Paul Schrader – författare

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader’s theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

A loner, Travis Bickle takes up driving a taxi in search of an escape from his sleeplessness and his disgust with the corruption he finds around him. His pent-up rage, fuelled by his doomed relationship with the political campaign worker Betsy, leads to an inevitable descent into psychosis and violence.One of the key films of the seventies, it won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Festival.This volume also contains an extended interview between Schrader and Martin Scorsese in which they discuss their unique relationship - one which stretches from Taxi Driver through Raging Bull to The Last Temptation of Christ.

Paul Schrader is US cinema's hardcore intellectual. Three of his finest screenplays, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Light Sleeper, form a kind of triptych devoted to a single, soulful character. As Schrader commented upon the release of the third film, 'I wrote about this character when he was in his twenties, and he was young and paranoid and angry and he saw the city as his enemy. And in his thirties he was very narcissistic and self-involved, and he was a gigolo. Now he's forty and he's anxious. He's looking at the back-stretch of his life, wondering, 'What's the second half going to look like? Is there a plan?''Taxi Driver (1976)Travis Bickle is a Vietnam veteran who tours the harsh, sordid streets of New York in his yellow cab. Desperate for companionship, painfully unable to communicate, his thoughts gradually turn psychotic and he contemplates an act of violence that will release him from the prison of his loneliness.American Gigolo (1980)High-priced hustler Julian Kay prowls the upper-class haunts of Los Angeles, coolly assured of his infallible charm and sexual prowess, until one of his wealthy tricks turns up dead and he finds himself enmeshed in a murder-frame.Light Sleeper (1992)John Le Tour is a drug delivery-boy, moving like a ghost through the salons of glamorous mid-town Manhattan, wondering all the while if love and luck are slipping away from him, and whether his lovely boss Ann may be poised to throw him to the wolves.