"Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer", Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader is a director, screenwriter and film critic. Raised in a Calvinist family who deprived him of the cinema in his youth, Schrader was only able to see the first film at age 17 ("Other college kids had to vandalize government buildings. go to movies. ", as he would say later). This led to the construction of his late cinephilia in a more intellectual than emotional way. Hence, in the films written by him, the spectator feels uncomfortable with the imperfection and lack of attachment to his protagonists, existentially disturbed and self-destructive, but redeemed in the last scene that justifies the long process of violence to which they had been subjected. Although he is most remembered for his collaboration with Martin Scorsese in 4 films - Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - the ones he directed are equally astonishing [Hardcore (1978) and Affliction (1997)], with a strong and innovative visual style [Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)] and, sometimes, with a Bressonian influence that is absent in Scorsese, as can be seen in the endings of American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992), widely reminiscent of Pickpocket (1959).

Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, published in 1972, analyzes and connects the work of the three directors in its title and how they reach, according to Schrader, the spiritual part of the human being. According to him, the transcendental style is achieved by 3 phases: "1) The everyday: a meticulous representation of the dull, commonplace commonplaces of everyday living (...); 2) Disparity: an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment which culminates in a decisive action (...); 3) Stasis: a frozen view of life which does not solve the disparity but transcends it." Schrader shows how these phases (or, in the case of Dreyer, their majority) are achieved by the filmmakers, while comparing the work of each of them with previous religious art forms: Ozu to Zen art, Bresson to Byzantine portraiture and Dreyer to Gothic architecture.

Excerpts:

“In Ozu, the image of stasis is represented by the final coda, a still-life view which connotes Oneness. It is the same restrictive view which began the film: the mountain has become a mountain again, but in an entirely different way. Perhaps the finest image of stasis in Ozu' s films is the lengthy shot of the vase in a darkened room near the end of Late Spring. The father and daughter are preparing to spend their last night under the same roof; she will soon be married. They calmly talk about what a nice day they had, as if it were any other day. The room is dark; the daughter asks a question of the father, but gets no answer. There is a shot of the father asleep, a shot of the daughter looking at him, a shot of the vase in the alcove and over it the sound of the father snoring. Then there is a shot of the daughter half-smiling, then a lengthy, ten-second shot of the vase again, and a return to the daughter now almost in tears, and a final return to the vase. The vase is stasis (…).” 

"The long forehead, the lean features, the closed lips, the blank stare, the frontal view, the flat light, the uncluttered background, the stationary camera, these identify Bresson's protagonists as objects suitable for veneration. When Michel's cold face stares into the camera in scene after scene in Pickpocket, Bresson is using his face--only one part of Bresson' s complex film-making-like a Byzantine face painted high on a temple wall.”

“The decisive action breaks the everyday stylization thematically (total emotional release) and technically (the introduction of a vertical line into a previously horizontal composition). This "decisive" effect of Marthe's martyrdom was calculated by Dreyer: 'As a principal rule one can say that one shall try to keep a continuous, flowing, horizontally gliding motion in the film. If one then suddenly introduces vertical lines, one can by this reach an instantly dramatic effect - as, for instance, in the pictures of the vertical ladder just before it is thrown into the fire in Day of Wrath.' "

Link to the complete book in PDF:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11aCcSSn2IvmBTD3mps-GazYbp0aRQA_I/view?usp=sharing

Update from 10/10/2018: Transcendental Style in Film has been recently republished with a new Introduction by Schrader, "Rethinking Transcendental Style". You can read this new edition here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IxaX5qthhqh3tsCDwPxSlx6Q57rmIB-z/view?usp=sharing

Paul Schrader