In his seminal 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (written at age 24, two years before he turned from film criticism to filmmaking), Schrader noted that, “The many statements [Robert] Bresson has made in interviews and discussions, properly arranged, would constitute an accurate analysis of his films (a statement which can be made of no other filmmaker to my knowledge)….” It’s an astute remark, but one which Schrader perhaps now should amend to include himself.
In recent times, and especially since “First Reformed” debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, the writer/director has spoken about his work in numerous interviews and discussions, and his comments—which I encourage interested readers to seek out—are invariably as stimulating and insightful as they are candid.
While many artists take pains to disguise the influences on their work, Schrader jovially confesses his, and says that the important thing is not to avoid stealing from others but to do it intelligently and strategically. From one angle, “First Reformed” is an unreformed film critic’s tour through a strain or tradition of art-filmmaking that molded him, as well as a tribute to masters including Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer and, of course, Bresson.
Brought up in the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist denomination, Schrader was raised without movies but became enchanted with their forbidden pleasures when he encountered them. Later, in discovering Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” he was electrified because “I sensed a bridge between the spirituality I was raised with and the ‘profane’ cinema I loved. And it was a bridge of STYLE not content.”
That last point is crucial. Schrader continued, “Church people had been using movies since they first moved to illustrate religious beliefs, but this was something different. The convergence of spirituality and cinema would occur in style not content. In the How, not the What.”
The idea of spiritual meaning expressed in style is deftly encapsulated in the first shot of “First Reformed,” a neat synecdoche for the whole film. The camera tracks slowly forward as it gazes up at the stark white facade of an 18th century church in New York State. The building’s elegantly restrained colonial architecture, the gray sky, the stately camera movement and music all convey an austere gravity, which, together with Schrader’s use of Academy ratio (inspired, he has said, by Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida”), point us back not only to an earlier era of American religion but also to such European cinema models as Bergman’s “Winter Light” and Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest.”
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