“Every Act of Preservation is an Act of Creation”: Paul Schrader’s Eco-theology in First Reformed

This chapter scrutinizes the complex relationship between climate change and theology, as represented in First Reformed, as well as Paul Schrader’s understanding of humanity’s major problems today. Analyzing the issue of ecological decline through the prism of religion, Schrader outlines the ideology that presumably might help humanity survive at the age of global warming. Through the complex discussions of such issues as despair, anxiety, and hope, Schrader deduces the formula of survival in which preservation is the key component. Equating humans to God, Schrader, on the one hand, censures those actions that led to progress but destroyed the environment, yet, on the other hand, he foregrounds the fact that humans can also save the planet now. Schrader portrays both humans and Earth as living organisms created by God. He draws explicit parallels between the current state of our planet and the problems that we experience – from political ones, including war, to more personal ones like health issues.

Movement and Meaning: The “Unmotivated” Camera in Four Films by Paul Schrader

Centres on Paul Schrader’s use of camera movement (or absence of movement) as a means of articulating themes within his films and, furthermore, as a tool with which he expresses himself prominently as an author. His ethos that “style determines the theme in every film,” that “unity of form and subject matter” is paramount and that for a film to succeed artistically its unique style must deliver “the right solution to the right problem” runs through them all. Shows how in many films he makes regular use of “unmotivated” camera movement, which he describes as “when the storyteller imposes himself on the story, when the camera calls attention to itself.” It encourages us to participate actively in the process of viewing and the construction of meanings. The chapter presents case studies of four films from different stages of his career – all of which have very different styles and camera techniques to illustrate these points. Each case study will feature close textual analysis of between two and four scenes: American Gigolo (1980), The Comfort of Strangers, Auto Focus (2002), and First Reformed.

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms: Love and Silence in First Reformed

This chapter reads First Reformed as an embodiment and fulfillment of Paul Schrader’s career, a capstone that serves as a meditation on our responsibilities toward each other, our earth, and god. The transcendental style, the quest for redemption, a sense of restraint punctuated by violent action--these qualities have dominated Schrader’s career since the publication of Transcendental Style in Film until 2017, when he updated that text while writing and directing a film about a struggling pastor in a small church in upstate New York. First Reformed also contains nods to his filmic influences, including Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and his own work on Taxi Driver. This chapter surveys these many influences and self-references to read Schrader’s most recent film as a culmination of his life in film.

Prophets and Zealots: Paul Schrader’s Adaptations of The Mosquito Coast and The Last Temptation of Christ

Focuses on Paul Schrader's process of adapting two novels—Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast and Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. Draws on the Harry Ransom Center's collection of Paul Schrader's papers, Schrader's annotated copies of The Last Temptation of Christ and The Mosquito Coast, the outlines that he created for both films, and the multiple script drafts. Argues there is an inherent dilemma with The Mosquito Coast because the voiceover structure distances the viewer from the protagonist, Allie Fox, instead telling the story through the eyes of his son, Charlie. However, in Last Temptation (1978), Jesus undergoes trials that challenge his followers while remaining the audience's touchstone. The shifting use of voiceover as a technical tool in screenwriting therefore serves as a gauge for demonstrating how Schrader envelops viewers in his characters' worldviews. The last section of the chapter reflects on how Schrader's presentation of such themes is informed by his own critical concept of transcendental film style.

Schrader’s Women: Cat People and Patty Hearst

Paul Schrader’s connection with director Robert Bresson is often explored through his male characters, the ‘man in his room’ of Light Sleeper and American Gigolo, but Taxi Driver before them and First Reformed most recently. However, Schrader’s two primary experiments with female characters, Cat People (1982) and Patty Hearst (1988), also follow a similar Bressonian trajectory and end with each female character incarcerated, yet finding a kind of spiritual freedom that helps them realize their identities. This chapter explores Schrader’s women primarily through close examination of Cat People’s Irina (Nastassja Kinski) and Natasha Richardson’s eponymous heroine in Patty Hearst, but use his representation of women in the male-driven films for points of comparison and contrast. In addition, this chapter approaches Schrader’s women as reflections of his male characters, many of whom are driven by existential anxiety that motivates them to seek self-actualization in redemptive violence.

