Abstract
The book Transcendental Style in Film, written in 1972 by future film director Paul Schrader, offers perhaps the most extensive analysis of how a particular film style might have a specifically religious significance. The article provides a critical discussion of Schrader’s theory, with a particu- lar focus on the films of Carl Th. Dreyer. Schrader’s ideas are compared to alternative explanations of the same stylistic features provided by David Bordwell and Torben Grodal. The article concludes that while Schrader identifies a number of pertinent stylistic features, the ‘transcendental film’ is better understood as a subset of the art film mode. Torben Grodal’s description of the intertwined effect of a salient (often abstract) style and thematic content indicative of higher meaning, coupled with the contribu- tion of a suitably disposed spectator, is, the article argues, more plausible than Schrader’s analysis.
Films are often described as ‘religious’ on the basis of content – they are called religious because they present biblical stories or other narratives where the divine or the supernatural appears directly; stories about saints, priests or other holy figures; or moralistic tales, where religious doctrine is more or less explicitly presented. In this way André Bazin divides reli- gious films into biblical films, films about saints and films about priests and nuns in an important essay from 1951, ‘Cinema and Theology’ (Bazin 2002: §§ 3–5). But Bazin’s essay is also an argument for the significance of film style for such films. Despite Bazin’s example, later writers have tended to neglect the aesthetic dimension, argues Melanie Wright in her recent introduction to the field, Religion and Film: ‘Typically, the narrative dimension of the films being studied is emphasised, with little attention to mise-en-scène […], cinematography, editing or sound’ (Wright 2007: 21). Accordingly, the great Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer is identified as a ‘religious’ director because he made a film about a saint and a film about a miracle: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc/ The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Ordet/ The Word (1955).
There are some writers, however, who have explored the aesthetic dimension of religious films in greater detail. They tend to argue that there is a specific set of stylistic features particularly appropriate for religious
Keywords
Carl Th. Dreyer Paul Schrader religion and film transcendental style film style
cognitive film theory
matters. The most prominent of them is probably Paul Schrader. In his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Schrader 1972), Schrader suggests that the styles of these three film-makers may, in effect, make manifest the divine. This goes against the idea that particular stylistic effects cannot generally be said to have meaning in and of themselves, and for that reason alone, Schrader’s book is worth examining closely. In doing so, I will focus mainly on Dreyer’s films, not only because they are clearly important to any discussion of whether there are film styles that are particularly religious or spiritual, but also because I think they best illustrate both the strengths and the shortcomings of Schrader’s conception. I shall conclude that while Schrader identifies a number of pertinent stylistic fea- tures, the ‘transcendental film’ is better understood as a variant of the art film; in arguing this, I shall be drawing on the theoretical work of Torben Grodal, which shows that these films combine thematic and stylistic pro- cedures to create an impression of ‘higher meaning’ that invites or at least facilitates a religious interpretation.
Dreyer’s ‘frightful chromolitographs’
Schrader distinguishes sharply between films in the transcendental style and more conventional films that depict a religious subject matter. As Schrader himself points out, religious films were made from the very beginning of cinema, but he dismisses nearly all of them because the con- ventionality of their style renders them incapable of manifesting true spirituality. It would have been interesting to read what he thought of Dreyer’s only completed example of biblical film-making, his second film Blade af Satans Bog/Leaves from Satan’s Book (1919). This film is divided into four parts, taking place in four distinct historical epochs. In each epoch, Satan, ordered by God to tempt humanity to sin, tries to manipulate a vulnerable individual to commit a heinous wrong. The first episode shows how Judas betrayed Jesus, beginning just before the last Passover and ending with the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Schrader, however, does not mention the film at all, probably because he had not seen it.
