Despite the fact that Paul Schrader historically wrote about a unique aspect of film, which featured men who kept diaries or self-initiated journals in how Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest”, which was a highly important movie to Paul Schrader’s film philosophy. He has a long-standing interest in Bresson, who appears in the title of a master’s dissertation turned into the book Transcendental Style in Cinema: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer and which nearly shaped him as a screenwriter and film writer and director. As much glove write overs already highlighted Bresson within “Taxi Driver” penned by him and Martin Scorsese, in his and Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver”; in the third solo picture as writer-director, ‘American Gigolo’ among other pictures including the first one he directed as “Mishima”.
For characters in Bresson’s films, the struggle for grace is visible on film, but it is questionable whether they achieve it, as the fixation on finding grace can greatly cost someone. (Bresson’s last film, ‘The Devil, Maybe’ is quite poignant and disturbing evidence of such an obsession.) In the later work, it is apparent to him that love can be expressed through grace which is why the ending of ‘Master Gardener’ last year was optimistic. In a Bersanian image, ‘First Reformed’ and ‘The Card Counter’ which came before ‘Gardener’ features a man sitting at a desk writing in a journal as its first scene. As a joke perhaps, at the end of all this, in the interview with the journalist Esther Zuckerman, he stated that the last of his works was titled ‘The Gardener,’ which finished is so called Man In the Room trilogy. He further explains, “It’s about the transformation of the spirit of these individuals who are secluded in their own rooms and are unable to extend their hand and touch someone.”
However, in “Oh, Canada” as adapted by Schrader from the Russell Banks novel Foregone it appears that the actual title suggests what people preferred, as Leonard Fife makes his entrance in the room and not the desk. Richard Gere brilliantly depicts Leonard as a man stricken with fate, laying on a death bed, and from here on cancer has dominion over him
Fife is a novelist and a director but according to Fife, his ethics have been rough and painful, and his work often exposes certain issues that are sensitive in nature. He is also present at the time when Fife is on the death bed, and Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) is a younger filmmaker who was creating documentaries about Fife during this period.
In one way, Fife answers the question of how he came to be a Canadian filmmaker, by embarking upon a rather robust investigation of his history. Young Fife, portrayed by Jacob Elordi in the flashbacks, is a young idealistic American citizen who is ready to go to college, however, he is also trying to avoid getting detained by the army to “fight.” However, to have a clear and unbothered life after moving here, he would have to deal with all of his material, emotional, and spiritual belongings first and relieve himself from all of them beforehand.
As Jonathan Romney pointed out Live Fife’s contradictory versions of his life as captured on film in Schrader’s renderings, are somewhat like the confused memories in play in “Providence,” which was a 1977 joint effort of a temporal minded director Alain Resnais and British playwright David Mercer. But the Resnais film injected a certain charm which made it into an interesting tragic-comedy (and in fact had even a werewolf in it); whereas in “Oh, Canada” although there are parts which are funny, for the most part it is a sad film.
Even so, it is as much a film about the process of making a film as about the theme of death. Of the filmmakers working today, it is most uncommon for one such as Schrader who grew up in a setting where the Mosaic commandment about making graven images was a serious matter. Ultimately Fife’s reckoning is with death, but also with that which he deemed as the ultimate truth. In a seemingly disinterested but witty discussion, it turns out that Fife has very much modified the camera so as to create the ability to look into the camera the same way one looks into Errol Morris’ “Interrotron.”
This innovation alters the lens such that whoever is being filmed can see the interviewer up on the monitor. Its purpose is to make it appear as though the interviewee is seeing the lens the entire time reducing any sort of intimidation. There were instances during the interview when Schrader appeared to be skeptical as to the functions of an interrogative device. Godard is known to have spoken of cinema in able to state, It is an illusion because the premise of the film, the thought that film expresses truth, at the pace of twenty four frames a second is seen poorly with the passage of time. He acknowledges, toys with and decimates that concept here in a masterly fashion it probably took Schrader two or so attempts to be a bona fide “camera director’, and what he achieves with color and cutting establishes his virtuoso status anyway and yes, a category of deificites marked by difficulty.
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