Author Martin Woessner and writer/director Courtney Stephens join Now Instant to discuss Woessner's recent publication Terrence Malick and the Examined Life.
The evening's program will include a screening of Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun (1958), which was an important influence on Malick, followed by a conversation with Woessner and Stephens on Malick's interest in the Western, and the key role Penn played in Malick's development as a filmmaker.
Co-presented with Veggie Cloud, a film and lecture series organized by both Stephens and writer Kate Wolf.
Terrence Malick and the Examined Life
Utilizing newly available archival sources to offer original interpretations of his canonical films, Martin Woessner illuminates Malick’s early education in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford as well as his cinematic apprenticeship at the American Film Institute to show how a young student searching for personal meaning became a famous director of Hollywood films. Woessner’s book presents a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of the many texts, thinkers, and traditions that made this transformation possible—from the novels of Hamlin Garland, James Jones, and Walker Percy to the philosophies of Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard to road movies, Hollywood Westerns, and the comedies of Jean Renoir. Situating Malick’s filmmaking within recent intellectual and cultural history, Woessner highlights its lasting contributions to both American cinema and the life of the mind.
Terrence Malick and the Examined Life suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer.
The Left Handed Gun
"The iconographic photo of Billy the Kid, his body at a slight rake, a holster and pistol cut on his hip, shows him left-handed. Reverse that image as recent scholarship demands and, faster than you can slap leather, William Bonney is right-handed. This simple exercise shows the plasticity of myth. At first glance, Arthur Penn's debut feature is about that very thing, the juvenile outlaw made notorious by the mythopoetic press. But Penn sets his bead on something gamier, the feral underpinnings of the great western expansion. Billy, played with simmering swagger by Paul Newman, is an ill-bred roustabout, roaming the range of New Mexico. Taken in as an uncouth stray by “The Englishman,” a patriarchal rancher caught up in the Lincoln County War, his lethal behavior is temporarily corralled. But upon the rancher's murder, Billy's untamed nature returns like a stampede of wild horses. Newman's portrayal is all lanky gesture and hardscrabble speechlessness. “I got myself all killed,” he mutters, acknowledging his unruly reckoning. Penn's free-ranging Western is all about cowboys and Freudians."
Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime. In-store ticket purchases are subject to availability, first-come, first-served. We do not operate a standby list.
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