The biblical section of Leaves from Satan’s Book exemplifies a stylistic feature that has been very persistent in biblical films: the use of famous devotional artworks by the great masters of western art as models for the film’s images. ‘All [Jesus] films draw extensively upon familiar works of western religious art’, writes Adele Reinhartz (2007: 7) in her excellent book, Jesus of Hollywood, which despite its title includes European films. Reinhartz makes only a cursory reference to Leaves from Satan’s Book, but her remarks are certainly true of this film as well. The scene of the Last Supper, in particular, uses the arrangement best known from Leonardo da Vinci: Jesus and his disciples are seated along a long table placed parallel to the picture plane, with Jesus in the middle. There are a number of differences, though; Dreyer was not content to imitate Leonardo’s famous painting, so he looked at other variations as well. A handwritten note (opposite page 14) in his personal copy of the screen- play, conserved at the Danish Film Institute, also refers to the versions of the scene painted by Ghirlandaio (around 1480) and Eduard von Gebhardt (1870).
Dreyer thus presents the familiar iconography, but with some interesting variations. Nevertheless, Dreyer was later strongly critical of his own work. In 1935, the French director Julien Duvivier made the sombre and ambi- tious Golgotha, the first major sound film about Jesus, which focuses on the passion. When it was released in Denmark, the director A.W. Sandberg, who wrote film reviews at the time, was rather critical of it and suggested that Leaves from Satan’s Book was a superior Jesus film. Compared to Duvivier’s Last Supper scene, Dreyer
achieved a much more powerful atmosphere in the same situation in the silent film Leaves from Satan’s Book; there, both the apostle types, the performances, the composition, the set, even the photography accorded better with the spirit of the material.
(Sandberg 1935)
Dreyer immediately wrote a letter to Sandberg (which he subsequently quoted in an interview in 1954) where he dismissed his own efforts, thank- ing Sandberg but insisting that his praise was completely unwarranted:
I must definitely protest against this. I haven’t seen Duvivier’s film, but I know my own, two-thirds of which was just heaps and heaps of histrionics. The Christ episode was the worst: a frightful collection of chromolithographs. I am absolutely opposed to having these tyro errors brought out of well-deserved oblivion.
(Dreyer 1954)
This dismissive attitude towards traditional imagery is by no means exclu- sive to Dreyer. In fact, it is shared by Schrader, by the French critics he has been influenced by, and by André Bazin as well. Bazin gently dismisses Bible films as being ‘simply amplified variations on the Stations of the Cross or on the Musée Grévin’ (Bazin 2002: § 3), that is, devotional church images and waxworks displays.
More recently, Bazin’s translator Bert Cardullo has published an article strongly critical of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which he believes exemplifies the inescapable, patent inauthenticity of the visu- ally spectacular religious film:
The fundamental requirement of an authentic spiritual style, or a religiously significant one, is that it be grounded in naturalistic simplicity, even abstraction – not in widescreen pyrotechnics of the kind to be found in such sand-and-sandals epics as Quo Vadis? (1951), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Ben-Hur(1959).
The spirit, after all, resides within – in internal conviction – not in external trickery or ‘special effects’.
(Cardullo 2005: 622–23)
In Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader took a similar position and his book supports it with theoretical claims about the very nature of film. The argument is based on the difference between two kinds of artistic means, ‘abundant’ means and ‘sparse’ means. These terms come from the writ- ings of the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). In
his small book, Religion et culture (1930), he distinguishes between two kinds of good works: those that sustain physical existence and those that sustain the spirit. Because the first need tangible resources, Maritain calls them ‘abundant temporal means’ (‘moyens temporels riches’); and because the second increase in effectiveness by unburdening themselves of all material furnishings, he calls them ‘sparse temporal means’ (‘moyens temporels pauvres’). While both are necessary, it is evident that the first must ultimately serve the second, more important ones: ‘the abun- dant means keep the body alive so that the sparse means can elevate the soul’ (Schrader 1972: 154).
Schrader goes on to explain that the distinction applies to art as well; here, the abundant means keep spectators engaged, while the sparse, again, elevate their souls:
The abundant means in art […] are sensual, emotional, humanistic, individualistic. They are characterized by soft lines, realistic portraiture, three-dimensionality, experimentation; they encourage empathy. […] The sparse means are cold, for- malistic, hieratic. They are characterized by abstraction, stylized portraiture, two-dimensionality, rigidity; they encourage respect and appreciation.
