Codas of Creation
This article gives a mystical interpretation of Terrence Malick’s award-winning film, The Tree of Life (2011), arguing that Malick carefully develops two esoteric patterns to structure his visual language: first, a triadic symbolism of divine emanation and return, and second, a complementary alchemi...
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| Medienart: | Elektronisch Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Verfügbarkeit prüfen: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Brill
2015
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| In: |
Religion and the arts
Jahr: 2015, Band: 19, Heft: 5, Seiten: 552-582 |
| weitere Schlagwörter: | B
Neoplatonism
Kabbalah
Hermeticism
alchemy
renaissance
film
Terrence Malick
mysticism
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Volltext (Verlag) |
| Zusammenfassung: | This article gives a mystical interpretation of Terrence Malick’s award-winning film, The Tree of Life (2011), arguing that Malick carefully develops two esoteric patterns to structure his visual language: first, a triadic symbolism of divine emanation and return, and second, a complementary alchemical pattern of ascent and descent portraying the process of regeneration. Far from being a doctrinal presentation of Christianity, as some critics suppose, The Tree of Life engages little known but highly influential bodies of esoteric knowledge to offer a visually complex and symmetrical representation of genesis and alchemical transmutation. With the tree of life presented as an initiatory symbol of the axis mundi, Malick’s film portrays creation as a chiastic process, one point of view staging a triadic structure of emanation mysticism and the other offering a magical variation of this pattern in the human struggle for renewal in time. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5292 |
| Enthält: | In: Religion and the arts
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685292-01905004 |