Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" and Other Visions of Life in the Universe

Surprising. Ponderous. Overlong. Breathtaking. Love-it- or-hate-it. Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning film The Tree of Life generated a variety of such verbal responses. Critics saved their strongest gulps for the CGI dinosaurs and manipulated Hubble telescope imagery that portrayed visions of life in the cosmos inaccessible to the naked human eye, beyond and before the here and now. On their own, such images would surely be stunning, but what struck audience sensibilities was the visual clashing of micro- and macrocosmos, the movement from Waco TX to nebulae light years away, from the 1950s to the Pleistocene era. A closer look at The Tree of Life's cosmic images reveals that such cosmic correlations are actually situated within a long visual and religious history. Here, Plate presents a series of encounters that situate the imagery of The Tree of Life within a larger religious, cultural, and cinematic visual history, juxtaposing the new and the traditional through three historical plateaus.