La pace non è di questo mondo. Su A Hidden Life (2019) di Terrence Malick

Abstract

The essay examines the relationship between peace, nature, and the concept of world in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019). Drawing on Malick’s philosophical background, particularly his engagement with Martin Heidegger, the article argues that nature in Malick’s cinema is the condition through which the world becomes thinkable. In A Hidden Life, the contrast between the violence of history and the serenity of nature structures the film’s reflection on peace. Through the story of Franz Jägerstätter, who refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler and is executed for his resistance, Malick presents peace as something unattainable within historical and political reality. Instead, peace belongs to a transcendent dimension, symbolised by the ‘kingdom of heaven’. Franz’s refusal becomes both a spiritual and political gesture, capable of interrupting the logic of power and opening the possibility of imagining another relation to the world beyond war and domination.