About Time Stone, Rob
Film quarterly,
03/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Remembrance without nostalgia is a crucial sentiment in the cinema of Richard Linklater, whose films tend to look both forward and back but invariably end on moments that recognize the newness of the ..."nowness." Boyhood (2014) is an accumulative work in many senses, one that ties off many loose ends left hanging by both the experimentation and the conventions of his films. Tracing themes of temporality throughout and alongside the evolution of new media prompts consideration of the present, when belated recognition gives way to celebration of one of the most important filmmakers in world cinema, but also draws attention to the tension between past and future filmmaking technology. Here, Stone examines Boyhood and Linklater's Before trilogy.
Digital Déjà Vu Lurie, Peter
Film quarterly,
03/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a key sequence in the second Trilogy feature (Before Sunset, 2004), Jesse expresses a fear that he'll "dissolve into molecules" if someone embraces him. Later in the film--or, rather, following ...its close--Celine does just that and, naturally, Jesse remains intact. Moreover, and importantly, their relationship takes a decisive step toward realization. The film may not show the couple embrace and then make love, but the audience will soon learn that they in fact procreate, producing the twin girls who appear in the opening of the next and final (thus far) installment of the series, Before Midnight (2013). Here, Lurie examines cinephilia, loss, and medial integrity in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy.
The Holy Moment Grabiner, Ellen
Film quarterly,
03/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Grabiner talks about Richard Linklater's animated feature film, Waking Life. It is line and color that give the film its form, texture, and shape, and that anchor its narration, serving as drawing is ...wont to do to bring the viewer into the present of a sublime moment. Situated in the space that Henri Bergson has demarked image--more than a representation, but less than a thing--Waking Life elides the distinction that Andre Bazin drew between what the brush or pen can interpret and what the camera can record. Linklater's animated film erases that boundary between the plastic arts.
Richard Linklater's dark comedy, Bernie (2011), recounts a bizarre murder story the director first encountered in Skip Hollandsworth's article, "Midnight in the Garden of East Texas" in Texas Monthly ...(January 1998). Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLame) is an elderly, bitter, wealthy widow who is shot in the back by a beloved assistant funeral-home director, Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), who not only kills her but also hides the fact-and the body-for nine months. It is not the murder but the way the residents of a small Texas town rally around the confessed killer that is the focus of both Hollandsworth's original article and the film script he co-wrote with Linklater. Both writers attended the actual trial when a distraught Bernie was sentenced to life imprisonment and removed from the courtroom, but it would take more than a decade to bring the story Linklater describes as "comedy and tragedy, all intertwined" to the screen. Here, Boyd examines time, tasks, and storytelling in Linklater's Bernie.
Only Lovers Left Alive McDonnell, Jenny
The Irish journal of gothic and horror studies,
07/2014
13
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The music within the film functions as a soundtrack to persistent musings about the nature of art and the artist, and their resilience (or otherwise) with the passing of time; significantly, the ...Christopher Marlowe with whom Eve ruminates in Tangiers is ultimately revealed as the 'true author' of Shakespeare's plays, and Adam has chosen to settle in the original hometown of Motown, the record label that was previously as prominent a feature of Detroit as the city's once-thriving automotive industry. ...Only Lovers Left Alive is exactly what you'd expect from a Jim Jarmusch vampire film: meditative and unhurried, wryly humorous and culturally allusive - and utterly beguiling. ...it turns out that the vampire makes for a curiously appropriate Jarmuschian figure, isolated and out-of-time.
THE RIGHT TIME AND PLACE Rich, B. Ruby
Film quarterly,
09/2014, Letnik:
68, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Paradigmatic American filmmaker Richard Linklater’sBoyhoodhas been much praised from the moment of its release (2014). The scope of this twelve-year project is more than a stunt, and the making of ...the film has become a birthright. This article weighs in on the film and its reception, considers Linklater’s French New Wave influences, and addresses how gender has been so muted, rendered illegible, if not irrelevant in the film’s reception.
Some people live to work, others work to live, while still others prefer to live lives of leisure. Since the Puritans, American culture and literature have been dominated by individuals who have ...valued hard work. However, shortly after its founding, America managed to produce the leisurely Rip Van Winkle, who, over time, has been followed by kindred spirits such as, for instance, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Twain’s Huck Finn, Melville’s Bartleby, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, the Hippies, and Christopher McCandless. With the rise of the Indie Film movement of the 1990s, so came the rise of the slacker film. Films such as Slacker (1991), Singles (1992), Wayne’s World (1992), Reality Bites (1994), Clerks (1994), Kicking and Screaming (1995), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Office Space (1999) filled theatres over the decade with characters who take an unorthodox view of work and stress the importance of leisure in life. This essay discusses two slacker films, Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), which defined the slacker phenomenon in the 1990s and constituted two important landmarks in American independent film. While many of us may find the slacker pathetic and annoying, this essay argues that there is much value to be found in this healthy counterculture. By offering their perspectives on issues such as the Puritan work ethic, work-incited self-importance, leisure versus idleness and human relationships, Linklater and Smith join the preceding generations of slackers, providing a much needed balance to the American obsession with work and success.
