Elastic Time: A Richard Linklater Master Class (3 class package)

Showings

Digital Screen Room Tue, Apr 13, 2021 - Tue, Apr 27, 2021

Description

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.


April 13, 6:00pm: BOYHOOD with Richard Linklater—Filmed over the course of 12 years, BOYHOOD follows a boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), as he passes through childhood and adolescence to the brink of leaving home for college. As Mason ages and evolves, so do his divorced parents (Patricia Arquette, who won an Oscar in the role, and Linklater stalwart Ethan Hawke). The result is a breathtaking vision of lives evolving in both time-lapse and real time. 


April 20, 7:00pm: DAZED AND CONFUSED with Melissa Maerz—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.


April 27, 7:00pm: BEFORE SUNSET with Shawn Levy—Linklater’s Before trilogy follows two characters, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, as their relationship evolves from a chance meeting on a train to a lifelong connection. The films tell one story but were released at nine-year intervals, allowing the actors to age in real time as their lives unfold. We’ll be focusing on the second film in the series, but our discussion will touch on all three.


 **Please note that the BOYHOOD discussion begins at 6:00pm PST, while the other two events in the series begin at 7:00pm.


RICHARD LINKLATER
Richard Linklater is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose films include the Before trilogy, DAZED AND CONFUSED, WAKING LIFE, BOYHOOD, and many others. He lives in Austin, where he founded the Austin Film Society in 1985.


MELISSA MAERZ
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.


SHAWN LEVY
Shawn Levy is the international bestselling author of eleven books of biography and pop culture history, including The Castle on Sunset, Paul Newman: A Life, Rat Pack Confidential, and the forthcoming In on the Joke:  The Original Queens of Standup Comedy. A former film critic for The Oregonian and KGW-TV, he has written for The New York Times, Interview, Sight and Sound, Variety, The Guardian, The Village Voice, The Black Rock Beacon, and many other publications. He is not the Shawn Levy who produces and directs Stranger Things, and he doesn't know how to contact him. See shawnlevy.com for more information.