How do current films convey an image of the sacred? What can the sacred mean in these contexts? And finally, what is "transcendental style", as the film critic and filmmaker Paul Schrader called it in 1972? These questions will be addressed in the following article.
1.
Film - officially shown in public for the first time in 1895 - is considered a paradigmatic medium of modernism. It soon emancipated itself from the status of a fairground attraction in the context of the cinema art debate of the 1910s to become an artistic form of expression with its own means, which was also regarded as the "seventh art" in the French-speaking world. From the very beginning, film was dedicated not only to the reproduction of everyday life but also to the marvellous, the completely different, the sublime - ultimately the sacred.
In this context, I would like to refer to the distinction between the profane and the sacred proposed by the religious scholar Mircea Eliade in his book of the same name, The Sacred and the Profane (1984). He distinguishes in human perception of the world between the everyday, rational world and the sphere of the other, the extra-ordinary, which can be grasped more spiritually. In Latin, "sacer" stands for the sacred (the "sacred") and is associated with the "sacrificium", the ritual sacrifice in which a being or object is "made sacred" in a ritual act ("sacri-ficium"). This act of sacrifice can be symbolic or real (by killing the victim), which acquires a sacred status in this ritual act. This direct connection between the sacred and the sacrificial ritual is of particular importance in the context of film, as cinematic narratives very often refer to acts of sacrifice, whether as self-sacrifice for the community or as the killing of a "scapegoat" to reconstitute the community. The filmic form takes on ritualistic traits: Familiar, repeated patterns of action bring these acts close to the audience. This connection between ritual and film is also evident in the repeatability of the cinematic performance: a film can be seen again and again with profit in different dispositifs. The cyclical character of the narrative accommodates this repeated viewing and reflects it at the same time.
2.
The least comprehensible area for enlightened modernity is transcendence. What belongs to the sphere of the divine and the sacred can no longer be grasped with human concepts. What does not seem to be of this world also eludes the world's control mechanisms and is already sovereign in itself. And this is precisely why transcendence, the approach to the sacred, has become a particular fascination for film, because what eludes words could still 'clear up' in images and sounds, to use Martin Heidegger's words.
Transcendental is derived from the Latin "transcendere", which means "to transcend", and is used in epistemological contexts with reference to experience. It thus denotes structures, concepts or insights that cannot be acquired through empiricism, but whose existence must be presupposed in order for experience to have a truth content.
In his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film, the film critic, screenwriter and director Paul Schrader sketched out an idea of the audiovisual encounter with the transcendental, the 'sacrisphere'. Using the oeuvre of three international directors - Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, all explicit representatives of a cinematic modernism - he examines their staged attempts to express the sacred on film. He describes the stylistic similarities that emerge as transcendental style, subjecting all the terms used to a detailed definition:
"The Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience, and that which it transcends is, by definition, the immanent. [...] It can mean directly or indirectly: (1) the Transcendent, the Holy or Ideal itself [...], (2) the transcendental, human acts or artifacts which express something of the Transcendent [...], (3) transcendence, the human religious experience which may be motivated by either a deep psychological need or neurosis (Freud), or by an external, "Other" force (Jung). [...] Transcendence in art is often equated with transcendence in religion because they both draw from common ground of transcendental experience."
He thus emphasises early on in the book that he is not concerned with a specific concept of the sacred in the sense of a concrete religion, but with an intercultural universal, the fundamentally "other". He does not deny the associative or sometimes concrete connection between religion and transcendence, but is aiming for a specific cinematic form, a style:
"Like transcendence,' the term 'style' is susceptible to semantic confusion. It can have various meanings: it can mean, as Wylie Sypher states, 'a contemporary view of the world' expressed by a particular geographical-historical culture, or it can mean the individual expression Raymond Durgnat describes as the 'creation of a personal, a subjective, a 'non-objective' world,' or it can mean what Heinrich Wölfflin called a 'general representative form. The style described in this essay is a style in the way that Wölfflin used that term, a style like the primitive or classic styles, the expression of similar ideas in similar forms by divergent cultures."
In this section, Schrader already emphasises this transcultural aspect: even if the concrete world view differs, the similarities are to be found in the cinematic form with which the "sacred" finds expression:
"[...] transcendental style [...]: a general representative filmic form which expresses the Transcendent. [...] The study of transcendental style reveals a 'universal form of representation. That form is remarkably unified: the common expression of the Transcendent in motion pictures."
Schrader's thesis thus assumes a cross-cultural commonality that comes to light in the (cinematic) staging of the sacred. In terms of methodology, Schrader's analysis is therefore based on two assumptions: "[...] that there are such things as hierophanies, expressions of the transcendent in society" and "that there are common representative artistic forms shared by divergent cultures."
