Name: Transcendental Style in Film | Paul Schrader | TIFF 2017
Uploaded: 2019-11-05T07:39:01.000Z
Duration: 3 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you come to expect the action, well,  you're not going to get it.

Adverbs of manner

[Schrader] Transcendental style is, essentially,  withholding the device.

You're going to hold on shots  too long; you're not going to cut.

when you are instructed to watch nothing?

Now, in real life, you don't watch dead time.

De Sica, in UMBERTO D. — [there's that] famous shot of the maid striking the match three times.

It was no longer about the  activity of striking a match.

It was about how long you're going to sit and watch.

The filmmaker is using the power of cinema itself — against itself —

to get you into a sense that  you have to participate.

They lean towards you aggressively  with their hands around your throat,

trying to grab every second of your attention.

[Schrader] These type of films lean away from you,

and they use time and — as other people would call it — boredom as a technique.

Eventually, if you're smart enough on how you use these techniques,

now you're doing something really rare: you're activating the viewer.

[Schrader] When you use boredom  as an aesthetic device,

when is it effective, and when is it simply boredom?

If you consistently withhold, and now  the viewer is leaning towards you,

now you have to think, in a certain moment, "freedom."

In IDA, it's the tracking shot at the end, you know.

In Bresson, it's just a burst of music.  You know, you show a movie

for an hour and a half,  two hours, with no music at all,

and all of a sudden, at the end, boom! A big blast of Mozart.

What are you going to do with something that aggressive?

And the trick of someone who can use transcendental style

[Soundtrack crescendo: Mozart's  "Great Mass in C Minor - Kyrie"]

So, like the characters in Ozu's films — [they] never show any emotion

and, all of a sudden, at the end — wham-o! —  comes a big blast of emotion!

now that he has totally  conditioned you not to expect it?

Is it going to put you off, or is it going to knock you up a notch?

And, once you get that action, and then... then after that,

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Transcendental Style in Film | Paul Schrader | TIFF 2017

essentially

eventually

grab

technique