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Richard Linklater
From Slacker (1990), Dazed and confused (1993), The before trilogy (1995 – 2013) and Boyhood (2014).
A cinematic journey through the eyes of Richard Linklater.
-A thread
From Slacker (1990), Dazed and confused (1993), The before trilogy (1995 – 2013) and Boyhood (2014).
A cinematic journey through the eyes of Richard Linklater.
-A thread
Going to the movies is, for most of us, an escape from real life. We want to experience a world that is really different from our daily lives, which has an excitement or charge that seems missing from our quotidian routines.
Hence the appeal of superheroes, adventure films, even melodramas, for each in its own way heightens an aspect of our lives that seems dreary in the living of it but exciting when placed in high relief.
Richard Linklater is an American filmmaker. Linklater is known for his realistic and natural humanist films, which revolve mainly around suburban culture and the effects of the passage of time.
He’s a truly visionary filmmaker whose love of film and movie culture is on display in the large body of work he’s made over the last 20 years
He’s going against the fashions of contemporary filmmaking, Linklater’s notion of cinematic refinement has less to do with virtuosic camerawork than with creating a moment that’s worth capturing.
He is living proof of the magic of cinema, like how it works on us and when it’s done well it’s powerful. He can add significance to small things like a dead bird. It’s like the more specific you make something the more general it becomes.
As a writer and director, Richard Linklater has attempted to the most honest stories he can about life: the romance and evolving relationships in his Before series, the process of growing up in Boyhood and the boredom and teenage angst in Dazed & Confused
They all bear the trademarks of his uncompromising artistic vision which shies away from traditional narrative tropes and relishes the seemingly mundane details of everyday life, rendering them profound. A film isn’t just a narrative; it’s a framework in which to create.
“There’s really got to be a structure; art demands it. I care more about structure, less about plots. Anything plot-driven feels a little man-made, manufactured. I’m always going toward something that’s a little more true to life.”
Many of his films have been about people, growing consciousness and awareness of who they are. For him, that& #39;s the big story of all of our lives. And that constant relation of ourselves to ourselves at a different era in our lives. That& #39;s a pretty fascinating relationship.
One of Linklater’s big preoccupations is time. The manipulation of time, the perception of time, the control of time. But Linklater’s films exploit time in more brilliantly daring and groundbreaking ways than most.
The most obvious examples of this are of course his radical 2014 feature Boyhood, shot over the course of 12 years, revisiting its protagonist every year between the ages of six and eighteen
In the Before trilogy, he explores the relationship between Jesse & Celine on the day they meet in their early 20s (Sunrise), the day they encounter each other again 9 years later (Sunset) and a day spent on holiday as a middle-aged couple 9 years after that (Midnight)
By framing them in this way, he successfully uses the progressively aging characters to convey, in his words~
~“a written parallel world saying something about different phases of life or the times we’re living in or just what it’s like to be a person: how you physically change, how you mentally change, how you’re still the same person but you’re kinda not.”
Personal experience underscores the concepts behind a vast majority of Linklater’s films. Some of his former classmates tried to sue him for defamation for using their real names; Wooderson, Floyd and Slater in “Dazed and Confused”
In Boyhood, the character of Mason is loosely based on his own childhood, but he also looked to himself as an adult and parent when writing the role of Mason’s parents.
Movingly, the premise of Before Sunrise was based on his fleeting encounter with a girl called Amy Lehrhaupt whom he met in 1989. “There wasn’t any big drama, it was just a feeling between two people who have that infatuation and the get-to-know-you thing.”
Right from the start, Linklater has championed the beauty of the mundane or, to quote Jesse in Before Sunrise, “the poetry of day-to-day life”, from chance encounters and off-the-cuff conversations to the everyday activities that underscore human existence.
To Linklater, the drama doesn’t have to include bells and whistles; it can exist in the simple exchange of glances.
In Dazed and Confused, following a group of students on their last day of high school, he was asked what exactly happens to the characters. He said “Ugh, not much.’ In the end...they are going to get Aerosmith tickets”.
“They aren’t even going to the concert, it’s so nothing.” But that is exactly what makes the film and so many of Linklater’s other movies, from the before trilogy to Boyhood. They celebrate the humor and profundity embedded within those seemingly “not-much” moments.
He finds people talking very evocative, and people talking can be wonderfully cinematic because not only does it conjure what they’re talking about in the viewer’s mind because you’re not showing it and that’s more interesting
He’s going for some non-action, the moment the viewer feels like this is acting everything falls apart, because when you see people acting you expect drama and therefore a plot. His work is about the revelation of character and the peeling of one layer after the other.
In the before trilogy, his weapon was dialogue, it& #39;s about two people connecting, and in real life, it’s a very verbal conversational event. As an actor they ask you to strike a certain pose or to evoke a certain feeling, for Linklater it’s only about having a real conversation
In before midnight (2013) what we see on the screen is an 80-minute interaction between Jesse and Celine that actually takes place over 80 minutes. He captures the lived-in feel of a very specific time and place.
This results in our experiencing the film as more realistic than those films in which time is telescoped through editing. Most films are around two hours in length but tell stories that take place over a much longer period of time.
Editing allows the filmmaker to telescope the time of the story so that we don’t have to spend as long in the cinema as the time the actual plot took. In the 1950s, André Bazin argued that realism as a film style realized its ability to present us with the very objects themselves
He claimed, editing had to be downplayed in favor of long takes that enabled the film’s action to develop in a way that appeared natural to the audience. Linklater’s films show that there is another route to realism, one that depends on making film time and viewing time the same.
In Everybody wants some (2016), It’s just a film that went from character to character and no real story, just a series of that. It has no real plot or story, just characters in moments
In Boyhood (2014), this brand of naturalism brings its own imperatives. As Linklater entered his forties, he kept returning to the idea of making a movie about growing up. But he couldn’t see how it could work.
“When I think of kids, I think about the utter powerlessness of being young and how you& #39;re totally restricted, how you deal within the confines of your parent& #39;s house and everything you& #39;re supposed to be doing. You& #39;re just completely at the mercy of the conditions around you.”
“If you make a film about childhood, you’ve got to pick a moment”. Most childhoods have no single, representative dramatic stretch. They gain meaning across years and disparate moments.
Therefore, it’s a single feature-length work of fiction covering crucial points from the age of six to eighteen in the life of its protagonist, Mason, and his family. Viewers watch Mason find his way through childhood and head to college.
By the time the film is over, they’ve not only witnessed his growth but shared it. The evolution of a personality, the changing soundtrack of those years.
Watching Linklater movies is a different experience because it flows in a different way. It’s a rebellion against the old school wisdom that images should take precedence over words, that you don’t talk about a character’s experience you show him having the experience.
If you do something that means a lot to you. The power of cinema will translate that feeling you’re investing, it has the potential to communicate something on some other level.
