The Cinema of Richard
Linklater: walk, don’t run. By Rob Stone.
West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2013. pp. 224 + vii.
Existing as part of the Wallflower
Press’s Directors’ Cuts series, one
that boasts titles on auteurs ranging from Takeshi Kitano to Terry Gilliam, Rob
Stone’s nuanced study of Richard Linklater takes one remarkable step in making
amends for the relatively little amount of work to be found on one of the most
innovative of contemporary filmmakers. One of the objectives of this series of
monographs is to illuminate the creative dynamics of World Cinema, a commitment
to art that is embodied by Linklater himself, who made the decision to place
himself in a world ‘that was just about your artistic desires’.[1]
This world, as addressed in Stone’s
opening chapter ‘Locating Linklater’, is that of the Texas University campus
and its surrounding areas. Somewhat convincingly, Stone outlines the importance
of such a liberal, creative and bohemian landscape to the development of ‘a
prime contradiction: the committed slacker, which remains the dominant theme in
Linklater’s cinema.’[2]
For Linklater and his band of slackers, then, Austin is transformed into a
utopia of creative activity politicised in its opposition to the cut-throat
world of Reaganomics being espoused by America at large. As the title-card in Slacker reads: ‘withdrawal in disgust is
not the same as apathy’[3],
a sentiment that Stone dexterously links to Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, a group ‘who
refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces’ and are ‘at
once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.’[4]
From locating Linklater
geographically, Stone goes on to display the problems in placing the director
amongst the taxonomies of film. Neither belonging to the studio-systems, nor being
wholly independent, Linklater is shown to occupy an area of grey that has seen
him produce blockbuster films such as School
of Rock, adapt plays (SubUrbia, Tape),
shoot digitally (Tape) and explore
post-production rotoscoping as a means of enhancing the oneiric qualities of
his contemplative cinema (A Scanner
Darkly, Waking Life). The implications that Stone draws from this cast
Linklater as a composite Modernist figure who employs ‘the techniques of
associative thought favoured by the Surrealists, the dérive of the Situationist International and the experiments with
film language of Godard.’[5]
The inclusions here of Guy Debord’s
theory of the dérive, Gilles
Deleuze’s notion of the ‘time-image’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the carnival
are masterfully appropriated with the cinema of Linklater, the rewards being of
valuable insight to the diligent reader. Rather neatly, Stone moves from an
investigation of the spatial aspects of this cinema to the temporal, building
an argument all the while that confirms Linklater, and his work, to embody the
ethos of revolutionary withdrawal; of committed slacking.
Ultimately, this book is invaluable to anyone
with an interest in understanding the works of one of cinema’s most intelligent
directors. It comes with just the one caveat: a work as well-researched and
packed with ideas as this requires a pace not dissimilar to Linklater’s films;
so, like the subtitle of this book, when approaching Stone’s writing: walk,
don’t run.
[1] Rob
Stone, The Cinema of Richard Linklater:
walk, don’t run (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 16.
[2] Ibid.,
p. 1.
[3] Slacker, dir. by Richard Linklater
(Detour Film Production, 1991)
[4] Robert
Louis Stevenson cited in The Cinema of
Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run (Columbia University Press, 2013) p.
108.
[5] Ibid.,
p. 99.
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