Anna Bergqvist

Film establishes specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of the cinematography of the philosopher-director Terrence Malick is that is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as organised intentional-communicative artefacts[1], cites for conveying meaning in public space.  This paper will explore the connections between film, authenticity and the narrative self within the context of Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, with special emphasis on the specific kinds of self-deception to which one may be prone in self-consciously seeking authenticity. While the heritage of Heidegger’s philosophy in this aspect of Malick’s cinematography is well-known, in this talk I want to reframe Malick’s vision of authenticity and narrativity by drawing on Merleau-Ponty. In particular, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s non-reductive suggestion, in his 1947 lecture ‘Film and the New Psychology’, that film affords the viewer a distinctive kind of phenomenological experience as embodied subjectivity as a perceptual agent.[2] Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Badlands can reveal what shows itself within the world of the characters to be seen in appreciating the dangers of assimilating life-narratives and what they are about.

Dr Anna Bergqvist is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, England. Her principal research interests are aesthetics and moral philosophy. She is editor of Philosophy and Museums: Ethics, Aesthetics and Ontology (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and editor of Evaluative Perception (under contract with Oxford University Press). She has also published on aesthetic and moral particularism, narrative ethics, thick evaluative concepts and selected issues in philosophy of language and philosophy and film.  She is convenes a regular Graduate Class in philosophy and film aimed at postgraduate MA and PhD students. She is also interested in intersection between metaethics, philosophy of perception and philosophy of psychiatry, currently preparing a monograph on particularism and personalised medicine.

[1] I borrow the term ‘intentional-communicate artefact’ from Gregory Currie’s Narrative and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 6.

[2] Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press), Chapter 4: 48-59.