Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Chyutin, Dan

Titel

Transcendental Style Reconsidered: Absence, Presence, and a “Place Which Is Not-a-Place”

Ist Teil von

• Journal of film and video, 2021-10, Vol.73 (3), p.34-46

Ort / Verlag

Englewood: University of Illinois Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Film and Television Literature Index with Full Text

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• in the winter of 2oi6, the usual academic crowd of the Society of Cinema and Media Scholars annual conference witnessed an unusual sight: the personal appearance of renowned critic-turned-filmmaker Paul Schrader, there to respond to a panel, organized by Cristina Ruiz-Poveda and myself, on the reconsideration of his formative 1972 volume Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.1 By Schrader's own admission, this experience led him to a process of "rethinking," in which he asked himself: "How did I come to write the book in the first place and how does its premise hold up after forty-five years?" (1). Yet a more decisive reason for the way this volume stood out over the years may arguably be found in the ambitiousness of its project: to comprehensively address cinema's "spiritual aspirations" (Pence 50), over and against the dominance of film studies' "iconoclastic approach," which interrogates the medium for its "ability to reveal and remake a thoroughly human-centered world" (Pence 33). Interrogating the intersection of film and spirituality/ religion was very much the vogue with several key theorists in post-World War II France-most notably André Bazin and his acolytes Amédée Ayfre and Henri Agel;2 and in the United States, as Schrader himself attests, Susan Sontag paved the way for such discussions through her formative writing on Robert Bresson's "spiritual style. In doing so, this cinematic form radically departs from classic film traditions: instead of exploiting the medium's expressive means to create a spectacular and compelling image of the world, it strips reality to its bare bones, providing "a meticulous representation of the dull, banal commonplaces of everyday living" (67).