Rob Stone
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231165532
- eISBN:
- 9780231850407
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231165532.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines the form and content of Richard Linklater's films on slacking. A theoretical approach to the Modernist cinema of Linklater begins by looking at the frequent motif of the street. ...
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This chapter examines the form and content of Richard Linklater's films on slacking. A theoretical approach to the Modernist cinema of Linklater begins by looking at the frequent motif of the street. In Slacker (1991), SubUrbia (1996), Before Sunrise (1995), Waking Life (2001), Before Sunset (2004), and Fast Food Nation (2006), the street is a place and time of visual, auditory, sensual, romantic, spiritual, and philosophical encounters. The locating of these encounters in the urban areas of Austin, Vienna, Paris, New York, and SubUrbia's metaphorical Burnfield suggests modernity and its flow of life, as well as the fluid nature of the films themselves, for the movement of these films is the movement of the characters therein. This movement is always temporalized; it is defined by time. This temporalized movement negotiates the potential of cinematic subjectivity, and the sharing of empathy and emotional effect. Thus, the cinema of Linklater is one of time-frames, and the movement therein: life, fluidity, and open-endedness of thought and action.Less
This chapter examines the form and content of Richard Linklater's films on slacking. A theoretical approach to the Modernist cinema of Linklater begins by looking at the frequent motif of the street. In Slacker (1991), SubUrbia (1996), Before Sunrise (1995), Waking Life (2001), Before Sunset (2004), and Fast Food Nation (2006), the street is a place and time of visual, auditory, sensual, romantic, spiritual, and philosophical encounters. The locating of these encounters in the urban areas of Austin, Vienna, Paris, New York, and SubUrbia's metaphorical Burnfield suggests modernity and its flow of life, as well as the fluid nature of the films themselves, for the movement of these films is the movement of the characters therein. This movement is always temporalized; it is defined by time. This temporalized movement negotiates the potential of cinematic subjectivity, and the sharing of empathy and emotional effect. Thus, the cinema of Linklater is one of time-frames, and the movement therein: life, fluidity, and open-endedness of thought and action.
Steven Jacobs
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640171
- eISBN:
- 9780748670901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640171.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the ...
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This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the stage, the cinema of the early 1900s appropriated the aesthetics of tableaux vivants in its attempts to develop a new model of narrative cinema. Strikingly, these practices were revived in post-war European modernist cinema, which often included tableaux vivants in line with its interest in duration and stillness. By incorporating tableaux vivants into their films, modernist filmmakers attempted at determining the specificity of their medium – movement was juxtaposed to stasis, pictorial or sculptural space to cinematic space, iconic immediacy to filmic duration, and so forth. These issues are particularly dealt with in the context of a discussion of Pasolini's La Ricotta and Godard's Passion, which both are films about the making of a film. In both works, the self-referential aspect is thus explicit and, strikingly, both films-in-the-film consist of tableaux vivants based on famous paintings.Less
This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the stage, the cinema of the early 1900s appropriated the aesthetics of tableaux vivants in its attempts to develop a new model of narrative cinema. Strikingly, these practices were revived in post-war European modernist cinema, which often included tableaux vivants in line with its interest in duration and stillness. By incorporating tableaux vivants into their films, modernist filmmakers attempted at determining the specificity of their medium – movement was juxtaposed to stasis, pictorial or sculptural space to cinematic space, iconic immediacy to filmic duration, and so forth. These issues are particularly dealt with in the context of a discussion of Pasolini's La Ricotta and Godard's Passion, which both are films about the making of a film. In both works, the self-referential aspect is thus explicit and, strikingly, both films-in-the-film consist of tableaux vivants based on famous paintings.