The specific works that the author analyses tend to strive for a distance that is intended to prepare the viewer for the encounter with the sacred through calm, arrangement and minimalist acting style. The films by Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer stand in stark contrast to Hollywood's expressive approach of staging a Christian-religious propaganda cinema in their quiet, concentrated image arrangements, for example in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Schrader polarises these two approaches into "sparse" and "abundant", into "stasis films" and "religious films". Seen in the extreme: The exuberant religious film thus easily veers close to kitsch, while the extremely minimalist film can easily slip into apathy.
Schrader locates the transcendental style, as it also appears in Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, between these poles: "In a film of spiritual intent it is necessary [...] to have an everyday and a disparity; there can be no instant stasis. The everyday both adheres to the superficial, 'realistic' properties of cinema and simultaneouslyaously undermines them." Since the sacred - just like 'evil' - obviously eludes concrete representation, it can only appear as a difference between a comprehensible everyday situation and the slight difference in which the hierophany reveals itself. In this context, Bresson's and Ozu's extremely reduced stagings make sense. And this idea of reduction can be found in recent theatrical productions, and is sometimes already present in the drama texts, as can be seen in Botho Strauß' reinterpretation of the last canto of the Odyssey (in his theatre play Ithaka, 1996).
The transcendental therefore does not manifest itself in the over-fulfilment of expectations. This only produces unintentional comedy. In this respect, compare Martin Scorsese's almost existentialist interpretation of the Jesus story in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) with the naïve The Ten Commandments or Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2000), which at times quite deliberately reproduces religious kitsch images with auras of light and heavenly choirs, and above all thrilled Catholic audiences worldwide (even if it undoubtedly plays out transgressive moments in this context).
The transcendental style of modern media art, as Schrader sees it, lies in reduction, concentration and abstraction, even if different media and art forms demand different creative approaches. It is worthwhile discovering the transcendental style in arts other than film, because the representation of the transcendental remains one of the great challenges of enlightened modernism.
3.
Paul Schrader has repeatedly tried to find cinematic approaches to a story of redemption: Be it in American Gigolo (1980), where he reduces the spaces to their flatness, mutes the colours and consistently stretches time, especially in the last sequence, or in Light Sleeper (1988), which tells of the self-induced atonement of a drug dealer (Willem Dafoe) and increasingly recreates the symmetrical image arrangement of Russian icons of saints at the end. In the moment of hierophany, the world seems to freeze, the characters, who in Schrader's work, as in Bresson's, often appear astonishingly artificial and distant, seem completely isolated in their world.
In Cat People (1981), the young protagonist (Nastassia Kinski) has a mythical revelation on an aeroplane - a subtle cross-fade of her face transports her back to the airport in New Orleans. In a long shot, she passes in front of a huge glass wall, leaving the crowd of extras behind her. A wind comes up. Against the light, she moves slowly towards the camera, which is positioned below her, her gaze absent. A cut to the subjective shows a railing-lined, bluish-lit walkway, a bridge or passage leading to a glowing orange gate. The boundaries between profane everyday life and mythical revelation become blurred, even if this sequence is still recognisable as a dream depiction. In his later works, Schrader would no longer use such tricks. But the gesture of transcendental minimalism is also present here.
The transcendental style discusses, as Schrader explains, "a common film style used by different filmmakers in different cultures to express the transcendent". It is a constant "pursuit of the ineffable and invisible", although the art itself never achieves such a status. Schrader's mystery is determined in its staging endeavours to penetrate this unknown, never expecting to solve the unsolvable. Trancendental style in film, then, is a book that sorts through the successes and personal traits of exemplary films that acutely capture the yearning for transcendental feelings. Their differences are less important than their similarities, however, and Schrader soon encounters a universal, overwhelming ability of these films to rise above their own (deliberate) trappings of a cold, unfeeling world simply by introducing an irrational and undefined passion into a heartless existence. The ultimate catharsis of the work comes not from the plot but, as Schrader calls it, from the "stasis" that is a reconfiguration of the film's harsh, normalised style, influenced only by what has happened.
4.
