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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater

Edited by Kim Wilkins and Timotheus Vermeulen

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£95.00

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About this book

The first edited collection of critical essays on American filmmaker Richard Linklater
  • Analyses both Linklater’s celebrated and understudied work in dialogue with ongoing debates in film studies
  • Considers the impact of Linklater’s oeuvre in industrial and cultural contexts, with a focus on gender, identity politics, American politics, and animal rights
  • Connects Linklater to relevant American political and cultural events and institutions

Richard Linklater is a popular American filmmaker who is widely celebrated for the breadth of his oeuvre. Over the past three decades, Linklater has directed more than twenty features, ranging from non-linear independent films to Hollywood genre entertainment. Despite the popularity of Linklater’s rich and varied body of work—and perhaps also because of this generic diversity—he remains under-represented in critical and scholarly fora.

ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater addresses this oversight, bringing together twelve original essays attending to Linklater as a filmmaker whose work engages with contemporary debates in American politics, gender, youth, and activism as well as significant concepts in film studies, including time and duration, rhythm, and movement. Together these essays form a dialogue on Linklater’s ongoing role in contemporary American popular culture, and the impact his work has on discussions within (and beyond) film studies.

Reviews

Linklater has quietly developed into one of his generation’s most celebrated directors, and this excellent collection helps to explain why. Fittingly conceptually heterogeneous, its chapters offer innumerable fresh dialogues with key philosophical, aesthetic, and sociopolitical dimensions of the filmmaker's most fêted and lesser-known work. A rich and rewarding text.

In this collection of essays, Wilkins and Vermeuelen showcase recent debates about, and interpretations of, the films of Richard Linklater, an Austin, Texas, auteur whose work has long walked a fine line between art cinema and Hollywood-friendly genre offerings. The best essays look at major stylistic issues across multiple films: for example Bruce Isaacs explores time in Linklater’s films, and Christopher Holliday looks at Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly and their innovative mixture of Linklater’s long take and smooth style meeting the discordant and sometimes syncopated rhythms of the Rotoshop animation process. Though Linklater still seems young and is identified with youth films, the book makes a case for a mature and deeply considered career. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.
In this collection of essays, Wilkins and Vermeulen showcase recent debates about, and interpretations of, the films of Richard Linklater, an Austin, Texas, auteur whose work has long walked a fine line between art cinema and Hollywood-friendly genre offerings. The best essays look at major stylistic issues across multiple films: for example Bruce Isaacs explores time in Linklater’s films, and Christopher Holliday looks at Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly and their innovative mixture of Linklater’s long take and smooth style meeting the discordant and sometimes syncopated rhythms of the Rotoshop animation process. Though Linklater still seems young and is identified with youth films, the book makes a case for a mature and deeply considered career. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Rather than trying to fit Linklater’s filmmaking and its shifts between scales of production and variances in narrative, style and theme into a singular auteurist vision, this collection skillfully promotes the value of approaching artistic achievement from different perspectives. What emerges is a critically rich exploration of resemblance and relationality.

Table of contents

List of figuresNotes on contributors

Introduction: Linklater’s itinerant oeuvre - Kim Wilkins and Timotheus Vermeulen

Part 1: Auteur Cinema in Context

1. ‘I Think I Still Qualify as a Slacker …Just One that’s Currently Lucky’: The Myths of Slacker, Austin, and Richard Linklater - Mary P. Erickson

2. On Being a Vegetarian in Texas: The Incongruities and Politics of Linklater’s Fast Food Nation - Claire Parkinson

3. The Little Space Between Hal Ashby and Richard Linklater - Rob Stone

4. On Drifts and Swerves: Linklater’s Love for Lacunae - Jeroen Boom

Part 2: Genre

5. Richard Linklater and the Field of American Dreams - Timotheus Vermeulen

6. Boyhood: Linklater’s Testament of American Youth After 9/11 - Timothy Shary

7. The (Un)bearable Weight of Gendered Genre: Richard Linklater’s post-Boyhood Masculinities - Mary Harrod

8. Stories So Far: Romantic Comedy and/as Space in Before Midnight - Celestino Deleyto

Part 3: Style and Meaning

9. Empathetic Effort in Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Bernie - Kim Wilkins

10. Richard Linklater’s Humanism: Moral Primacy, Recency Effects and SubUrbia - Wyatt Moss-Wellington

11. Keeping Time in Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Boyhood - Bruce Isaacs

12. Rhythm and the Rotoshop: Waking Life (2001), A Scanner Darkly (2006) and Rhythmanalysis - Christopher Holliday

About the contributors

Kim Wilkins

Kim Wilkins is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Screen Cultures at the University of Oslo. She is the author of American Eccentric Cinema (2019) and co-editor with Wyatt Moss-Wellington of Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (2019). She has published widely on American indie cinema, German film, and television in numerous journals and edited collections.

Timotheus Vermeulen

Timotheus Vermeulen is Professor of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo. He has published widely on screen media, contemporary art and cultural theory. Books include Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism (2017), edited with Robin van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, Anmerkungen zur Metamoderne, (2015), Scenes from the Suburbs (2014) and New Suburban Stories (2013), edited with Martin Dines. Vermeulen is a regular contributor to Frieze.

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