First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017).
Against the muted winter lawn, a minister attempts to hoist a fallen gravestone into the vertical position. This stark shot, half an hour into Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), is composed within a squarish 1.33 aspect ratio, framed to contain the entirety of the minister’s labored efforts to erect the somber slab. Figure, object, and ground flatten into mere shapes; the idea of vertical motion itself becomes the focus of the shot.
Musing on film aspect ratios during a conference of the Technicians Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein—like Schrader, a philosopher-filmmaker-provocateur—described a similar vertical action: “We started as worms creeping on our stomachs. Then we ran horizontally for hundreds of years on our four legs. But we only became something like mankind from the moment we hoisted ourselves onto our hind legs and assumed the vertical position.” Eisenstein’s lecture, titled “The Dynamic Square,” was presented as the advent of sound standardized a new “Academy” ratio (1.37). Eisenstein jeered that wider-screen formats signified “laziness”—lying, in form and in spirit.
Lazy Schrader is not. Through a stupefyingly prolific career, Schrader has probed the “something” that is “mankind.” He poses—always at the scale of the individual—the big questions: life and death, belief, spirituality, art. His protagonists, and his films, seek answers. Schrader himself seeks to explain how certain films embody these philosophical questions in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Published in 1972 and revised nearly 50 years on, during the production of First Reformed, Schrader’s book rigorously mines techniques of filmmakers from Bresson and Tarkovsky to contemporary exemplars of slow cinema in an effort to define transcendental style.
More professor than mystic, Schrader is a great figure of speech. In an early scene of First Reformed, Schrader employs a Bressonian device, doubling written and spoken word through the protagonist’s diary. Reverend Ernst Toller narrates the act of writing as it is performed, imitating Schrader’s expository impulse: “Every inflection of penmanship, every word chosen, scratched out, revised, is recorded.”
First Reformed is packed and compact: compositionally, within the dynamic square, and narratively, with plotlines and information. Schrader’s protagonists have an ejaculatory urge: to express, to emote, to go nuclear, to melt down, creating fallout for the people and environment around them. In First Reformed, this imperative to express and affect is encountered in Reverend Ernst Toller’s tortured visage and the ever-present Schraderian weapon: here, an explosive suicide vest.
First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017).
Contemporary viewers consume moving images in an array of orientations and dimensions, on personal and theatrical screens, and have become accustomed to ever-shifting aspect ratios (sometimes within the same film). As audiences accept expanses of negative black space on the screen in the form of letterboxing or pillarboxing, the allegiance to flat (1.85:1) and scope (2.39:1), the cinematic standards of the last 70 years, is waning. The present attitudes toward presentation resemble Eisenstein’s proposition in “The Dynamic Square,” that an “assemblage of varied screen shapes” can be a “gigantic new agent of impression.” In this cinematographic free-for-all, Schrader experimented with a new (old) format.
Historically, 1.33 is a silent-film format, the image printed perf-to-perf on a celluloid frame without need for an optical soundtrack running alongside. When Toller moves to resurrect the prone gravestone, the composition is concise and astonishing in its flatness. The shot approaches an aspect of transcendental style: the Bressonian aphorism to “flatten my images without attenuating them.” Mid-distance, from the askew angle of an almost reachable God, (or a drone, or a tree), the shot dilutes Toller’s facial and bodily expressiveness. The clergy robe reduces his figure to matte black geometry; the morbid stone slab is weathered and illegible. Toller is allowed to be blank.
While the camera peers down upon this struggle to erect the weighty historical form, the viewer in a cinema watches with eyes raised in devotion toward the screen. It’s a holy moment, a slip of poetry. Despite Toller’s voice-over musings on God and man, the shot could be silent. Like Schrader’s admission, in the introduction to the new edition of his book, that “the heart of transcendental style remains a mystery,” it’s a moment where words are beside the point.