Paul Schrader's book was groundbreaking in its methodical treatment of cinematic experience that becomes cinematic expression. Inspired by the classical era of cinema, in which modernity was already heralding itself, Schrader also combined classical film theory (such as André Bazin) with new ideas, which he subsequently used as the basis for his own productions. His book is thus also a programme of New Hollywood Cinema between 1967 and 1980, which overcame the classical phase and reopened film with modern approaches. After initially writing screenplays for now canonical films of the era (including Taxi Driver, 1976, by Martin Scorsese), Schrader repeatedly made films that anchored the transcendental style in his own work. He rarely went as far as in his last three films, which are known as the "lonely men trilogy" and include First Reformed (2019), The Card Counter (2021) and The Master Gardener (2022). All three films focus on highly ambivalent men who are damaged or traumatised in different ways: a terminally ill priest in a crisis of faith, a torture specialist from the Iraq war who becomes a virtuoso system card player, and a former right-wing extremist who starts a new life as a landscape gardener. In all three films, there are moments of stasis in which everyday life is subtly transformed into moments of pause and wonder.
In this trilogy, Schrader works with creeping camera movements, unusual lighting moods and unexpected events, which place irritations in the conventional representation of a coherent world according to 'realistic' standards. Music also plays an important role here. In First Reformed, for example, the soundtrack comes from the black ambient project Lustmord by Australian Brian Williams. Black ambient - also known as dark ambient - works with rumbling bass drones that spread out in layers like an unsettling carpet of noise. These cascading drone sounds transform even seemingly unspectacular everyday situations into oppressive nightmare landscapes. In this way, at the beginning of the film, the slow approach to a church from the Wilhelminian era looks like the beginning of a horror film.
However, the 'cosmic horror' signalled by the music is not linked to the religious context, but to the excessive destruction of the environment, which only later becomes a central theme of the film. This is where Schrader takes his production in the direction of "beyond normal sense experience", as he puts it in his book.
5.
Having looked at how Paul Schrader realised his own approach on film, it is worth taking a look at the work of another filmmaker who undoubtedly seems driven by similar ambitions: Terence Malick. From his first directorial work in 1971, Badlands, Malick used the generic forms of the gangster film, the melodrama (In the Heat of the South, 1978), the war film (The Thin Red Line) or the adventure film (The New World, 2003) to build a much more far-reaching model on the basis of formal and narrative conventions, which enabled him to philosophise about man himself using the means of film. Malick also comes from the New Hollywood tradition of the late 1960s. With only two directorial works, Malick long remained a legend of this era - a legend, incidentally, who carefully kept out of the public eye and gave no interviews about his own work. Moreover, a legend whose philosophical inclination did not need to be conjured up; after all, in the 1960s he produced a translation of Martin Heidegger's text "Vom Wesen des Grundes", which is still widely used today. The question of man's being, especially his meaning of being in the world, could be a possible key to categorising and understanding Malick's work.
A unifying element of all Malick's films is the overwhelming power and beauty of nature, which he celebrates in elegiac visual compositions. In his films, too, we gaze for a long time at waving grasses, foliage or shimmering underwater landscapes, accompanied by sacred chorales, ritual chants or heavy strings. He celebrates this beauty in the temple of the woods, as if it were a matter of preserving a fading, sacred world that has long since been lost to modernity. His pictures breathe the soulfulness of living creatures and plant life, placing them on an equal footing with the equally close and intimate faces of people, who often gaze upwards in mute amazement. For Malick, the sacred and the divine lie in the animated world of nature; in Heidegger's words, a "clearing of the sacred" occurs here. Malick conjures up this sacred light quite visually by letting us look through the eyes of his protagonists into the sun glaring through the foliage.
In the sense of this soulfulness (similar to animism), nature is therefore far more than a filmic space of action; it is rather the place where humans and animals meet, where beauty and death have always been connected. As early as the 18th century, there was a philosophical-religious current represented by J. W. von Goethe, among others, which called itself pantheism and found God in all of creation: 'pan' is the comprehensive, holistic, and 'theism' the divine. In pantheism, the relationship between God and the world is negotiated - in an associative, not always clearly definable way. Pantheism thus stands in contrast to dogmatic theism, which understands God as a sacred entity that does not have to be part of the world at the same time.
Consequently, pantheism is not a religious position, but rather a philosophical worldview that has similarities with the animism of Buddhism as well as with Christian mysticism and pagan spirituality. One possible definition of pantheism sees the world as a totality consisting of nature, people, the cosmos and God. The next step would be to derive from this the view that there is a power inherent in the entire cosmos that connects everything and provides inspiration for ethical or religious values. One could conclude from this that man is an equal part of this biosphere, i.e. that he should neither "subjugate the earth" nor is he himself subordinate to God. In any case, in pantheism there is no longer a personified God, but rather a cosmic, divine principle that permeates man and nature. This view is understandably rejected as 'atheistic' by supporters of fundamentalist monotheism.
