Paul Joseph Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Despite his often-demonstrated "confessional" style of writing, Schrader's childhood remains largely a mystery. What emerges from his sketchy comments on the subject is a loving but strict...

WHEN HIS agent showed him a screenplay about the late actor Bob Crane, director Paul Schrader was not inclined to read what he assumed was a conventional biopic script. But as he read it, "I saw this very interesting movie down there. A film...

In Paul Schrader's screenplays for "Taxi Driver," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Raging Bull," "Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters," "Hardcore," "Patty Hearst" violence is the physical manifestation of unbearable psychic trauma or spiritual burden the characters struggle with nobly but rarely overcome. ...

Berlin's annual film festival opened Thursday with a tribute to the turbulent story of diva Edith Piaf _ part of a strong French contingent at this year's event.Olivier Dahan's "La Vie en Rose" was the first of 22 movies competing for the top Golden Bear...

Director Wang Quan'an's "Tuya's Marriage," which follows the troubles of a young farming woman in fast-changing China, won the top Golden Bear award at the annual Berlin film festival on Saturday.The movie stars Yu Nan as Tuya, a herdswoman in Inner Mongolia trying to resist...

Blue Collar has to be one of the most dogged pictures ever produced. Making his début as a director, Paul Schrader, the phenomenally successful young screenwriter, has approached directing as a painful, necessary ritual—the ultimate overdue term paper. He goes at it methodically, and gets through it with honors but without flair, humor, believability. Blue Collar is an exercise, an idea film in which each scene makes its point and is over. (p. 406) Blue Collar says that the system grinds all w...

[The films of Paul Schrader] are difficult to get hold of. They are not only about contradictions, they deal in them. As often as not they employ shock effects that appear to pander to what the moralists among us would call our baser instincts…. Once upon a time when we went to the movies, there was never any doubt about what we were supposed to think. We knew who were the good guys and who were the bad. Some of this had to do with typecasting but, basically, it was the result of the laws laid down b...

[In Blue Collar Schrader] seems to have been influenced by both Godard and Antonioni—the former in the deadening ritual of the assembly line itself, and the latter in the chromatic utilization of industrial artifacts as art objects in their own right. The movie has an interesting look to it as Schrader tries to make a painterly comment on the pathetic bleakness of low-level industrial landscapes. But the pacing is something else again, as much of Blue Collar turns out to be stylistically and thematic...