Transcendental Style In Film (Da Capo Paperback) [Paperback]

Paul Schrader (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 1988 | Series: Da Capo Paperback

The acclaimed director of Mishima, American Gigolo, Hard Core, Blue Collar, Cat People also the screenwriter for Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader here analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasajiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language by these artists from divergent cultures. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state with austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This important book is an original contribution to film analysis and a key work by one of our most searching directors and writers.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Schrader is the acclaimed director of Mishima, American Gigolo, Hard Core, Blue Collar, Cat People and the screenwriter for Taxi Driver.

Product Details

• Paperback: 194 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (August 22, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306803356
• ISBN-13: 978-0306803352
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile October 7, 2009

By Martin Purvis

Format:Paperback

I read the book about thirty years ago and found it contained original, and still useful, insights about film expression. The self-absorbed critics on this page who have panned the book should probably reflect on their own verbal excesses before they criticize Schrader's. Anytime you take on the subject of the transcendental, you will necessarily be speaking metaphorically. Schrader's model may not be precise, but they offer food for thought.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Gem of a book on a rare cinematic style August 14, 2009

By L. Pals

Format:Paperback

This book is a gem of appreciation for an all but dying cinematic style. Bottom line, it's an enthusiastic analysis of a very rare style shared by three different filmmakers, all auteurs in their own right. You may disagree with the "spiritual" import, or the importance of the stylistic similarities across cultures, but you cannot deny that Paul Schrader is onto something worth studying. Schrader's background in Calvinism (and its analytic, ascetic tendencies) is a unique and fitting window through which the reader can appreciate Bresson's, Ozu's, and Dreyer's work as it relates to the aesthetics of grace. Schrader's concentration on the primacy of filmic form as a means to communicate with the audience, as opposed to content, vicarious emotion (empathy), and visceral sensations, flies in the face of visual narrative styles today, even the most "artistic."
Sure, it's a masters thesis, and sometimes reads like one. It is a little uneven rhetorically and goes in some tangents. But the negative reviews on this book seem emotionally charged with some kind of weird rivalry endemic to the academic world and petty film critics.

If you take the time to understand the complexity of stasis, disparity, abundant and sparse means, and the "choices" at work in predestinarian logic and the moment of grace, you won't be disappointed. You'll see Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer and filmmaking in a new light.

32 of 49 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Transcendental Twaddle June 11, 2003

By Colin Burnett

Format:Paperback

For some reason or other, this book remains, thirty years after its publishing, an authoritative introduction for newcomers to Bresson and Ozu (not so much to Dreyer). Having spent several years studying French and English-language Bresson scholarship and criticism, I must encourage those who are looking for a reliable way to 'insert' themselves into Bresson's films to begin elsewhere. Schrader's book has not aged gracefully.

Its primary shortcoming is that, in the case of the chapter on Bresson, it is sadly outdated. First and foremost, for a book that boasts to offer a 'theory' of (transcendental) style, it offers little more than an interpretation of a select group of Bresson's films (the so-called 'Prison Cycle') and their stylistic tendencies. While some of these stylistic observations remain strong, they are covered over with the most outrageous of readings of Bresson's film that they themselves lose their initial value. Published in 1972, the theory that Bresson's style is adapted to 'express' the 'Holy' fails to account for the filmmaker's later, almost atheistic, color work, like 'Lancelot du Lac,' 'Le Diable, Probablement' and 'L'Argent.' In order to convince us that this theory applies, Schrader would have to write a new edition of the book, which would have to make sense of the 'anti-transcendental' leanings of the last stage of Bresson's career. I doubt whether this could be accomplished. He would also, I believe, need to address an issue raised by David Bordwell in 'Making Meaning,' in the chapter 'Why Not to Read a Film.' Schrader fudges the line between hermeneutics and theory, offering not a 'theory' that makes sense of Bresson's 'style,' but an interpretation that periodically makes use of formal and stylistic observations.... In short, there are many shortcomings to Schrader's scholarship, here.