Since man, nature and the cosmos are all subject to the divine principle, a separation between science and religion is also cancelled: everything is animated, everything is one. Although the term 'pantheism' was introduced by the philosopher John Toland in 1705, this view goes back to antiquity. The Stoics already regarded the universe as a unity and concluded that this unity should be accepted with equanimity. Instead of striving for rational knowledge, feeling and imagination were also recognised as important sources of knowledge. At this point, one could already go so far as to say that a work of art can also be capable of conveying knowledge in the same way as a philosophical essay.
In the 18th century, pantheism led to a dispute between the various sciences, which felt challenged by this perspective. This circumstance is reminiscent of the harsh discussions surrounding the films of Terence Malick, whose 'family melodrama' Tree of Life (2011) was sometimes attacked as 'spiritualist kitsch' because it staged the interpenetration of time, space, man and nature more radically than before. Malick's world view clearly distances itself from a rational or pragmatic perspective, and the Gene Republic in particular feels 'deceived' in these philosophical digressions.
For Malick, emotional intuition is a more important principle than rational comprehensibility: his films take place in a continuous flow that consciously rejects the conventional act structure of Hollywood dramaturgy. Like other radical innovators of film art with or after him (such as Andrei Takovsky, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Bruno Dumont or Nicholas Winding Refn), Malick's films prove to be associative journeys that are held together less by a curve of suspense than by a spiritual pulse. You have to experience his films more than 'understand' them directly.
Terence Malick's cinema may stand for such a transcendental style, just like the films of Robert Bresson or Ingmar Bergman before him: in his seemingly everyday stories of farewell, death, war and love, there is always a moment of 'translucency'. The sacred is revealed in the everyday, the sacred in the profane. Eliade relies on the theory that this model is a transcultural constant, that the clearing of the sacred in the profane can also be found in non-Christian, non-monotheistic cultures. Which leads back to animism, such as Buddhism and Shintoism in Asia. This idea of a holistic world view can also be found in contemporary currents of New Age thinking and esotericism.
6.
The above theses can be exemplified by the war film The Thin Red Line (1996). Historically, The Thin Red Line is based on the American victory in the Battle of Guadalcanal on 9 February 1943, when US troops triumphed over the Japanese stationed on the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. In Malick's film, Guadalcanal is mentioned in passing, often simply as the rock. The film never deals with the background to the military actions, we only experience the action itself and the results. In contrast to other war films, Malick is rarely interested in conventional suspense dramaturgy and narratively established conflicts. At most, Captain Staros' (Elias Koteas) refusal to give orders to Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) is reminiscent of such standard situations. Again and again, he conjures up scenes of sneaking up on the enemy, marching in enemy territory, fighting, but the staging usually clearly characterises what it is actually about: the view to the side, the bobbing leaves and chattering birds in the trees, which are shown on an equal footing with the soldiers. Everything is one, even in war. In the middle of the battle, we see a bird chick that has fallen out of its nest and is fighting for survival; in the middle of the battle, a soldier is attacked by a poisonous snake in the tall grass. Nature seems to be at war with itself. And at the same time, all of this is just an expression of existence itself.
For this reason, it would also be absurd to call the film an "anti-war film", as such an ideological perspective would presumably be very alien to Malick. Birth and death, war and peace, love and hate are just expressions of the same cosmic structure. From this perspective, it would even be pointless and banal to make a film 'against war'. Private Witt (James Caviezel) asks quite clearly: "How does evil come into the world? Why is nature in conflict with itself?" However, this is never questioned: 'evil' exists in this world - just like the beauty of the coral reefs that Witt has previously explored. Witt questions the military, as becomes clear in the interrogation by his cynical superior Welsh (Sean Penn), but he never questions the war. Consequently, at no point does it become clear what the fight is about - it is not about "possession", as Welsh puts it. Captain Staros' exhibited humanism cannot be seen as a satisfactory solution here either, as his selective refusal in the midst of the inferno remains strangely rhetorical.
Malick's film does not explore the film space with the interest of giving the viewer a better orientation. Instead, he strings together impressions of the jungle environment as if he wanted to explore this strange world with his camera. The faces of the soldiers become projection screens for his own perception, while a camera that is only supposedly subjectively guided moves through nature in a self-determined manner. In this way, seemingly incidental objects and events repeatedly come into focus. This also applies to the battle scenes: Here, the enemy position is sometimes not shown - the volleys of gunfire seem to be aimed directly at the forest, as if man is at war with nature itself. The soldiers shoot at the trees and catch a crocodile, which they expose with its mouth tied shut. In contrast, the beauty of the landscape is shown again and again. Nature is destroyed by the war just as much as it remains seemingly untouched in the end. This indifference is also reflected in the soldiers' encounter with an islander, who wanders past the fully armed men almost indifferently. In later scenes, the soldiers disguise themselves, becoming visually part of nature. In Malick's eyes, they are anyway. There is no hierarchy in his cinematic gaze, because: everything is one.
