The Cinema of Richard Linklater

Walk, Don't Run

Rob Stone

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850407
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From Slacker (1991) to The School of Rock (2003), from Before Sunrise (1995) to Before Sunset (2004), from the walking and talking of his no/low-budget American independent films to conversing with the philosophical traditions of the European art house, Richard Linklater's films are some of the most critical, political, and spiritual achievements of contemporary world cinema. Examinations of Linklater's collaborative working practices and deployment of rotoscoping and innovative distribution strategies all feature in this book, which aspires to walk and talk with the filmmaker and his films. Informed by a series of original interviews with the artist, in both his hometown and frequent film location of Austin, Texas, this study of the director who made Dazed and Confused (1993), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Bernie (2011) explores the theoretical, practical, contextual, and metaphysical elements of these works along with his documentaries and side-projects and finds fanciful lives and lucid dreams have as much to do with his work as generally alternative notions of America, contemporary society, cinema, and time.Â

CHAPTER ONE

Locating Linklater

Independent cinema feels right at home in Austin. Born of a revolution, Texas resisted the union of its Lone Star state with the rest of America for almost a decade, and even then and ever since its capital city of Austin has symbolised resistance to exploitation by the incursive forces that surround it. Americans come from all over the world they say, but Texans come from Texas. Its capital city was named after Stephen F. Austin, a cautious and peaceful sort who led the colonisation of the region by settlers. Fortunes from steers, cotton and oil sponsored the construction of the Texas State Capitol, the University of Texas at Austin and the damming of the Colorado River to make the downtown Lady Bird Lake that blooms as much as any symbolic oasis should. Urban legend has it that the city’s slacker community was formed when rednecks and hippies hybridised over marijuana at a concert by fellow Austinite Willie Nelson, the leader of the ‘outlaw’ country movement of the 1970s. Today left-leaning Austin is a blue dot in a red state, still peopled with folk whose slacking is a charming distraction from the city’s modernity, although lately the area has challenged San Francisco’s Silicon Valley for high-tech industries that are largely manned by those who came to Austin to drop out but could not stand the pressure of doing nothing. Locating Linklater in Austin is vital, for his films not only emerged from the slacker culture of the mid-1980s but enunciate its undermining of the ideologies of late capitalist materialism via their form, content, style and themes. In this, Linklater applied the techniques associated with representations of alienation in post-war European cinema to a specifically regional concept of American cinema that was also informed by existentialist and Marxist undercurrents. Consequently, his films associated slacker culture with the deliberate wider critical project of communal estrangement from political and national hegemonies and reterritorialised a part of America that would find common identity and cause in the development of independent cinema.

The notion of independence in American cinema had existed since the mid-1910s as an industrial demarcation of films made by small production companies unrelated to the major studios. It also described films by such illustrious figures as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, who produced films independently but negotiated their distribution with the majors. Subsequently, poverty row studios of the 1930s and 1940s such as Monogram and First National produced low-budget westerns and thrillers, while exploitation companies such as James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures (AIP) began producing B-films for double-bills in the 1950s. In 1970 Roger Corman, who had directed a notable series of adaptations of the work of Edgar Allan Poe for AIP, established New World Pictures as a small, independent production and distribution studio whose films paid attention to marginalised, rebellious, adolescent characters and were an influence on Linklater. By the 1980s, however, the term independent ‘started to signify films that ventured into themes largely untouched by Hollywood, that assimilated the influence of the experimental and art traditions, and that voiced minority perspectives’ (Suárez 2007: 40). Even so, from Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) to Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2009) the majors have always been willing to distribute independently produced films, reasoning that potential profit makes a good choice of ‘indie’ a safe investment because the risk is limited to its distribution.¹ The major studios are also keen to poach aesthetics, themes and filmmakers from the independent sector as exemplified by Geoff King’s apt description of Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) as ‘a $50 million Dogme movie’ (2009: 158). The independent sector also provides market research on the changing tastes and demographics of its audience, which has been revealed as high-spending, ‘educated adults who [are] interested in film as an aesthetic object’ (Suárez 2007: 46) and whose idea of creativity is sympathetic to theories of auteurism. In the 2000s the term ‘independent’ shifted to describe what King identifies as:

Indiewood, an area in which Hollywood and the independent sector merge or overlap. […] From one perspective [films produced in this area] offer an attractive blend of creativity and commerce, a source of some of the more innovative and interesting work produced in close proximity to the commercial mainstream. From another, this is an area of duplicity and compromise, in which the ‘true’ heritage of the independent sector is sold out, betrayed and/or co-opted into an offshoot of Hollywood. (2009: 1)

Mike Atkinson concludes that ‘any consideration of the indie climate in the U.S. must begin with this identity crisis’ (2007: 18) that is perhaps exemplified in the manner by which the populist brand of independent cinema has become a non-threatening badge of quirkiness that Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), for example, uses to make palatable a parable of anti-abortionist conservatism. Even an oddly-shaped movement such as Mumblecore, whose digitised disciples or ‘Slackavetes’ of Linklater and Cassavetes have churned out no-budget variations on Before Sunrise using digital cameras, twenty-something amateur casts and improvisation, has failed to offer much of an update on the cinematic declarations of its prophets.²

