There was a solitary chapel scene, ending in one of those strange short dolly shots that Bresson was so fond of, a movement of almost clumsy longing toward the priest at the altar, as though the camera itself were taking communion. Suddenly I had the impression that the film had stopped, or, rather, that time had stopped. All forward motion was arrested, and I was staring into "eternity." Now, I am not the kind of person readily given to mystical experiences, but at that moment I had a sensation of delicious temporal freedom. What I "saw" was not a presence, exactly, but a prolongation, a dilation, as though I might step into the image and walk around it at my leisure.

[...] a Bresson composition draws inward, implodes, abstractly denies truck with daily life, cuts off all exist. In many scenes of Diary, the priest, let into a parishioner's house, encounters almost immediately a painful interview in which his own values are attacked, ridiculed, tempted. There is no room for small talk; every conversation leads directly to the heart of the matter: sin, suicide, perversity, redemption, grace.

At first I used to resist my mind's wandering during such films, thinking I was wasting the price of admission. But just as in Buddhist meditation one is instructed not to brush aside the petty or silly thoughts that rise up, since those "distractions" are precisely the material of the meditation, so I began to allow my movie-watching mind to yield more freely to daily preoccupations, cares, memories that arose from some image association. Sometimes I might be lost to a personal mental thread for several minutes before returning with full attention to the events onscreen; but when I did come back, it was with a refreshed consciousness, a deeper level of feeling. What Diary of a Country Priest taught me was that certain kinds of movies -- those with austere aesthetic means; an unhurried, deliberate pace; tonal consistency; a penchant for long shots as opposed to close-ups; an attention to backgrounds and milieu; a mature acceptance of suffering as fate -- allowed me more room for meditation. And I began to seek out other examples.

In various films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, there will be a scene early on where the main characters are fiddling around in the house and someone comes by, a neighbor or the postman (the traditional Japanese domestic architecture, with its sliding shoji, is particularly good at capturing this interpenetration of inside and outside); a kimono-clad figure moves sluggishly through the darkened interior to answer, some sort of polite conversation follows; and throughout this business, one is not unpleasantly aware of an odd aural hollowness, like the mechanical thud-thud of the camera that used to characterize all films just after sound came in; and it isn't clear what the point of the scene is, except maybe to establish the ground of dailiness; and at such junctures I often start to daydream, to fantasize about a movie without any plot, just these shuttlings and patient, quiet moments that I like so much. Ah, yes, the lure of pure quotidian plotlessness for a writer like myself, who has trouble making up plots. But then I always remember that what gives these scenes their poignant edge is our knowledge that some plot is about to take hold, so that their very lack of tension engenders suspense: when will all this daily flux coalesce into a single dramatic conflict? Without the catastrophe to come, we probably would not experience so refreshingly these narrative backwaters; just as without the established, calm, spiritual ground of dailiness, we would not feel so keenly the ensuing betrayals, suicide pacts and sublimely orchestrated disenchantments.

Schrader once wrote a book called Transcendental Style in Film, which focused on such great filmmakers as Ozu, Dreyer, Rossellini and Bresson. The transcendental style was developed, according to Schrader, "to express the Holy": it is characterized by an austere, formalist rigor; a deep respect for objects and light; and a reflective pace and silence-gathering, indwelling calm, often in the face of narratives about intense suffering. Schrader himself has directed seven feature films, which, while fascinating, generally suffer from an unresolved tension between his transcendental-cinema formal leanings and his penchant for sensationalist content.

Painters love Lynch. His compositions are exquisite, the frame divided into stylized pools of shadow and light. Then there is his signature color sense, that brownish-blue acidic palette that seems to derive most from art photographers like William Eggleston and Cindy Sherman. In Wild at Heart, however, his inclination to create memorable autonomous images sometimes leads him off in a static, uncinematic direction. Like Fellini, Lynch is too uncritically fond of the Absurd, and cannot resist showing off his collection of miscellaneous grotesqueries: his close-up of flies buzzing on vomit, his obese topless dancers, his rich man on the can surrounded by harem girls. There's no discrimination between true perversity and silliness. Of course, Lynch might say that this silliness is intentional, that he wants a polyphony of moods from the transcendent to the inane. The trouble is, the moods get jumbled. Miraculously adaptable as the Angelo Badalamenti score is, too much stress is placed on music to key the change of emotions. The ear adjusts, but not always the heart.

One thing that gave Blue Velvet an eerie edge was its daring slowness, its willingness to space out-like the Dean Stockwell party where the plot drifts away and we simply watch the spook carnival unfold. Wild at Heart has much shorter, choppier scenes, and less vivid places: I wonder if Lynch's television work, with its episodic hopping about, has not had an adverse effect on his cinematic rhythms.

[...] "sublime" may in fact be the operative term, if we use the recent definition provided by French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard: "An inevitable sadness coming from the inconsistency of all things, it is also the exaltation of thought passing beyond the limits of what can be presented."

One needs to take with a grain of salt the contemporary critical tendency to validate a work of art by calling it "dark," "darker" or "darkest." Understandably, defenders of Naruse want to stake out a separate territory for him, but perhaps we do him a disservice by exaggerating his pessimism. In any case, is "pessimism" even the correct word, if all that we mean is a rejection of that sugarcoating of conventional cheerfulness? Freud once said that he was trying to bring his patients from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. Naruse's characters certainly know about ordinary unhappiness, but to the degree that they regularly fight clear of hysterical misery and hold on to a dazed integrity, finding momentary compensations, satisfactions and trade-offs along the way, I find his movies rather comforting-not to mention satisfying, in the way of all such poised, well-executed art.

[...] it is Dreyer who eloquently lamented the absence of a consistent visual approach in Danish film, and who wrote: "What one feels regarding the photography of this film is first and foremost the absence of an artistic will that sets up a goal for itself and consciously works toward it."

And the films themselves were sexy. I don't mean to say that the actors took their clothes off, they didn't, but what was sexy was the extremely fluid way the movies were put to-gether. The sound track of soul songs had something to do with it, but even more so the long hand-held tracking shots that followed in "real time" someone walking down corridor after corridor, or the merry-go-round shot that metaphorically described an attitude toward the cosmos as much as did Godard's swirling coffee cup. The shots took us over like a wet dream. It was as if Hitchcock's 360-degree turn around the lovers, Stewart and Novak, in Vertigo, that saturation of love and impossible yearning and doubt and fulfillment, had started to infiltrate all of Sobert's images. It was a lover's cinema. The filmmaker was in love with the world, or was amused and saddened by it, so obviously that he had only to point his camera anywhere, it seemed, and it would fill up with feeling.