This dissertation centers on four auteurist films by Max Ophuls, Liliana Cavani, Nicolas Roeg, and Stanley Kubrick which turned to the artistic, intellectual, and cultural history of fin-de-siècle ...Vienna in order to adapt classical Hollywood melodrama for the art cinema genre. Drawing on art history, aesthetic philosophy, literary theory, and film studies, the dissertation intervenes in an ongoing discourse about the relationship between modernism and melodrama. Whereas scholars of European art cinema have tended to focus on how modernist provocateurs have appropriated Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte in order to undermine classical melodrama’s immersive emotionality and advance social critique, my project traces an alternative tradition of auteurs who engage not in a subversion rather a submersion of melodrama. Throughout the project, I develop the concept of the “melodramatic unconscious,” the aesthetic and erotic impulses that undergird melodrama’s manifest moral polarities.At the heart of the project are four films which chart turn-of-the-century Vienna’s Nachleben throughout the Cold War and post-Soviet period, when the concept of “Vienna 1900” gained purchase on the international imaginary: Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980), and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Each of these films illuminates different dimensions of the melodramatic unconscious—the conceptual, the transformative, the mythical, and the seductive. In chapter one, I examine how Ophuls’s Ur-text mobilizes the conceptual properties of an indexical medium through the metaphor of the circle, the figure par excellence of the Viennese imaginary, from the Ringstraße to the Riesenrad to the waltz. In chapter two, I detail how Cavani explores the perennial melodramatic theme of victimhood through her treatment of Viennese architecture, figuring erotic desire as a neo-Secessionist force of anti-Historicist transformation. In chapter three, I demonstrate Roeg’s affinities with the ahistoricism of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Sigmund Freud, arguing that the film’s saturation of historical citations belies its aspiration to the timelessness of myth. In chapter four, I trace Kubrick’s final gesture of a Viennese-inflected erotics of authorship, a seductive relation effected through hyper-optical form and androgynous authorial surrogacy. Detailed stylistic and narratorial analyses of these key films are situated within a constellation of other Vienna-based films, and contextualized within the broader cultural reception of Vienna 1900 in academia, the art world, and the popular press from the 1930s to the present.
Growing Old Together San Filippo, Maria
Film quarterly,
03/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Richard Linklater's trilogy Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (20,3) spans eighteen years in the evolution of its couple, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), ...as well as US independent film. The trajectory of the Before trilogy's "external" temporality offers a unique opportunity to compare three pivotal moments in the past two decades of the US film industry: the 19905 "indie" boom, the millennial move toward digitalization, and the current "post-cinema" era of cross-platform deliveries. The Before trilogy thus models, by way of its sequel-friendly seriality and intertextual self-referencing as well as its proto-digital qualities in narrative and form, an alternative to Hollywood's global blockbuster franchises--even as the trilogy simultaneously demonstrates how the binary "Hollywood vs. indie" fails to capture the complex nature of 21-century US film. Filippo examines Linklater's trilogy in the twilight years of art house distribution.
“Everyday transcendence” names a style of filmmaking exemplified in recent works by Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Richard Linklater (the Before series and Boyhood), Ari Folman (Waltz With ...Bashir), and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait). In each of these films, time operates on two interrelated levels: time as we experience it and understand it in our daily lives, and time as an overarching big picture. This big-picture temporality varies from film to film and is often ambiguous: for Malick, it appears as divine eternity; for Linklater, as a secular concept of an eternal Now; for Folman and for Gordon and Parreno, as a broad view of human history.What all of these films have in common is that each is built around a movement from everyday time, in the form of the present, to transcendental time and back again. This movement is accomplished through an evolution of the transcendental style first outlined by Paul Schrader, who describes a specific formal progression from everyday banality to disparity to stasis. This progression, Schrader suggests, creates a structural movement from the everyday material world to the transcendental spiritual world. In showing how everyday transcendence adapts these formal techniques and structures to effect temporal transcendence, I identify two trends that distinguish the films in this study from those that Schrader focuses on. The first is a shift from transcendence as a specifically spiritual phenomenon to a more secular one; the second is the adaptation of transcendental style to the realities of a contemporary world in which our daily experience of time has been profoundly transformed by technologies of mediation and connectivity. This second trend in particular suggests that everyday transcendence has emerged as an aesthetic response to a world in which our sense of time has become diminished and disconnected. In the face of such a contemporary experience, everyday transcendence serves as an urgent call to return to nowness, and to do so with an expanded sense of what “now” is and of how the present connects to the past and the future.
PDF