However, back in the 1970s, films made by enthusiastic amateurs from far-flung places like Texas were not called independent but regional cinema. Their independence was not an ethical, financial or creative choice but a consequence of localism. Regional cinema could be identified as such for its authentic locations, characters, themes and mise-en-scène, its home-based cast and crew, its accent and languages as well as its mostly localised financing, modest ambitions and particularly regional sensibilities, themes and characters. Regional filmmakers lacked the critical support of a Cahiers du cinéma, a cinémathèque or anything like access to distribution, but they did have the lightweight cameras and sound recording equipment that had enabled the French New Wave. For example, fifteen years before Linklater’s Slacker was erroneously acclaimed as a new breed of film from Nowheresville, another Austinite named Eagle Pennell had marshalled talented amateurs to make films featuring ordinary folk whose culture was absent from what passed for Texas in Hollywood. Film such as Giant (George Stevens, 1956) and countless westerns offered grand vistas and remembered the Alamo; but only Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) and The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), which were both adapted from novels by Texan Larry McMurtry, had come anywhere near to genuine street level tensions and smalltown mores.³ The borderland novels of Cormac McCarthy had not yet impacted,⁴ nor had contemporary Tex-Mex film dramas such as Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and the adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007). But forget the Alamo, it was the resolutely un-mythical, working-class Austinite, red of neck and blue of collar, that was the subject of Eagle Pennell’s A Hell of a Note (1977), The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978) and Last Night at the Alamo (1983). These warm but downcast features reveal a people so rooted in a time and place that a collective identity is discernible in the gait of the films themselves. Long, loose takes of bullshitting urban cowboys are imbued with ‘a kind of deeply pessimistic Southern fundamentalist Protestant view of humanity’ (Odintz 2009: 19). But there is humour here too. All the opportunistic failures, bar-room braggadocio, defeatist advances on weary females and everyday chores of Pennell’s characters reveal them as a generation lost between the tenant farmers of the 1950s and the untethered Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) of Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. If he had been able to free himself from the alcoholism that blighted his working relationships and killed him in 2002, Pennell might have served as a trailblazer for Linklater instead of the brief flare and fade that still made for an influential legend.

As Pennell discovered, there was only a ragged circuit of film festivals in the 1970s. Instead, films like his were predestined for limited runs in sympathetic local cinemas that occasionally inspired word of mouth. In turn this encouraged filmmakers to apply and submit to festivals, where critics might be open to seeing regional films as genuine American cinema. Hollywood’s contemporaneous attempts to attract audiences by employing independent filmmakers had resulted in what Robin Wood called ‘the incoherent narrative’ of 1970s cinema, in which ‘the drive towards the ordering of experience [was] visibly defeated’ (1986: 47). Yet genuine empirical disorder was the natural subject of regional cinema like Pennell’s, which reflected smalltown life as it was, made up as it went along. Whether by lack of training, disdain for formulaic narrative, a piecemeal production schedule or simply an unhurried experimentation with filmmaking that did not broker any realistic possibility of ever reaching an audience, the regional cinema of mavericks such as Pennell flirted with Modernism in responding to its own criteria and limitations. This was not the obscure, experimental cinema of Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man, 1961–64), though it was no less unconventional; nor was it the militantly Queer, underground cinema of Kenneth Anger (Lucifer Rising, 1972), although its cultural identity was no less specific. Pennell lacked the work ethic of John Cassavetes, whose performance of independent auteurism contributed to the purist, romantic tenet of opposition to Hollywood, but like Cassavetes and Linklater he was one of the few who quit talking about something and did it. His collaborative cohort of Austinite cast and crew made The Whole Shootin’ Match for about $20,000 and watched it at the Dobie, Austin’s off-campus movie theatre on Guadalupe Street. Thereafter, popular response prompted a screening at the USA Film Festival in Dallas in April 1978 and a new festival held in Salt Lake City in Utah in September of that year, where it featured in the sidebar Regional Cinema: The New Bright Hope alongside the New York-based Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978) and Martin (George A. Romero, 1977) from Pittsburgh. The suggestion was that the regionalism of these films was alternative and inseparable from their meaning. Robert Redford’s viewing of The Whole Shootin’ Match in the Utah festival so inspired him to want to nurture ‘strays like this’ (Cullum 2009: 23) that he moved the festival to Park City and changed its name to one of association with his Sundance Institute, whose precise aim was to encourage new breeds of regional filmmaking. This objective would be realised when the Pennell-inspired Slacker was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film in 1991.