(Schrader 1972: 155)
Because film is more lifelike than other arts, showing actual people mov- ing in real time, it must, by its very nature, overwhelming privilege the abundant means: ‘[O]f all the arts, I think film is one of the most difficult to be used in a spiritual manner, because it is so kinetic, so visceral’, Schrader has told an interviewer (Asika 2002). Similarly, in his video introduction for the DVD edition of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), he says:
Film is not a very spiritual medium, and if you want to convey transcendence or quietude, film is really not for you. Because film is filmed reality, it’s images, and it’s images moving in real time, so therefore, what it’s good at is empathy, evoking emotions and of course movement, so that psychological realism is the film medium’s strong suit, and action is the high card.
(Schrader 2005)
The conventional religious film relies on emotion, action and identification: ‘For an hour or two, the viewer can become that suffering, saintly person on screen; his personal problems, guilt, and sin are absorbed by humane, noble, and purifying motives’ (Schrader 1972: 164). But the experience this gives the spectator is not an authentically spiritual one; it does not ele- vate the viewer to the level of the sacred, it brings the sacred down to the level of the viewer.
Schrader’s understanding of the sacred mostly derives from the German theologian Rudolf Otto, whose 1917 book Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (English translation 1923: The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non- Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational) has had a great deal of influence in religious studies. Otto describes the holy as ‘das ganz anderes’, the wholly other. It is completely beyond the mundane; it cannot be grasped by human reason, and it cannot be defined,
taught or properly described. It can only be suggested through the emo- tional responses it produces. This inexpressible mystery, this ‘unnamed Something’, is the essence of religion. ‘There is no religion in which it does not live as the innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name’ (Otto 1958: 6).
While this ‘wholly other’, the ‘Transcendent’, cannot be circumscribed by the human mind, it may be experienced – an experience that Schrader refers to as ‘transcendence’, – and it is possible for human acts or artefacts to be ‘transcendental’, to express or reflect at least part of it (Schrader 1972: 5). As Schrader goes on to say, to speak of ‘transcendental art’ – art that ‘expresses the Transcendent in a human mirror’ – implies an equiva- lence between art and religion: ‘Transcendence is the imperious experi- ence; art and religion are its twin manifestations’ (Schrader 1972: 5–6). And Schrader embraces this equivalence on the first page of his book, choosing as its epigram a quote from the Dutch theologian Gerardus van der Leeuw, the founder of the phenomenology of religion: ‘Religion and art are parallel lines which intersect only at infinity, and meet in God’ (Schrader 1972: v).
The idea of a transcendental style
In arguing that certain films were indeed transcendental art and therefore could, in effect, function as a sort of alternative religion, it would seem that Transcendental Style in Film (1972) grew out of Schrader’s own dis- enchantment with organized religion and consequent loss of faith. An interviewer remarked that the book ‘gives the impression of being the work of someone who is still a believer’, to which Schrader replied:
But a believer in spirituality, not a believer in any sectarian notion of God. I was no longer a member of my church or a believer in its doctrines. […] What hit me was that religions of that nature are really social institutions, not spiritual institutions, and that spirituality was just an occasional adjunct of its social and economic functions.
(Jackson 1990: 28)
It is thus not surprising that Schrader should embrace the phenomenological accounts of religion offered by Otto and van der Leeuw, where the institu- tional, social and even moral aspects of religion take a back seat to individual spiritual experience.
Schrader identifies the style of film-making he believes is most likely to offer this kind of spiritual experience ‘transcendental style’. In films of the transcendental style, normally significant elements such as ‘plot, act- ing, characterization, camerawork, music, dialogue, editing’ are all ‘non- expressive’, Schrader writes, continuing: ‘Transcendental style stylizes reality by eliminating (or nearly eliminating) those elements which are primarily expressive of human experience, thereby robbing the conventional interpretations of reality of their relevance and power’ (Schrader 1972: 11, original emphasis).
This stylization proceeds in three progressive steps over the course of a film during which abundant means are increasingly replaced by sparse means. The first step is called ‘the everyday’: films in the transcendental
style will present ‘a meticulous representation of the dull, banal common- places of everyday living’ (Schrader 1972: 39, original emphasis). There is little dramatic build-up, because the events and actions we see do not really lead anywhere; they will occur again in much the same way on another day. Character psychology is submerged in a routine where no particular action seems more important than any other. The spectators’ potential empathy with the characters is held back, and ‘sparseness’ is thus achieved by ‘gradually robbing the abundant means of their potential’ (Schrader 1972: 160).
