Oh, Canada
A dying man wants to confess, that is, tell the truth, but confession has its technical conditions, which derive from the epoch through which one lives, in this case an epoch of great change, as the century of cinema gives way to the age of computation. The movie camera, as an instrument of the immortalisation of the “this was” (here it is Susan Sontag rather than Roland Barthes who is named), through which the fabric of reality and fiction is woven as a psychosocial dream, proves to be losing its veritative capacity. Sounds pretty interesting, but this film seems to keep promising something, some kind of revelation, that it never delivers, making for a frustrating and ultimately disappointing experience.
Still, it’s worth thinking about Schrader: obviously he is a man who made his mark writing for Scorsese; his own directorial efforts, some good, were equally obviously overshadowed by the career of the director who would become the most revered and admired of all living American directors. But despite all of that, if we consider the decade leading up to this film (say 2015–2024), it seems that Schrader is the one of these two who has fought hardest against stagnation, and that, however variable his output, he continues to try things, in a way that few younger filmmakers today really attempt to do.
This film comes some three and a half decades after Jean-Luc Godard said that we have, in the dark, spent half a century burning imagination in order to heat reality, and twenty years after Bernard Stiegler said that the “last filmmakers”, those who come at the end of the cinematic century, are struggling against the loss of images in the age of the ubiquitous image, which is to say, the loss of the possibility of being affected by them, as our horizons of expectation find themselves televisually and computationally annihilated. As an artform, cinema, like civilisation, like the protagonist here, and to paraphrase Paul Valéry, now knows that it is mortal, and Paul Schrader, as much as anyone, and in his unsure, sometimes fumbling, half-aware way, bears witness to its dying.
Still, it’s worth thinking about Schrader: obviously he is a man who made his mark writing for Scorsese; his own directorial efforts, some good, were equally obviously overshadowed by the career of the director who would become the most revered and admired of all living American directors. But despite all of that, if we consider the decade leading up to this film (say 2015–2024), it seems that Schrader is the one of these two who has fought hardest against stagnation, and that, however variable his output, he continues to try things, in a way that few younger filmmakers today really attempt to do.
This film comes some three and a half decades after Jean-Luc Godard said that we have, in the dark, spent half a century burning imagination in order to heat reality, and twenty years after Bernard Stiegler said that the “last filmmakers”, those who come at the end of the cinematic century, are struggling against the loss of images in the age of the ubiquitous image, which is to say, the loss of the possibility of being affected by them, as our horizons of expectation find themselves televisually and computationally annihilated. As an artform, cinema, like civilisation, like the protagonist here, and to paraphrase Paul Valéry, now knows that it is mortal, and Paul Schrader, as much as anyone, and in his unsure, sometimes fumbling, half-aware way, bears witness to its dying.
Mini Review: A dying man wants to confess, that is, tell the truth, but confession has its technical conditions, which derive from the epoch through which one lives, in this case an epoch of great change, as the century of cinema gives way to the age of computation. The movie camera, as an instrument of the immortalisation of the “this was”, proves to be losing its veritative capacity. Sounds pretty interesting, but this film seems to keep promising something, some kind of revelation, that it never delivers.