“Strangers and pilgrims”: el arquetipo del migrante en el cine de Terrence Malick

Pablo Alzola Cerero ^[1]
1. [1] Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
  
  Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
  
  Madrid, España
Localización: Comunicación y sociedad = Communication & Society, ISSN-e 2386-7876, ISSN 0214-0039, Vol. 32, Nº. 2, 2019, págs. 97-108
Idioma: español
Enlaces
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Resumen
- The migrant archetype is a prevailing motif of the cinema directed by Terrence Malick to date: most of his main characters share the condition of being displaced or nomadic people. This article is focused on analysing six films –belonging to different periods of Malick’s filmography– in which this condition is significantly emphasized: Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2015). The aim of this study is to reflect upon the central role of the migrant archetype in the works of Malick, showing to what extent the essential features of this archetype are inherited from United States mythology. In the end, this connection between film and myth is due to a common ground: on one hand, the thought of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson about the idea of America, revisited in the last decades by the philosopher Stanley Cavell; on the other, the legend of the first New England settlers, in which the biblical theme of exodus and the figure of the pilgrim are fundamental. Thus, I aim to prove how –and explain on what grounds– both in the construction of Malick’s migrant characters and in the mythic representation of the American migrant the same feature stands out: the condition of “stranger and pilgrim”.