"It's Not Far....It's Within Reach‪"‬

A dissertation on cinematographer Terrence Malick and his treatment of the Adamic Adam, with his search for wholeness, in relation to the work of Melville and Whitman. The fact that Malick's cinema is approached from a literary perspective is not so strange, because the Adamic myth has always most clearly been expressed in American literature. This thesis tries to show that Malick's cinema moves from a tragic, Melvillian treatment of the American Adam to an optimistic, Whitmanesque conception of the American Adam. If films are poetry, and Malick films are, then his films articulate a certain poetry of nature, a meditation on the place of human beings in this world and our relationship with nature. Malick's poetic cinema let us experience the Edenic yearning almost perfectly.