Paul Schrader

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader’s theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer

Transcendental Style in Film

The “time-image” style (as opposed to the conventional “movement-image”) “allows the viewer to imbue the image with associations, even contradictory ones” (5). The unique quality of cinematic introspection is that is caused by the moving image, and the duration of the time-image allows the filmmaker to provoke introspection in this surreal and subconscious manner that characterizes Transcendental Style. 

Conor Murphy

Cinema, after all, is only still images projected in rapid succession. The spectator will imagine the gun firing, the monster emerging from the cave, and so forth.

Postwar film-makers realized that just as movement-image could be manipulated to create suspense, time-image could be manipulated to create introspection.

Bresson is a rarity among film-makers: he apparently knows exactly what he does and why he does it.

Transcendental Style in Film quotes

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