For a director who has tried most of the narrative maneuvers in the modern filmmaker's arsenal (and who has also proposed a few of his own designs that have, over time, established themselves as classical), Paul Schrader has a signature that is as distinctive as can be. More often than not, his stories are woven around lonely protagonists, not infrequently haunted by a lingering ghost of their ambiguous pasts, living in a relative state of stability – and the inevitable moment that their fragile balance breaks down usually coincides with the one in which the protagonists decided to abandon the diaries in which they jot down their darkest and most intimate thoughts, night after night. At the same time, his cinema always contains some form of reference to that of Robert Bresson, an auteur for whom Schrader has cultivated a following since his youth, when he dedicated his fundamental study to transcendental style to him, Ozu and Dreyer. Whether it’s the narrative structure, borrowed from Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and A Man Escaped (1957), or the ending scene of Pickpocket (1959), where love and the promise thereof redeems the soul of an imprisoned protagonist, which the American director has already replicated three times throughout his career, Bresson is inseparable from the fiber of Schrader’s cinema.

Flavia Dima

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Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.

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