7.
In Malick's film, the sacred first appears in the images of nature, but it can also be found in his visual compositions. When Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) goes exploring alone in the first third of the film, he sees a hill in the distance with three charred tree trunks, which in this perspective is reminiscent of a depiction of the place of the skull in Jerusalem on which the three crosses were erected. This Golgotha motif establishes an explicitly religious level that pervades the film alongside the pantheism level. Figures, motifs and thoughts recur ritually, accompanied by the sermon-like off-screen commentaries. And again and again we see the view towards the sky, into the pure light, the holy light.
Seemingly everyday gestures in The Thin Red Line have something ritualistic and sacred about them, such as when a wounded man is 'baptised' with water. In general, the eternally flowing water is a motif of transcendence, of constant interpenetration and cyclical life processes. In one of the film's most poetic shots, we see the deserted Witt diving into the bright blue with childlike islanders. It will be the last (memory) image before he is shot by the Japanese. Following a strange logic, this actor Jim Caviezel will later play Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. "Perhaps all men have a great soul," muses Witt in the military hospital. Elsewhere, Witt speaks of a "spark" that can be understood as synonymous with the world soul. In his final sacrificial death, he literally becomes a martyr figure: Witt, who walked on the border throughout the film - between water and land, between earth and sky. When he is surrounded by Japanese, he looks up to the sky and does not react to the calls to drop his rifle. Instead, he raises his rifle and is shot. The expression on his face, which seems enraptured at this moment, seems to merge with the wholeness of the world in the face of imminent death. In his self-sacrifice, he becomes part of the sacred and transcends the pure presence of war.
The inner voice of the film is distributed among several people, and yet proves to be the voice of the filmmaker. Bell also formulates this idea of transcendental fusion, of achieving unity in the love of two people, when he says of his wife over the images of a flashback. "We! The two of us! One being..."
The philosophical war film The Thin Red Line shows how a film can transcend its own genre discourse in order to go one step further. While the soundtrack reflects on the nature of evil, we see images of a nature that exists independently of the human spirit. This nature dissolves hierarchies and desires and simply exists 'for itself' - as an existential 'nothing'.
Rüdiger Safranski once pointed out that Kurtz could have made precisely this discovery in the jungle in Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness (and in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, 1979), which in the end forces the words "the horror!" out of him: The realisation of the absolute meaninglessness of existence. In The Thin Red Line, this appears more conciliatory: in the numerous close-ups of human faces, which the film combines with the view of nature, a dissolution of the relationship between man and the world becomes apparent. Malick's film strives for a 'neutral view' that allows the phenomenon of war to appear in a completely new light. Malick conjures up an "allness" of the world and enables the viewer to experience this in the context of (of all things) a war film.
8.
Epilogue: The preceding examples may prove how Paul Schrader himself and Terence Malick realise the tendency of a transcendental style in their feature films and thus evoke not only philosophical questions, but also epiphanies of the sacred on the screen and in the imagination of the audience. In the new edition of the book from 2016, Schrader emphatically emphasises that neither spiritual nor religious themes are necessary for a transcendental style in film, because it is ultimately about a cinematic form. However, he also admits at this point that both usually occur at the same time. In his negotiation of elementary and seemingly incidental moments, which are given great importance in the production, the audience comes closer to the transcendental. Only a few films succeed in mastering the delicate balance between pragmatism or narration and pure cinematic form in time. Making the time on which the medium of film is based perceptible becomes essential here. Gilles Deleuze called these films "time-image" (Deleuze 1990). Schrader himself refers to the term "slow cinema", which has become popular in recent years and is strongly derived from Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema. This cinema is currently represented by Bruno Dumont, Carlos Reygadas and Apichatpong Weraseetakhul: Films that hardly pursue a dominant narrative, but meander almost hypnotically slowly between the stations of the plot. Terence Malick's long, associative detours are also to be found here, especially as his cinema has repeatedly adapted elements of slow cinema in recent years and the running time of his films has become longer and longer.
In the new edition of his book, Schrader shows us in a three-part diagram how he locates the transcendental style within auteur and avant-garde film today. He also refers to the "faux use" (Schrader 2016, 22) of transcendental style in films by Lars von Trier, for example. However, this "faux transcendental style" seems to me to be more concise as a pure pathos formula of exaltation into the sacred in commercial Hollywood cinema. Zack Snyder evokes such transcendental arrangements in his Justice League trilogy as part of the DC Universe, in which he pits Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman against extraterrestrial evil.
