Virtually everything we’ve learned in the last hundred years is outdated. We do not know what the duration of a film should be. We do not know where we are going to watch them, or how to look at them. We no longer know how to make a film or how to finance a film. We have reached a state of permanent transition. The projection halls now welcome an increasingly smaller audience. Closer to that of the theater or the concert hall. In The Canyons (2013) by showing these empty rooms, I wanted to inform the viewer that they are watching a movie on their computer because of the closure of these types of establishments.
Paul Schrader
What became of transcendental style? What in the 1950s began as art house cinema has blossomed into the hydra-headed creature we call slow cinema. Bresson and Ozu, seen as esoteric and slow, now are audience friendly compared to the multi-hour epics of Béla Tarr and Lav Diaz and Pedro Costa. A theater experience for art house customers morphed into marginalized audio-video presentations shown only at film festivals and art galleries.
Paul Schrader in Rethinking Transcendental Style, 2018
