In the age of spectacular violence and cinematic overstimulation, Vermiglio (2024) by Maura Delpero and A Hidden Life (2019) by Terrence Malick stand as quiet acts of defiance — not only in terms of content, but in form, rhythm, and gaze. Both films meditate on resistance not as grand gesture, but as spiritual posture; not as war, but as waiting.
Both films use nature not as passive backdrop but as moral terrain. In A Hidden Life, the mountains seem to echo Franz’s spiritual clarity — vast, immovable, serene. In Vermiglio, the snow-covered village becomes a claustrophobic cocoon, beautiful but freezing, embodying both repression and potential rebirth. Here, silence is not absence, but atmosphere; a space where interior transformation becomes possible.
Vermiglio follows Lucia, a young woman in an isolated Italian alpine village during WWII, whose life is governed by religious dogma and social propriety. When she falls in love with a wounded deserter hiding in the mountains, her world is shaken — not violently, but tectonically. Similarly, A Hidden Life chronicles the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who refuses to pledge allegiance to Hitler, choosing martyrdom over moral compromise. These narratives unfold slowly, almost silently, but their ethical weight is seismic.
Malick’s philosophical cinema aligns with the phenomenological tradition, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s view of perception as embodied and affective. His camera glides through landscapes and human interiors with equal reverence, suggesting that moral decisions are rooted not in ideology, but in lived sensation. Franz’s resistance is thus not an abstract idea, but a visceral truth felt in his hands, soil, breath.
Delpero, on the other hand, grounds Vermiglio in a feminine poetics of space and silence. The film resonates with Laura Mulvey’s feminist critique of the male gaze, yet moves beyond it by reclaiming the domestic and the muted as sites of agency. Lucia’s gestures, her silences, her gaze — all become forms of resistance in a patriarchal society that renders her invisible. As feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis notes, "the female subject is not simply oppressed by ideology but produced by it" (de Lauretis, 1987). Vermiglio exposes that production — and then quietly subverts it.
Both films use nature not as passive backdrop but as moral terrain. In A Hidden Life, the mountains seem to echo Franz’s spiritual clarity — vast, immovable, serene. In Vermiglio, the snow-covered village becomes a claustrophobic cocoon, beautiful but freezing, embodying both repression and potential rebirth. Here, silence is not absence, but atmosphere; a space where interior transformation becomes possible.
Ultimately, these films ask: what does it mean to resist in a world where your voice cannot — or must not — be heard? And who is more radical: the man who refuses to kill, or the woman who dares to feel?
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Works Cited:
De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1987.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton University Press, 1992.
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