Irena (Nastassja Kinski) is a beautiful young woman who shares a terrifying secret with her brother (Malcolm McDowell) - when sexually aroused she transforms into a panther. When Irena falls in love for the first time, her secret threatens the relationship. Can she bring herself to tell her new-found love that she is one of the Cat People?

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.

Groundbreaking drama of urban alienation from director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader. Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works as a New York City taxi driver, and is consumed with disgust by the 'filth' which surrounds him. His explosive, psychotic loathing eventually drives him to make an attempt on the life of a politician, and when it fails he turns his attention to saving a prostitute (Jodie Foster) from the clutches of her pimp.

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.