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.

The theological prison metaphor in Bresson encompasses both the body/soul “dichotomy” and the predestination/free will “paradox.” Characters mortify their flesh in order to free their soul from the prison of their body. Marvin Zeman suggested that Bresson is aligned with St. Ambrose’s logical conclusion approach to the prison metaphor: “Let us die, if we may leave, or if we be denied leave, yet let us die,” following the desire to escape the prison of the body to the extremes of suicide. St. Augustine, and later Jansen, are precedents for Bresson’s exploration of the free will paradox and Predestinarianism. Characters achieve freedom from the prison of the flesh by choosing to become a prisoner of the Lord, accepting the will of God even as they were already fated to it. “The only tension, as in predestinarianism, is whether or not she will choose her predestined fate.” Even the viewer is brought into the metaphor. Bresson’s goal in the use of the transcendental style is to give the viewer the freedom to accept the Transcendent. The stasis that follows escalating disparity and the decisive action is only significant if the viewer willfully surrenders to the transcendental experience and its paradoxical nature, where “the physical and the spiritual can coexist, still in tension and unresolved” (108). “Show him things in the order and the way that you love to see them and to feel them; make him feel them, in presenting them to him, as you see them and feel them yourself, and this while leaving him a great freedom, while making him free.” I don’t think that it’s particularly meaningful to say that the conclusion the films lead to is “predestined” any more than any other film which attempts to convey a specific truth, but Bresson fairly explicitly likens his approach to conveying truth to divine revelation, which relies on a free choice by the recipient and openness to accepting the revealed truth: “the presence of something or someone unseen: a hand that directs all.”

Bresson’s prison metaphor allows for this complexity. In his films man’s “freedom” consists of being a “prisoner of the Lord” rather than a prisoner of the flesh. 

Transcendental Style in Film quotes

Join the club