Transcendental Style in Film by Schrader Paul;

Transcendental Style in Film by Schrader Paul;

Author:Schrader, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press


The beginning of A Man Escaped and the end of Pickpocket: “Imprisonment is the dominant metaphor in Bresson’s films, but it is a two-faced metaphor: his protagonists are both escaping from prison of one sort and surrendering to a prison of another.”

Given this theological backdrop, Bresson’s “pretexts” must necessarily be different than Ozu’s. In Bresson’s films, as in Christian theology, transcendence is an escape from the prison of the body, an “escape” which makes one simultaneously “free from sin” and a “prisoner of the Lord.” Consequently, the awareness of the Transcendent can only come after some degree of self-mortification, whether it be a foregoing of the “sins of the flesh” or death itself. Prison is the dominant metaphor of Bresson’s films, but it is a two-faced metaphor: his characters are both escaping from a prison of one sort and surrendering to a prison of another. And the prison his protagonists ultimately escape is the most confining prison of all, the body. In a sense, Bresson “mortified” his actors; he not only killed them fictionally, but also artistically, refusing to use an actor in more than one film.*** The actor had been “worn out”; in the next film there was a new (but similar) actor who had to be mortified.

In contrast, Ozu did not feel the need to compare the tension between man and nature, soul and body, to that between a prisoner and a prison. Self-mortification had little place in his films. There were no chains, bars, persecutions, self-flagellations. The “new body” was available on earth; his characters did not need to undergo the death of the old body. Ozu used a “family of actors whom he did not “kill off” but put through the same tensions in film after film. For Ozu grace was neither limited nor unpredictable, but easily available to all. The awareness of the Transcendent was for Ozu a way of living, not, as for Bresson, a way of dying.



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