"Words don't come easy": the transcendental style of Paul Schrader's first reformed

Abstract

Whereas the films by the screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader lack the rigorous formal choices of the

transcendental style he ascribed to Yasujirô Ozu and Robert Bresson, no film of his as a director has been

closer conceptually to this sort of style than his twentieth feature, First Reformed (2017). He made this picture during the same period as his essay “Rethinking Transcendental Style”, written as an introduction to a new edition of his 1972 study Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Here First Reformed, which has received more positive accolades than any of Schrader’s other films, is read as a reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s Nattvardsgätterna (Winter Light, 1963) and as a work manifesting key influences from two films by Robert Bresson: Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) and Pickpocket (1959). This article aims to articulate the stylistic influences informing First Reformed, paying particular attention to the dissonance between word/text/voice and image. It reflects upon the sparsity of words in Ozu, the monotonous voices in Bresson, the speech acts in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s cinematic oeuvre, and the fruitless verbosity in Bergman’s so-called trilogy of faith. .