Urgency in Restraint – The Power of First Reformed’s Ascetic Style

Paul Schrader is no stranger to wearing his visual and thematic inspirations on the sleeve of his clergy gown. His book, Transcendental Style in Film, explores the cinematic legacy of Robert Bresson (A Man Escaped, Mouchette), Yasujiru Ozu (Tokyo Story, Late Autumn), and Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr) and attempts to link their theses to a collective dramatic language of spiritual asceticism.

Write about the pillars of TSiF

First Reformed – the inaugural entry in his self-titled ‘lonely man trilogy’ (succeeded by The Card Counter and Master Gardener) – is not only a pulsating, urgent retelling of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Winter Light, but a textbook implementation of the aforementioned pillars of Transcendental style. The camera – restrained by Alexander Dynan to move a mere nine times over the course of the entire film – does so only at the behest of Hawke & Seyfried’s on-screen characters. This technique, utilised alongside Schrader’s inclination towards the ‘long take’, is substantially effective at creating moments of quiet, contemplative exigence – a feeling that is often lost in the decreasing length of scenes in modern mainstream cinema_[x]

In his words:

“A long take need not be of Olympian length to serve its purpose, it just needs to be longer than expected. A dramatic take of someone, say, pouring a cup of coffee would dramatically require ten to fifteen seconds of screen time. If that shot is held for thirty seconds, it has another effect. Held for three minutes, quite another.” – Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, Pg. 11

[write about minimal coverage pillar]

The prevailing example of these wheels in motion is Toller and Michael’s first face-to-face interaction. [Like the rest of the film, it’s visually and formally modest.] The [scene] takes place solely in the confines of Michael’s study, [climate], whilst the camera cuts periodically between four positions over its total twelve-minute* runtime. It feels counter-intuitive to call this scene a [gargantuan of], but that’s exactly what it is – certainly not in its aesthetics, but in the dialogue between the [two]. Their battle is allowed, by Schrader, the room to breathe and emanate with its audience. The pair’s words are punctuated by nothing but the humdrum ambience of Michael’s cave

[] – that, when the scene comes to its crux

Eight seconds of silence, locked on Michael

Michael: “Can god forgive us?”

A further six seconds of silence, camera unchanged

Michael: “…for what we’ve done to this world?”