Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater is one of my favourite filmmakers. I was reminded recently by a TV screening of his animated feature Waking Life of how original his subjects and style are, just as I was frustrated that the development of these has been interrupted again by a “mainstream” feature (Fast Food Nation, released a few weeks ago). So this piece is in praise of his genuinely independent films (or those of them I’ve seen).

The films of Richard Linklater fascinate me. In them I find peculiar tensions I have not found elsewhere. Between their obvious artfulness and what they lack in conventional craft (sutured narratives, purposeful dialogue, climax). More than this, the tension of subject with generic ambition: tragedies and epiphanies play out among students, drifters, the unemployed, people moreover who Linklater has taken no trouble to idealize or round out, but whose banalities and eccentricities are taken straight from the everyday. It would be interesting to compare him to Jim Jarmusch, on the face of it a similar director, whose self-conscious, indirect playfulness (watch Coffee and Cigarettes) conceals a very direct empathetic interest in his characters. (I’m thinking of Night on Earth especially.) Both elements are lacking in Linklater, whose indirectness is contemplative and not playful, and who is interested in human situations (the last day of school, the chance romantic encounter abroad), and ideas and possibilities, rather than characters as such. The camera waits for these to show themselves – in this Linklater remains the classic documentary director, the interviewer; but he knows how to nuance his presentation in the most subtle ways, and to give it forms resonant with historical meaning. Because of his politically activist, anti-establishment “agenda” (which comprises a philosophical justification of "slacking" quite in the tradition of Bertrand Russell's superb and cogent In Praise of Idleness) it wouldn’t naturally occur to one to look for such nuances, yet they are what I am most of all interested in here. (In this I'm taking a different tack from Ben Lewis, whose Channel 4 film a few years ago, "St. Richard of Austin", set out to unravel the messages and meanings he thought must underly Linklater's work. He more or less failed, which didn't stop the resulting documentary being very interesting - but does show the limits of that kind of interpretation.)

A potent set of meanings emerges from the unity of time which repeatedly characterises these films. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, and Before Sunset all take place within 24 hours (or considerably less in the case of the last two). In the case of Tape, in some ways the most atypical of Linklater’s films, the other classical “unities” are obeyed too, and the effect is positively Greek in its concentration. It remains confined to a motel room and two characters arguing, with a third (the girl they are arguing about) arriving half-way through. The tension is carefully increased, the dialogue is guarded, the use of the single, eponymous prop a stroke of pure theatre. But the intention is not, as in classical theatre, to impress the weight of fateful reality on the audience, but to make them doubt what they are being shown and told. The perspectivist paradox of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (did a rape take place? whose account can be trusted?) is heightened by the realist implications of recorded media. Not only the audio tape of the crime, but the video on which the film itself is shot (using clumsy but “true” panning shots at numerous points in preference to untrustworthy edits) imply presence, objectivity, truth. Yet the whole, true story is withheld from us, leaving only the claims of the characters themselves.

Before Sunrise is also a classical, temporally unified tale about sex (and love), although otherwise utterly different from Tape. A fleeting student romance is given the pathos and dignity of Dido and Aeneas’ – not my reference but Linklater’s, signalled during the credit sequence by the overture to Purcell’s opera. (Linklater’s musical editing is superb. He opens from a black screen during the slow introduction onto a shot of the track speeding away underneath the train that carries the to-be-lovers to Vienna, coinciding with the fugal Allegro: the cut is utterly compelling.) Other eighteenth-century musical excerpts give the drama an antique gravity that its sequel lacked: the lovers dance on the street at dawn to a harpsichordist playing the twenty-fifth – the bleakest, the most grief-stricken – of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and another Bach slow movement arches over the intensely moving final montage sequence, showing the places in Vienna the two have wandered through, talked in, made love in, in the cold light of morning (an old woman shuffling past the empty bottle and discarded wineglasses on the park lawn…).

Otherwise, unity of time is not interpreted as unity of story, but in a more open-ended, quasi-Romantic fashion. The time of the film is a frame, flung down arbitrarily over an area of life rather like one of those wire squares I remember throwing around on school biology field trips, to capture a finite segment of the local flora. Linklater’s flora is typically the oddball population of his home town, Austin, Texas, as in Slacker and Waking Life. The camera bounces pinball-style (pinball being another favourite Linklater image) from one conversation to another, neatly propelled (in Slacker) from dawn to dusk through the town by the serial encounters of its denizens, drinking, driving, (conspiracy-)theorizing. Conversations, especially speculative ones, are of central importance (as in the “philosophical” novels of Thomas Love Peacock). Linklater’s characters are extremely loquacious, and he loves to show the joy that springs from perpetuating interminable dialogues, free of all purpose and power. Talk is fascinating because it can take one anywhere, it is a continuous dérive or drift (the watchword of the Situationists, and the spirit of Godard, Rohmer, Eustache, Linklater’s French forebears), just like the movement of these characters or the camera that follows them. It is extravagant, pretentious, it fails to establish anything or “move the discussion on” (like a police officer!); but it is never mindless filling of empty space either, it knows very well the meaning of silence. It is after all, always referring to moments of silence and stillness – to dreams (Waking Life), to love (Before Sunset), to nature (the final scenes of Slacker and Dazed and Confused) – relating them with unconcealed excitement. (I find that very American, somehow! the excited refusal to concede ineffability to anything.) Sometimes, briefly, in the pauses between scenes of dialogue, those moments of stillness are echoed in the present tense – the camera lingers, refuses to cut, and makes one aware for just a second of the dumb mystery of the place we find ourselves in. In such moments too, the souls of the characters seem retrospectively to find their true weight, as Maeterlinck said in his great essay on silence (in Le trésor des humbles) “like gold and silver are weighed in water, and the words we utter have only their sense by grace of the silence in which they are bathed”. The achievement of Linklater’s style is that (as Maeterlinck also demanded) it bears this weight so lightly, in free, gentle, intimate rhythms, without resort to crushing dramatics or the apparatus of convention. I’m looking forward to the next film in which he will push this style on.