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All Things Shining: A Narrative And Stylistic Analysis Of Terrence Malick's Films, C. Clinton Stivers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation fills a gap in the scholarship on the films of Terrence Malick by providing a historically based and grounded auteur study that provides a comprehensive examination of his formal and thematic concerns in Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and with a coda on The Tree of Life (2011).

This auteur study draws on critical approaches to formalism, Hollywood genres, American cultural myths, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Each chapter that addresses a specific film opens by historically situating Malick and that film within an industrial and production …