of the cosmos.” The problem was that professional philosophers weren’t interested in such things anymore. Cosmology had been relegated to the dustbin of academic inquiry. One could study Wittgenstein, of course, but his idea of the “miracle” of the world was more or less off-limits.
Maybe Thoreau had it right: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy,” he famously declared in Walden, “but not philosophers.” What Malick could not find in academic philosophy, he sought in filmmaking. The imagery of Voyage of Time suggests he was looking in the right place. He found so much to marvel at and wonder about, in fact, that he made two different versions of the picture—the IMAX documentary as well as a longer theatrical release, Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey, which contained even more splendor from the natural world. These films bring the cosmos to life with jaw-dropping visuals: shimmering schools of fish, magnificent slot canyons, glorious waterfalls, hissing fumaroles, and enough stunning outer-space poetry to put your average planetarium show to shame.
After being immersed in these sights and sounds, returning to the flashing lights and blaring noise of the Tropicana was jarring. But this was part of the film’s point. In addition to being “a one-of-a-kind celebration of life and the grand history of the cosmos”—as a promotional guide for the film put it—Voyage of Time makes us notice things: the wondrous, surely, but also the mundane. It shows us the creatures of the ocean deep along with the stillness of suburban streets. In doing so, it suggests that even the Tropicana and Atlantic City are, like you and me, integral parts of the cosmos. How amazing it is that the world exists, that there is something rather than nothing.
I stood staring at the slot machines for a while, but eventually found the exit and headed back out to the beach, which seemed like a more appropriate location for such metaphysical speculation. This time, unlike before, I was keenly aware of the terrestrial drama playing out all around me. I really saw the shining sun, truly felt the crispness of the breeze, actually heard, as if for the first time, the atonal symphony of the seagulls squawking nearby. And I was not just some passive observer of these sights and sounds, I realized. I was among them, part of them. “What binds us together, makes us one?” the narrator (Brad Pitt) of Voyage of Time asks. The answer is love, of course. “Is love, too, not a work of nature?” With these thoughts ringing in my head, the boardwalk didn’t seem so lonely anymore. The seagulls became my friends.
Like so many of Malick’s films, Voyage of Time altered my perception of the world around me. It didn’t just entertain or inform me; it transformed me. This is precisely what ancient philosophers tried to do, too, at least according to Pierre Hadot, who spent his entire career reminding us that philosophy was a “way of life” before it became an academic subject—a guide for living rather than mere intellectual system-building, ancient philosophy centered around “spiritual exercises,” practices meant to establish and hone certain habits of mind and action that could transform one’s being-in-the-world.
To take just one example, both the Stoics and the Epicureans recommended, for different reasons, the adoption of a “cosmic consciousness,” an awareness that “we are,” as Hadot put it in his famous essay on philosophy as a way of life, “part of the cosmos.” One needed to seek a “view from above,” the ancients thought, so as to put the trials and tribulations we face in our day-to-day lives into proper perspective. Whether it illuminated the rational order of the universe (as the Stoics had it) or the marvelous gift of existence (as the Epicureans believed), cosmic consciousness helped one live a full and meaningful life.
Cosmic consciousness also helps one see that “life is grace,” a notion famously put forward by Plotinus, the subject of Hadot’s first book, published in 1963 when Malick was still just an undergraduate philosophy student at Harvard, fruitlessly searching for his own place in the order of the cosmos. I’ve often wondered if Malick ever read Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, perhaps pausing over, maybe even underlining, sentences like this: “Once transformed, our vision perceives, shining on all things, the grace that makes God manifest.” All things shining—a memorable idea, and a phrase Malick eventually inserted into the voiceovers of The Thin Red Line. It has become something of a motto for his cinematic style.
While the vision was certainly Malick’s, Voyage of Time was a collaborative endeavor. Teams of photographers, cinematographers, and documentarians labored on the project for years, if not decades, collecting footage from around the globe that Malick could use back in the editing suite. I was fortunate enough to meet one of those collaborators recently, the filmmaker Courtney Stephens, who, after working for a while as Malick’s assistant, captured images of religious festivals in India—Durga Puja, most notably—that made their way into the longer version of the movie. Like most people who know and respect him, Stephens was protective of Malick’s privacy, but she did tell me this: the two of them often talked about books. One of their mutual favorites? Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot.
Malick-related gossip is a staple of contemporary film writing, especially these days, as everybody awaits the release of The Way of the Wind, a film about Jesus that Malick has been editing for more than five years now. Observers are speculating it might finally premiere later this year, far from the Atlantic City boardwalk, at the Venice International Film Festival. I like to think my experience at the Tropicana has prepared me for it.
Though not many commentators have made the connection between Hadot and Malick—the philosopher Jonathan Lee is one of the few—maybe it is time we start thinking of films like Voyage of Time as spiritual exercises, not necessarily in the religious sense, but certainly in the philosophical sense. Like Lee, we should approach Malick’s pictures as opportunities to practice the arts of attention and conscience, which might point the way toward what Lee calls conversion. After all, this is what the cinema, at its best, can do. It can get us to see things from a broader perspective, the way Stoics and Epicureans, pagans and Christians, mystics and Romantics, ancients and moderns have all recommended. It can help us say, as Hadot often put it, “yes to life and to the world.”
Voyage of Time did this for me. It gave me a much-needed glimpse of the “view from above” when I may have needed it most. So did Blue—even if it took me longer to understand how or why. I suppose the lesson is a simple one, and more relevant than ever given the cruelty, hatred, and violence currently confronting us: whether it’s an IMAX documentary made by a former philosophy student or an artsy French film by a Polish director you’ve never heard of before, a movie can, in fact, change your life—especially if you watch it on something other than a laptop.
