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.