Interview with Paul Schrader conducted by Michelle E. Moore and Brian Brems on 9/27/2018 at the Rail Line Diner, NYC

This career spanning interview with writer/director/film critic Paul Schrader was conducted in New York City in September 2018. During the wide-ranging conversation, Schrader reflects on his filmography, weighs in on the validity of the auteur theory, offers insight into his approach to writing and directing, draws distinctions between being a film artist and a film critic, and tells interesting stories from his life in the cinema. He discusses his most important contributions to film, including the screenplay for Taxi Driver, his stylistic evolution beginning with American Gigolo, and his celebrated film First Reformed. He also provides trenchant observations about the state of the cinema and how the film business has changed over time, insights offered with his typically unvarnished candor.

“So I Found Another Form of Expression”: Art and Life/Art in Life in Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader says Mishima, like Taxi Driver’s hero, “is an example of a certain pathology of suicidal glory that transcends education and culture.” But for Schrader his task is “exploration” of such pathology, while critics tend to take it as endorsement. This chapter shows that Schrader’s tactics in Mishima in fact invite misreading, through their aesthetic distance. Although the present tense of the film is carried out in what might be called a near-documentary neutral naturalism, most of the film works in other ways: the biographical flashbacks in more expressionistic black and white; the three segments of adapted novels both in lush color, and presented as deliberately, anti-naturalistic staged, in a kabuki-inflected style. The result of such aestheticizing tactics, in combination with the direction of Mishima’s own life—toward the “final action” as new “form of expression,” toward life as art—in its very Wildean tenor, strikes an “art for art’s sake” tone, suspending moral judgment. This aestheticism tends to bury the real (as opposed to Mishima’s intoned voiceover) final outcome: that this is a failed coup and a deluded act.

“Thinking White”: Performing Racial Tension in Blue Collar

By most accounts, as Paul Schrader’s first film as director, Blue Collar was a tension-filled production with the three leading actors coming to blows on multiple occasions. This chapter, will explore the performance styles of Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and Richard Pryor with particular focus paid to the latter’s identity as a stand-up comic and movie star during the mid- to late- 1970s. Through casting Pryor, Schrader does not fundamentally alter this comic persona but rather captures a dramatic variation of it, employing it as a defying signifier against the midcentury “realist” acting styles of Keitel and Kotto, who both trained on the New York stage. Through a fostering and challenging of Pryor’s persona and style, Schrader produces a tension between his performers that feels acutely aware of the comedian’s “territorialized” black identity as well as his ability to challenge racial boundaries through his humor. The contrasting styles of Keitel, Kotto, and Pryor provide a dramatic tension attuned to the complicated racial conflicts found in the more integrated work spaces of the 1970s.

“Just Being Transparent Baby”: Surveillance Culture, Digitization, and Self-regulation in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons

Paul Schrader’s micro-budget 2013 feature The Canyons was almost unanimously disparaged upon release, with critics pointing to its emotional detachment, flat digital aesthetic and lack of realistic characterization as its major flaws. This chapter rails against these criticisms and explores the complex aesthetic, socio-political, and moral purpose of Schrader’s film. The chapter argues that a theoretical approach to The Canyons as an expression of the post-humanist condition fostered by the influx of surveillance cameras and social media into the fabric of everyday life allows us to perceive of his work as a cultural tool that forces us to reflect upon our relationship with media images. A reading of the feature through the theoretical framework of Foucault's visual economy of self-regulation fills a gap within Schrader scholarship by arguing for an interpretative paradigm which investigates the symbiotic relation between alienation, narcissism and the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience at the centre of The Canyons, thus offering a substantial insight on the fragmentation and disintegration of affect and personhood within a digitized culture.

Schrader and Style

This essay relates both Schrader’s criticism and films to the analytic philosophical account of style developed by Nelson Goodman in order to show how Schrader’s style invokes form, content, ideology, and expression all at once. More importantly, however, the function of style in his work means that his films must be considered in terms of his filmography. In particular, any assessment of that body of work must grapple with the contradictory relationships between and among the films of which it is comprised. Ultimately, Schrader is the preeminent American filmmaker of a peculiar dialectical style, one that is simultaneously culturally specific, personally autographic, and universally humanist, though it bursts the frame of any of his films: no one Schrader film exemplifies his dialectical style, because this style can only be seen by relating each film to his others. Accordingly, a Paul Schrader film is style-less, yet Paul Schrader films are not. This essay ends with some speculative remarks as to what this implies about the status of the work of art in the case of Schrader’s cinematic and critical output.