Blue Collar boasts one of the great, self-implicating opening credits in cinema history. As workers at a car factory in Detroit negotiate the everyday mundaneness of life under late capitalism, the film repeatedly freeze-frames their tasks, chopping into their rhythms as the names of the filmmakers themselves seem to terminate their motion, to lock them into a cinematic-industrial prison. These men are busy minting and assembling the very apparatus that controls them, as not only the machinery of capitalism but the hardware of cinema atomizes and exsanguinates these men. The music, a swirl of blues lamentation and industrial punishment, seems at once to keep them alive and to keep them in place, to pulverize them in frames that stop and pause every time you think they’re going to get going. A mordant metaphor for the perils of the modern world, the credits prefigure and anticipate the violence that the world, and the film, will later do to these men as they go about their lives. Pressed in between machines and tools, they no longer even need to be swallowed by the anthropomorphized machine, a la Chaplin’s Modern Times, which at least took on a corporeal form that we could see and name. Here, the style of the film itself is against them. It melds with the very machinery of manufacturing, the two fulcrums of the ambivalent and often abyssal modernity that Michigan-born writer-director Paul Schrader cut his teeth on. It is only when the corrupt union representative struts through the frame that the film is able to smoothly compose itself, to run in full motion, to visualize a supple art in a stable world designed for him, not for them.

Watching (and listening to) this intro, I could not help but think of William Attaway’s classic 1941 proletarian novel Blood on the Forge, the story of three Southern African American brothers who travel to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills in the early 1900s. Throughout the novel, the protagonist Melody emerges as a chronicler of the soul who inhabits the world openly and evocatively. His endless capacity for music transmutes the sensuous currents of existence into a vagabond poetics of protean presences, channeling the world itself into human energy. At the novel’s end, however, Melody hears a sound “too heavy a load to be carried on the wind,” described as “like a big drum.” He must imagine an instrument of culture, the very thing that has protected him, to avoid the implications of the forces capital has brought to bear on a vast landscape that seems beyond engagement. Music, here, no longer marks his creativity but his delusion, the failure of sound to offer a mode of escape from a system that can produce a far more booming, far more penetrating music than he, alone, ever could. His playful, peripatetic consciousness finally becomes not a redemptive enlivener of stray energies but a wayward monument to capitalism’s ability to render the environment, and the capacity to sense it, into a tool for its own purposes. The blues of his soul finally merges with the very oppressive industry that produces it. He becomes not an enlivened poet of the American laboratory, but, rather, a husk evacuated of his own self.

For Paul Schrader, the film scholar turned writer-director whose most famous academic text is an analysis of cinematic transcendence, Blue Collar is, much like Blood on the Forge, a defiantly un-transcendental work. In this world, everything is arrayed against your perseverance, and even your mechanisms of inhabiting the world creatively and aspirationally are accomplices in your own subjection. The coca cola machines steal your money. In a bar scene, pinball machines in the background echo jackhammers, a momentary reprieve turned into one more background jostler of the brain. One of Schrader’s heroes was Robert Bresson, a filmmaker who turned individualized action into an art of ethereal serenity, an exalted realm of allegiance with the cosmos where individual commitment becomes a devotional act. In many ways, Blue Collar is a vision of a world where that spiritual singularity is not only monumentally threatened but channeled into new methods of control, the protestant ethic metastasized into, as Max Weber wrote, the spirit of capitalism. The rambunctious vibe of their interpersonal camaraderie illuminates a space of potential resistance and momentary disruption, but in no way of real purpose. Compare Blue Collar to Michael Mann’s deeply Bressonian Thief, with its opening depicting bank robbery and safe welding as poetic abstractions of austere masculine determination, of arraying your energies against the world’s forces. Conversely, in Schrader’s film, a cinematic poem of pyrrhic victories, perseverance is not a temporary communication and battle with the cosmos but an inert illusion of escaping from a labyrinth in which the characters are fatally enmeshed.

In Sculpting in Time, his exquisite paean to the soul-nourishing ineffability of artistic creation, Russian cinematic maestro Andrei Tarkovsky promises and then interrogates his art form’s relation to the world.Cinema, he informs us, moves beyond abstraction and engages the real in all its remarkable tangibility. Yet for all its adeptness and flexibility – indeed, because of it – film cannot really see the world as it is.It, like memory, is too distant from the thickness of reality, but also too close, a paradox that marks cinema as more and less than reality, a way of existing that is so touched by reality, so open to it, that it cannot ever distance itself enough to name reality as such. It is torn between feeling out reality in all its hyper-presence and holding back from it like a specter.

This tension, it seems, is cinema’s gift to us. In a world of unclarifiable external forces, acknowledging and reckoning with the complexity of the world around us often feels like an act of condemnation, dooming us to a fatal enmeshment in systems that limit and violate us. Threatened by the world, we produce either illusions of mastery over it or prophecies of surrender to it. This seems to be Tarkovsky’s critique, in his writing, of symbols: they abstract and attempt to master reality, and they posit control as the only alternative to evaporating the self into the world. In between diffusing into the pure immediacy of reality’s flux and, conversely, stopping it in a congealed concept, Mirror instead sees our lives as, to use one of its own metaphors, an impression on a pane of glass fading away. And it sees cinema as the form of our lives. Cinema is not really the mirror of reality, but the process of the ghostly touch leaving its mark and then letting go as it is displaced into the ether of an often ephemeral existence. And cinema, like life, is the act of watching itself come and go, engage with the world enough to stain it and color it anew and then acknowledge and grapple with the eventual invisibility of that interaction. Reckoning with the world not as a cosmic choreography we control but a lived encounter with an experiential symphony, Tarkovsky’s film invites us to see and feel the external in all its unmediated glory and ravishing awe rather than impress dogmatic meaning upon it. However, it also lets us know that symbolizing as an incomplete act of understanding and naming reality is part of this flow, not only a break from it. For this director, with significant spiritual acumen, nature is both a cavernous catalyst of possibility and a diaphanous fabric suffusing all existence. It surrounds us, legitimizing and potentializing our own efforts to exist, and to suffer its existence. Cinema’s capacity to renew our contract with the world, to see it in a new way or expose an alternative aspect of what we might otherwise pass by unthinkingly, bestows upon us a capacity to explore the world generously and expansively, to feel gossamer threads of relation across time and space. Cinema cannot see the world, truly, because it is with the world. While cinema, like all art, abstracts us from the world, it also returns us to it because that abstraction is our ability, as humans, to create with that world. If Siegfried Kracauer once called cinema the “redemption of physical reality,” Tarkovsky is one of physical reality’s most sensitive and receptive prophets. He treats film as the closest thing we have to genuine grace.