Laughing Before We Die: Transcendental Comic Style in Film

Abstract

In 1972, Paul Schrader introduced the filmgoing public to the spiritual and emotional virtues of a cinema of stillness, coldness, and inaction with Transcendental Style in Film. By examining the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Schrader argues that a universal cinematic style exists that is capable of suggesting—not showing —the presence of the otherworldly, the spiritual, and the transcendent via formal reduction, specific structural patterning, and emotional withholding. By using Schrader's text as a springboard, this paper explores transcendental style's relationship with comedy and humor and, more specifically, how filmmakers like Aki Kaurismäki, Jim Jarmusch, and Tsai Ming-liang utilize the transcendental style for comedic—yet spiritual and emotional—purposes. Although Schrader argues that transcendental filmmakers must be religious in some capacity—and, therefore, so should their films— this paper views transcendental style as boundaryless and applicable to various forms of content: emotion becomes spiritual through the use of the transcendental style, and the positive emotions of comedy (i.e., joy) are no less powerful than the tears of compassion in Ozu's films. Indeed, transcendental comedies—although bleak, despairing, and emotionally sparse—are funny because of the reductive deadpan styles they employ, and posit the idea that humor, laughter, and love will not only allow the human spirit to endure through time and space, but free individuals from their deathly surroundings. Humor, in other words, will lead us to the light.