To those new to Bresson, I'd have to suggest a few other texts that are more sober in their methods and conclusions: Kent Jones' Introduction to his BFI Modern Classics book on 'L'Argent,' Andre Bazin's essay on Bresson's style in Volume I of 'What is Cinema?' (which remains not only one of the best pieces on Bresson, but one of Bazin's best as well), and last but not least, the collection of essays edited by James Quandt (particularly the essays by P. Adams Sitney). The best essays on Bresson contextualize his stylistic development, noting that his 'autere' style emerged in part as a response to the French 'cinema de qualite.' Even Manny Farber's short write-up on 'La Femme Douce' in 'Negative Space' is more sound than Schrader's entire chapter on Bresson. Read more ›

8 of 13 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars In the beginning was a critic... September 28, 2000

By J. KNIGHT

Format:Paperback

I read this years ago, before Schrader was well known as either a screenwriter or a director, but this book introduced me to the three great filmmakers he analyzes here. Hard to believe the same writer would go on to script TAXI DRIVER, HARDCORE, and RAGING BULL. But after you read this you will see the 'transcendental' element is in all of Schrader's screenplays. This book is not for the "movie buff" but a more scholarly audience. But if you are a Schrader fan, it is a must read.

13 of 21 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad October 16, 2008

By Cosmoetica

Format:Hardcover

Filmmaker Paul Schrader, whose most cogent claim to fame is as the screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver, got his first `in' to the world of film with the publication of Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, a book which has been lauded as a seminal work of criticism, upon its 1972 release, but which the years have not been kind to.

This is because it is simply not a well written book. While not outrightly a bad work, it is wholly generic. Any film student or callow film critic could have penned it. Indeed, the book has been seen as a model of `deeper criticism' ever since its release. The work's origins came from Schrader's time as a film student, and although this work was published when he was 26, it clearly reads like a callow undergrad thesis; larded with pointless quotations and references to other big names in cinema (to lend an air of authority), rather rote assertions about the films and scenes discussed, and a nebulous proposition about the book's title that Schrader, himself, even fails to properly define. It was, indeed, an expansion of his 1972 UCLA Master's Thesis.

As example, from pages 5 and 6, read as Schrader struggles to define transcendental, and falls into the pointless quotation trap I mention:

Part of the confusion is semantic; the term `transcendental' can have different meanings for different writers.... It can mean, directly or indirectly: (1) the Transcendent, the wholly or ideal itself, or what Rudolf Otto called `the Wholly Other,' (2) the transcendental, human acts or artifacts which express something of the Transcendent, or what Mircea Eliade in his anthropological study of comparative religions calls `hierophanies,' (3) transcendence, the human religious experience which may be motivated by either a deep psychological need or neurosis (Freud), or by an external, `Other' force (Jung).

Aside from the ridiculously bad use of punctuation- commas where semi-colons are needed, commas where none are needed, etc., a problem that plagues the whole book, in this brief quotation we see that Schrader cannot a) simply define a term for his benefit, b) mixes up definitions needlessly by c) quoting famous and not so famous authorities (see The Appeal to Authority Fallacy), and d) invoking specious terminology to lend an air of depth and arcana to his quest....On the positive side, Schrader does make a few interesting points, most notably when he describes the shock of the viewer, when watching Ordet, over the seemingly insane character John's ability to actually raise the dead, thus abnegating the expectations the film raises. But, these are few and far between. The book ends on a very bad note, both intellectually and stylistically:

Transcendental style can bring us nearer to that silence, that invisible image, in which the parallel lines of religion and art meet and interpenetrate.

The very last word of the book, `interpenetrate,' is so consciously designed to sound `deep' and evoke a mystical feel, especially given that `penetrate' would suffice, and coming directly on the heels of words like `silence,' `invisible,' `religion,' and `art,' that even were one not aware of Schrader's age at the writing of this text beforehand, such `ooh, ah' moments would thrust it directly at the reader at the last moment.

The book is bogged down in a slightly off-kilter struggle between didacticism and full-on pedantry, from Schrader's inability to define his book's very title, to his blatant and fallacious appeals to authority that yield little, since those authorities have little to do with the subject matter the appeal is based in. Ultimately, Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer ends up as a conveniently admixed regurge of ideas others have had before, had better, and a few muddled pet ideas Schrader cannot even fully define. In short, aside from its lack of real content, the book's style is nonexistent, for that is the definition of the generic- indifferentiation. It is reflected in Schrader's wildly anarchistic punctuative style, his ennui-directed form of critical engagement, and his inability to even convincingly ground the text in a clear claim. Yes, the book may still be valuable for a handful of passages, but its bulk has about as much resonance to the work within, and that being made in cinema today, as mediaeval texts on human anatomy do to modern microsurgery. Take a pass on Schrader's ideas and book, and indulge his art: go rewatch Taxi Driver, instead. Read more ›