A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick

Piece by piece I am moving on. All pieces address pleasure so it seems I am "stuck" with the topic for a while and till my book is finished.

The new Malick comes to town soon. Anticipating.

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

― George Eliot, or else and more female sounding, Mary Ann Evans, Middlemarch (Quoted at the end of The Hidden Life)

I watched the best film I have ever watched. I love many directors and quite a lot of films but tonight I watched the best of them. I do not care whether I do injustice to all those excellent films. 

It was the Hymn to the Earth that Heidegger was unable to write (his talk at the University about the Earth and his Vaterland was a disgrace to both). An appropriate hymn to the unhistorical acts (see Eliot, and keep in mind Nietzsche's definition of being unhistorical in his Untimely Meditations). Also a wink to turn our attention away from the many famous PhD holders and no PhD holders who supported the Hitler frenzy. Not in order to "show" there was resistance in the German-speaking countries but for the sake of revealing this concealed life of resistance, the resistance we are unable and unwilling to offer every time tyranny is present: in us or around us. As a good friend said, we do not need "more" democracy but greater resistance to tyranny.

The film was not political? When I read such nonsense in reviews (that was in NYT), I decide not to read more.

The technical aspects are stimulating as well. Terrence offers such shots for the first time. He focuses on the body and often does not take care of the faces, which are left completely out of the picture...

PS: Which philosophy faculty is going to award him the PhD title he so much deserves? Or, has he not accomplished the PhD he started with Gilbert Ryle on the Notion of World in Heidegger and Wittgenstein? And much more in his unique way?