First Reformed.Against the muted winter lawn, a minister attempts to hoist a fallen gravestone into the vertical position. This stark shot, half an hour into Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), is composed within a squarish 1.33 aspect ratio, framed to contain the entirety of the minister’s labored efforts to erect the somber slab. Figure, object, and ground flatten into mere shapes; the idea of vertical motion itself becomes the focus of the shot.Musing on film aspect ratios during a conference of the Technicians Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein—like Schrader, a philosopher-filmmaker-provocateur—described a similar vertical action: “We started as worms creeping on our stomachs. Then we ran horizontally for hundreds of years on our four legs. But we only became something like mankind from the moment we hoisted ourselves onto our hind legs and assumed the vertical position.” Eisenstein’s lecture,...