Cinema of Richard Linklater by Stone Rob;

Author:Stone, Rob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004010, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Nevertheless, the impact of European art-house cinema on independent American filmmakers remained a factor in the form, content, marketing and reception of their films to the extent that it is possible to speak of a dialogue that opened up in the 1960s between American and European filmmakers, one that led directly to the New Hollywood era that was heralded by Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967).

As described by Mark Harris in Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood, Bonnie and Clyde was an attempt to ‘bring a Nouvelle Vague aesthetic to as American a subject as Dust Bowl bank robbers’ (2008: 15). The script by Robert Benton and David Newman combined the generic conventions of the American period gangster film with the aesthetic stylings and ‘live fast, die young’ existentialism of several key films of the French New Wave. Benton and Newman based their script on the ‘studied disregard for the moral and narrative strictures of Hollywood filmmaking’ (Harris 2008: 7) that they identified in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, 1962) and were delighted when it attracted the directorial ambition of Truffaut to make a film in America, as well as the bonus but more ambiguous interest of Godard. Incidentally, as a precursor to Linklater’s Before Sunrise, there were clear Texan, even Austinite origins to this film about boy meets girl, America meets Europe, and mainstream genre filmmaking meets art-house stylings, aesthetics and philosophies. Benton had gone to the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1950s and, as he explained, ‘everybody in Texas grew up with Bonnie and Clyde’ (Harris 2008: 12). With its abrupt shifts of tone, jump cuts, elements of pastiche, emphasis on ambiguous and explicit sexuality and hard-boiled dialogue, Bonnie and Clyde picked up the baton proffered by Godard’s À bout de souffle, which had itself taken it from Monogram Pictures, and passed it on to America’s youth. Eventually directed by Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde revealed the viability and relevance of New Wave stylings to the American public and major studios and thus opened up a dialogue that continues through the cinema of Linklater.

Key points in this dialogue include a preference for dialogue, as well as the affined expression of time through time-images that effect a contrast with the subscription to action and movement-images in the kind of Hollywood product that Bordwell theorised and Paul Cooke describes as ‘action-driven fictions, produced in the “continuity style” which elides the constructed nature of film as a medium’ (2007: 2–3). Slacker, for example and by name alone, promises, nay proclaims an oppositional lack of action, while Dazed and Confused, Waking Life and Before Sunrise are all titles redolent of sleepy hiatus. In truth, however, the cinema of Linklater is rarely still or silent. On the contrary, its supposed ‘idleness’ actually illustrates Samuel Johnson’s contention that ‘if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain one another’ (in Stevenson 2009: 1). However, as Stevenson observes in An Apology

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