Loner Travis Bickle takes up driving a taxi in search of an escape from sleeplessness and disgust with the corruption around him. His pent-up rage, fueled by his doomed relationship with political campaign worker Betsy, leads to an inevitable descent into psychosis and violence. An award winner at the 1976 Cannes Festival, TAXI DRIVER was an important film during the seventies.

Schrader on Schrader is an essential set of dialogues with one of the most genuinely fascinating and uncompromising writer-directors in American film. Raised as a Calvinist and hence forbidden to partake of 'worldly pleasures' such as movies, Paul Schrader nevertheless defied his upbringing to become first a leading film critic, then a star pupil among the US 'movie brat' generation of the 1970s: writing the coruscating screenplays for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing such provocative pictures as Blue Collar, Hardcore and American Gigolo. Maturity has never sated his appetite for attacking 'difficult' material, from adapting Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation for Scorsese, to filming the singular lives of Mishima and Patty Hearst. Schrader on Schrader is a tour through this formidable body of work, including some of Schrader's finest critical essays.

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors-Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer-and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader's theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Bela Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

Since the 1970s Paul Schrader has been hailed as one of America's most gifted screenwriters. From his work with Martin Scorsese, such as The Last Temptation of Christ and Raging Bull, to the films of his own direction, such as Mishima and Affliction, Schrader has created a dark and affecting body of work that has had a profound effect on cinematic storytelling. The works in this volume represent some of his key moments as a writer, including the script for what is perhaps his crowning achievement, Taxi Driver, one of the most influential films of the last several decades and an American classic.