No one would call Paul Schrader an especially funny filmmaker, but he has made at least one truly hilarious movie: his contribution to Venice 70: Future Reloaded, an omnibus film created for the seventieth anniversary of the Venice Film Festival in 2013. Schrader’s entry is a ninety-second short, codirected with his former assistant Andrew Wonder, in which he strides down the High Line park in New York City while wearing a rickety, ludicrous rig of digital cameras. Three are on spindly arms mounted to a harness around his waist, and another protrudes off his neon green helmet; all four are pointed at his face. The film cuts frenetically from angle to angle as Schrader fumbles with his glasses, gulps water, huffs and puffs past confused pedestrians, and delivers a mini-lecture on the current state of the cinema. Movies are in “a crisis of form,” he declares. “We don’t know quite what movies are—we don’t know how long they are, we don’t know how you see them, where you see them, how you pay for them…. Every week brings another change.”
Schrader had always been an incongruous figure among his New Hollywood peers, the filmmakers who, starting in the late 1960s, made “about fifteen years of interesting films,” as he puts it in the Venice short. A film critic turned screenwriter turned writer-director, he was most famous for his scripts for other people’s movies—Martin Scorsese’s, most of all, including Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), as well as Brian De Palma’s, Sydney Pollack’s, and more. Even as a director his work was defined more by a consistent, contradictory set of thematic fixations than by any particular visual style: a half-horrified fascination with sleaze and glamour and with violent, alienated men; narratives structured around spiritual sickness and the possibility of redemption, often with self-conscious borrowings from other films. His greatest work from this time was probably American Gigolo (1980), a film of glittering, seductive surfaces—it is often credited with popularizing the clothing of Giorgio Armani and making Richard Gere a sex symbol—that gets sadder and sadder as it goes. Its ending was lifted wholesale from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959): the protagonist in prison, suddenly expressing his love for the woman who visits him.
Even well after the end of those fifteen golden years, Schrader managed to get odd, uneasy, fascinating films made. (The early-Nineties pair The Comfort of Strangers and Light Sleeper were especially pleasing, by which I mean quietly harrowing.) But by 2013 his movies did seem like the work of someone struggling—or perhaps flailing—against the shifting currents of his medium. The Canyons (2013), which starred Lindsay Lohan and James Deen, better known as a pornographic actor (and accused a few years later of a variety of sexual abuses), was notorious even before its release for its difficult, low-budget production. The film itself—a bleak erotic thriller set on the fringes of Hollywood, punctuated by photographs of abandoned, decrepit movie theaters—seems almost disgusted by its own existence, as if its dreary writing and stilted acting are meant to exemplify how far movies had fallen.
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