Before Sundance, regional filmmaking in America was not a movement or a revolution but a homemade adventure that meant its parochialism was sometimes the punchline for a rare audience from elsewhere. Only occasionally might a regional filmmaker such as Austinite Tobe Hooper manage to transcend the stereotypes of Texans by turning them on their leather-faced heads in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), whose associate producer (Kim Henkel), sound technician (Wayne Bell), and assistant cameraman (Lou Perryman) had each learnt their skills as part of Pennell’s crew. Yet Hooper’s success was not just generic; it was also a terrifying response to what most audiences, festivals and critics disdained about rural America and, as such, was a particularly subversive example of regional cinema. Other regional filmmakers who escaped the fate of obscurity were mostly urbanites by comparison: Baltimore had John Waters (Desperate Living, 1977), New York had John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven, 1980) and Los Angeles had Alan Rudolph (Welcome to LA, 1976), while New York was sufficiently multi-cultural as to foster films featuring the streetwise but lost souls of John Cassavetes, the immigrants and nomads of Jim Jarmusch and the black working class of Charles Burnett. The catch-all title of ‘independent’ cinema did such regional filmmakers a disservice by dislocating them from their cultural specificity and grouping them in opposition to one place called Hollywood instead. As Marsha Kinder explains, the notion of regional cinema may be situated within a local and global interface but it is also an ideological construct and a ‘relativistic concept’ that is fluid and problematic because ‘like a linguistic shifter, “regional” means “marginal” in relation to some kind of geographic center or dominant cultural practice, and in the case of cinema, that frequently means Hollywood’ (1993: 388).

The eternally problematic term ‘independent’ has endured, however, while the notion of regional cinema has not. Competing ideas of independence in American cinema by Emanuel Levy (1999), King (2005, 2009), Yannis Tzioumakis (2006) and John Berra (2008) amongst others have each wrestled with the criteria. Tzioumakis sees:

American independent cinema as a discourse that expands and contracts when socially authorised institutions (filmmakers, industry practitioners, trade publications, academics, film critics, and so on) contribute towards its definition at different periods in the history of American cinema. (2006: 11)

King is more practical and empirical in demanding an industrial location, formal and aesthetic strategies based upon ‘a highly stylised minimalism that draws attention to itself as a formal-artistic device’ (2005: 82) and a relationship to a ‘broader social, cultural, political or ideological landscape’ (2005: 2). His correlated observation that ‘independent’ cinema stakes ‘a claim to the status of something more closely approximating the reality of the lives of most people’ (2005: 67) suits regional cinema too. Nevertheless, the term ‘regional’ still fails to resonate in America, unlike in Europe, where provincial television broadcasters have played a vital role in the funding and dissemination of their respective regional cinemas. In the absence of any similar, coherent funding, the independent spirit that may be identified in some American filmmakers of the 1970s and onwards was arguably coincidental. Their financing was haphazard, being mostly a particularistic collage of savings, loans, inheritances, local government and federal grants, public service broadcasting and, more recently, maxed-out credit cards. It was not until the success of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape (1989) at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals in 1989 that ‘the existence of significant available institutional support’ (Tzioumakis 2006: 254) and the potential commercial and critical viability of independent cinema outside America became apparent. This new awareness of funds and markets for a small-scale, intimate, character-based American cinema led to ‘questions of aesthetics [assuming] an increasingly prominent position in the discourse of American independent cinema’ (Tzioumakis 2006: 266). In turn, this contributed to a criteria for the discrimination of ‘indies’ from studio films, which included marketable similarities to the kind of European cinema that based itself on expression of thought and the negotiation of identities as opposed to a more mainstream deployment of physical expression in the negotiation of obstacles. Linked to this was the increasingly auteurist approach of many critics and a cine-literate audience, who identified the supposed autonomy of filmmakers like Soderbergh as a riposte to the perception of a blockbuster mentality and its concomitant ‘dumbing down’ of audiences by the major studios. Soderbergh, who appears as himself (albeit rotoscoped) in Linklater’s Waking Life, was briefly acclaimed alongside Jarmusch (see Suárez 2007) and Sayles (see Bould 2009) as the inheritor of Cassavetes’s noble cause (see Charity 2001), but even in Robin Hood mode or Kafkaesque conflict with the major studios most American filmmakers were unable to conquer the geographical impracticality of adopting any collective identity that was much more than a media construct to which they occasionally re-subscribed at festivals.

Linklater’s Slacker evoked an altogether different collective identity, one that rejected competition. Somewhat ironically therefore, the film was itself initially rejected by Sundance because of festival director Alberto García’s demurral, as well as the festivals of Telluride and Toronto. It was, however, shown as a work-in-progress at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York in October 1989, where it inspired a $35,000 advance from the Cologne-based WDR (Pierson 1996: 185). WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk/West German Broadcasting) was one of the German networks that pioneered the film and television synergy later adopted by the UK’s Channel Four and the deal was possibly due to some vestiges of empathy with the ethos of slacking that resonates in modern German cinema. This is evident from Wim Wenders’ road movies Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974), Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move, 1975) and Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1976) to the recent Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004) directed by Hans Weingartner, who was production assistant on Linklater’s Before Sunrise in whi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater
• 1. Locating Linklater
• 2. Crafting Contradictions
• 3. The Form and Content of Slack
• 4. American Art House
• 5. Dreamstate, USA: The Metaphysics of Animation
• 6. The Spaces In Between
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index