At the first of the two IBM² sessions titled New Media and the Future of Cinema Paul Schrader will conduct he will bring to his audience his mastery of the history of cinema to speak about the fate of cinema at the edge of a New Media age that threatens to redefine the shape of the medium in ways that would render it unrecognizable to its past. As cinema begins to connect up with new technologies of production and dissemination as well with the imperatives of a consumerist micro-technology driven entertainment industry filmmakers and audiences all over the world are divided as regards the evaluation of this new development. There are those who think that the death of cinema as we knew it would be a tragedy for the history of the arts while others feel that cinema like everything else must accept the challenge of history and move on in new directions. Theorists such as Lev Manovich have argued that right from the onset cinema was intimately related to neighbouring entertainment practices such as the circus and the popular theatres of the time. Therefore the frenetic dialogue between cinema and other media make our times as interesting and exciting for the history of optical entertainments as ever before. Digital therefore might be the new medium that is facilitating the cross-fertilization between contemporary performance practices with cinema still dominating the spectrum of such practices.

In the second session Masterclass on Screenwriting Paul Schrader will speak about his experiences with the art of screenplay writing. He will speak of the manner in which his screen plays have developed as an intimate dialogue with his own biography which has time and again afforded metaphors that served to speak of a general as well as a historically specific human condition. In the process of this critical self-examination to reveal the rules of the game for his artistic practice Paul Schrader will also discuss the screenplay and its importance for the filmmaking process. The session will be preceded by a screening of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

Paul Schrader remains a unique personality of cinema, one who has written films, directed them and written about them in a historically and discursively critical manner. He is a teacher of cinema and participates enthusiastically in debates about cinema, its history and its fate in all kinds of fora – real and virtual. It is in his dual roles as a teacher and critical thinker about cinema and a seasoned and acclaimed practitioner of the art that he comes to this year’s IBM² sessions to deliver two masterclasses – one on the New Media and the Future of Cinema and the other on the screenplay in film.

Schrader is known worldwide for his screenplay of Martin Scorsese 1976 classic Taxi Driver that simultaneously raised the careers of the director and actor Robert de Niro as well that of the writer to international fame. Subsequently the three came together for the Aacdemy Award winning Raging Bull in 1980 and Schrader wrote the script for Scorsese’s controversial adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Running through his legendary collaboration with Scorsese is Schrader’s creative obsession with examining the relationship between the Christian notions of sin, guilt and redemption, themes he would revisit time and again in the films he himself directed. These pre-occupations he refers back to his strict Calvinist upbringing at the hands of his mother who filled him with lasting images and notions of sin and eternal damnation.

As a director Schrader has been acclaimed for films such as American Gigolo (1980) that launched the career of Richard Gere, a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s horror classic Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) and the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990). His films, like Scorsese’s and the later-day Catholic master of American cinema Abel Ferrara’s, deal on the whole with obsessive loners who are driven by an acute sense of guilt to drive themselves to extremes of sensory and psychological experience to the point of self-destruction. His scripts and films stand as important testimonies to the post-Vietnam America of the 1970s and 1980s when the class system broke down revealing the dark psycho-pathological underbelly of social fragmentation. A cineaste by habit, Schrader brought his immense knowledge of Hollywood and World cinema to re-configure older cinematic tropes for new times. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose in an America where modernist individualism seemed to have exacerbated age-old reflexes of Christian guilt about pleasure and living freely.

Alongside his work in the film industry Schrader Schrader remained a prolific film critic and authored the classic Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer that dealt with the writer’s exploration of a cinema of redemption through the transcendence of materialism. The book also revealed Schrader’s long-standing interest in Japanese culture and aesthetics and re-introduced Ozu and Japanese cinema in general to a new generation of film watchers the world over. Schrader along with his brother Leonard had penned The Yakuza for Sidney Pollack in 1975 for a princely sum of $325 000, a record at that time. This was Schrader’s first film as screenplay writer and he subsequently wrote and directed a biopic of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.