This event is part of the Richard Linklater Master Class. Learn more about the other events in the series. Package discounts available.
The pandemic has turned our collective sense of time inside out: disrupting routines, lengthening days, and obliterating the calendar’s familiar touchstones. It’s the perfect moment to delve into the work of Richard Linklater, the American filmmaker who has spent his career exploring (and manipulating) the passage of time.
In such films as SLACKER, DAZED AND CONFUSED, WAKING LIFE, TAPE, the BEFORE trilogy, and BOYHOOD, Linklater has stretched and compressed the way we experience time—both as a function of watching movies and as a means of making them. Often he has scrunched all of the action of a movie into a single, dreamlike sweep; sometimes a single day, sometimes a series of single days. Once, thrillingly, he stretched it into twelve years of real life captured in two-plus hours.
For this three-week Movie Madness Master Class, we’ll take an in-depth look at Linklater’s filmography. We’ll be joined by Richard Linklater; Melissa Maerz, author of Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused; and bestselling author Shawn Levy.
We can't provide the films themselves, but all are easily rentable on major streaming platforms. The classes will be streamed via Vimeo, and attendees will have the opportunity to submit questions for our guests via chat.
Please contact education@moviemadness.org if you have questions about accessibility.
DAZED AND CONFUSED: Linklater’s beloved teen comedy unfolds over the course of a single day: May 28, 1976, the last day of school at Lee High School in Austin, Texas. The film follows several groups of teenagers as they party, hook up, chat, endure adolescent rituals and rites of passage, and face down the future. We’ll be joined for this discussion by culture journalist Melissa Maerz, author of Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused.
About our special guest: Melissa Maerz has worked as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone, a staff writer for Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, and a supervising producer on HBO’s Vice News Tonight. She was a founding editor at New York magazine’s Vulture website. She lives in Portland, Oregon.