Humean Cinema

Humean Cinema February 8, 2016

Mark Cousins once clipped a weed from the grave of David Hume, taped it to a piece of paper, and sent it to Terrence Malick’s agent. Not long after, Malick himself called, wanting to talk philosophy.

Cousins recounts this in his contribution to The Cinema of Terrence Malick, and he goes on to explain the “Humeanism of Malick’s work.”

He explains Hume’s epistemology: “We have only these perceptions – he called them impressions – with which to construct our sense of the outside world. These impressions, argued Hume, imprint themselves on our mind and, when repeated, form ideas. An idea is an aggregate of confirmed impressions – that, for example, the sun in the morning will feel warm on my face. We do not build our understanding of the outside world logically (Hume criticised the concept of cause and effect), but by impressions accumulating into ideas. Each, said Hume, recalls the other. There is a flow between the two.

This “non-essentialism” seems to conflict with Malick’s metaphysical vision, but Cousins thinks this objection misunderstands both Hume and Malick. The Humean element is evident in the “cyclical and repetitive” structure of Malick’s films. Complex ideas emerge from repeated sensible experiences: “This tree is beautiful. The one I saw yesterday is beautiful. The one from the day before was too. We grow accustomed to this certainty, this beauty-hit, and come to expect it. It enters our nature, this assumption of constancy, of guaranteed rapture.

Malick is thus able “to use the medium of film to show that it is the process of receiving impressions of the world that is transcendent. He may in addition posit theories of self, but looking at Malick through the lens of Hume shows that the pre-cognitive experience of engaging sensually with the world is where at least some of the wonder lies.


Cousins also sees a Humean element in Malick’s tendency to start every film in innocence, as if he has unlearned everything the previous films taught: “he seems to unlearn what life has taught him and start again with new characters like Pocahontas who are too young to have learnt, or from a place that doesn’t know or doesn’t need to know. They are wide open, these characters, Humean sponges drinking in experience, glorying in the aviary that is life.


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