Already, this seems to fit Bresson’s films better than either Dreyer’s or Ozu’s; it certainly seems odd to me to say that Ozu’s characters ‘seem to be automatons’ (Schrader 1972: 44); this description might seem more appro- priate for the characters in Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964), with their controlled movements and slow, hieratic speaking patterns, but Schrader does not con- sider it to be an example of transcendental style at all. It also seems diffi- cult to argue that character psychology is eliminated in Dreyer’s films, and Schrader acknowledges this; but he argues that the way the long takes in Ordet allow ‘time for a character to walk the full distance of a room and engage in conversation without a cut’ is a characteristic example of a tech- nique belonging to the ‘everyday’: ‘by subrogating the empathetic qualities of natural life and formalizing its factual detail, everyday creates a cold stylization’ (Schrader 1972: 133).
The second step is ‘disparity’. This emerges because the spectator gradually ‘senses there are deep, untapped feelings just below the surface’ (Schrader 1972: 44, original emphasis). The depth and strength of these feelings seem incompatible with the ‘cold, sparse stylization’ of the sur- face of the film (Schrader 1972: 161). This creates a disturbing feeling of unease in the spectator. The figure of Johannes in Ordet is in Schrader’s view an exemplary instance of this: Johannes is a character ‘who has no psychological (interior or exterior) cause for his estranging passion’; and something similar could be said of Jeanne d’Arc (Schrader 1972: 120). Particularly in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, this disparity is reinforced by a stylistic tension between ‘naturalistic settings’ and ‘contrived camera position and angle’ (Schrader 1972: 120). Eventually, the increasing sense of disparity culminates in a ‘decisive action’:
a totally bold call for emotion which dismisses any pretense at everyday reality. The decisive action breaks with everyday stylization; it is an incredible event within the banal reality which must by and large be taken on faith. In its most drastic form, as in Dreyer’s Ordet, this decisive action is an actual miracle, the raising of the dead. In its less drastic forms, it is still somewhat miraculous: a non-objective, emotional event within a factual, emotionless environment. […] The everyday denigrated the viewer’s emotions, showing they were of no use, disparity first titillates those emotions, suggesting that there might be a place for them, and then in the decisive action suddenly and inexplicably demands the viewer’s full emotional output.
(Schrader 1972: 46–47, original emphasis)
Even though Schrader regards the miracle in Ordet as a ‘decisive action par excellence’, I think that it is somewhat misleading to say that it is
either ‘unexpected’ or ‘implausible’ (Schrader 1972: 134). The dia- logue refers repeatedly to miracles, and the presence of the Christ-like figure of Johannes also helps suggest that they might be possible; fur- thermore, very few people have gone in to see Ordet without knowing that it ends with a miracle – even when the film was first released, Danish spectators, at least, would have been aware of the ending: the play, after all, was one of the best-known plays of Kaj Munk, at the time probably the most famous contemporary literary figure in Denmark because of his assassination at the hands of the Gestapo dur- ing the occupation.
Second, while miracles are inherently implausible, the whole construc- tion of the film is designed to overcome this. In a note at the end of the screenplay, Dreyer writes that the spectators must gradually and carefully be placed in an emotional state like that of guests at a funeral.
Once they have been brought to this condition of reverence and introspection, they more easily let themselves be induced to believe in the miracle – for the sole reason that they – being forced to think about death – are also led to think about their own death – and therefore (unconsciously) hope for a miracle and therefore shut off their normally sceptical attitude.
(Dreyer 1964: 294)
Moreover, in Inger, the woman who is raised from the dead, Dreyer creates a character so lively, so caring and full of goodness, so important for the happiness of all the others, that her death seems profoundly unjust and hard to accept, creating a strong emotional desire in the spectators for the miracle to happen, however disinclined they might be to believe that such a thing could happen.
The third step in the progression is ‘stasis’. In Schrader’s view, the unearned, arbitrary character of the decisive act – the way a sudden emo-