Richard Linklater’s Slacker, the Classic Gen‑X Indie Film

in Film | October 23rd, 2012

Think back to the Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film boom (some­times known as “indiewood”) of the nineties. Which of that time’s fresh-faced auteurs strike you as impor­tant? Which of their first fea­tures retain their impact? Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Reser­voir Dogs, cer­tain­ly; Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which sum­moned a vast fan cul­ture out of nowhere; Robert Rodriguez’s much-dis­cussed “$7,000 movie” El Mari­achi; Steven Soder­bergh’s con­cept-prov­ing Sex, Lies, and Video­tape, per­haps the bell­wether of the entire move­ment. But you may under­es­ti­mate Richard Lin­klater’s low-key debut Slack­er at your per­il.

He con­struct­ed the 1991 film (avail­able to view on YouTube) as a series of set pieces — some irrev­er­ent, some mean­der­ing, and some bizarre, but most all of them with stealth­ily uni­ver­sal res­o­nance — tak­ing place across the col­lege town of Austin, Texas. Dou­glas Cou­p­land hav­ing coined the term “Gen­er­a­tion X” with his epony­mous nov­el less than four months before, the North Amer­i­can zeit­geist had come to take seri­ous, if smirk­ing, notice of all these slouchy twen­tysome­things who seemed to turn up with­out warn­ing, spout­ing end­less streams of ideas, the­o­ries, wise­cracks, and elab­o­rate plans, yet drained of any­thing rec­og­niz­able as ambi­tion. These slack­ers, as we now call them with­out hes­i­ta­tion, make up the drama­tis per­sonæ of Slack­er. You can see them in their own pecu­liar type of action by watch­ing the pic­ture free online.

The first slack­er to appear, a deeply con­flict­ed motor­mouth in the back seat of a taxi, comes played by Lin­klater him­self. He seems nor­mal enough, essen­tial­ly an aim­less late-twen­tysome­thing you still meet in cof­fee shops today. But as the cam­era drifts from block to block, from neigh­bor­hood to Austin neigh­bor­hood, pick­ing up on any low-momen­tum sto­ry it can, behav­iors turn stranger. A book­store clerk who lives for JFK con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries log­or­rhe­ical­ly describes his own book-in-progress on the sub­ject to a help­less acquain­tance. A skin­ny stu­dent type liv­ing in a room crammed with tele­vi­sions and even wear­ing one on back claims des­per­a­tion to own yet anoth­er set. Two fel­lows egg a third on to throw a type­writer off a bridge and thus sym­bol­i­cal­ly final­ize a breakup. And let us nev­er for­get the immor­tal seg­ment where­in But­t­hole Surfers drum­mer Tere­sa Tay­lor attempts to sell what she describes as a “Madon­na pap smear.” Like the ear­ly films of Taran­ti­no, Smith, and Rodriguez, Slack­er remains thrilling­ly fun to watch, espe­cial­ly for the enthu­si­ast of micro-bud­get cin­e­ma. But some­where around its final pas­sage, which begins when a slack­er picks up the Pix­elvi­sion cam­era through which we our­selves see the next few min­utes, you real­ize you’ve been watch­ing some­thing on a high­er plane. Forced to bet which of the films of this move­ment schol­ars will rel­ish enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly a cen­tu­ry from now, I’d bet on Slack­er, which has now beed added to our ever-expand­ing list, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Alan Rickman Does Epic Violence to a Cup of Tea in Super Slow Motion

in Film, Random, Theatre | October 22nd, 2012

“Epic Tea Time with Alan Rick­man” comes from a video series called Por­traits in Dra­mat­ic Time, which fea­tures “an array of glacial­ly paced per­for­mances of the­ater artists and actors.” Accord­ing to its cre­ator David Michalek, the por­traits, each offer­ing “a phys­i­cal metaphor for an emo­tion­al con­di­tion,” were orig­i­nal­ly pro­ject­ed onto a build­ing facade at Lin­coln Cen­ter in New York City dur­ing a 2011 fes­ti­val. This par­tic­u­lar por­trait shows actor Alan Rick­man (you know him from Har­ry Pot­ter, Dog­ma, Die Hard, etc.) doing epic vio­lence to a cup of tea. As one YouTu­ber put it, “It’s a bit like watch­ing God cre­ate the uni­verse. A very angry God.”

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Watch Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang’s Censored Noir Film, Starring the Great Edward G. Robinson (1945)

in Film | October 19th, 2012

scarlet_street

A mil­que­toast cashier. A schem­ing pros­ti­tute. Her even hard­er-schem­ing boyfriend. The mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of art. A faked death. A sud­den, very real, mur­der. All of these hard noir ele­ments find their way into Scar­let Street, Fritz Lang’s ini­tial­ly dis­missed but sev­er­al times re-eval­u­at­ed 1945 crime pic­ture. We remem­ber the Aus­tri­an auteur, and right­ly so, for such immor­tal pieces of ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean cin­e­ma as Metrop­o­lis, M, and the Dr. Mabuse tril­o­gy.

But from the mid-thir­ties onward, Lang direct­ed Eng­lish-lan­guage films pro­lif­i­cal­ly, often using nov­els as source mate­r­i­al. You can watch Scar­let Street, a work from that peri­od which has drawn more and more cinephilic atten­tion since its release, free online. Star­ring Edward G. Robin­son as a cloth­ing-store clerk and hap­less part-time painter along­side Joan Ben­nett as his work­ing-girl object of frus­trat­ed desire, the film appeared as the sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Georges de La Fouchardière’s book La Chi­enne, the first hav­ing come from Jean Renoir.

“An uncom­pro­mis­ing sub­ver­sive remake,” crit­ic Den­nis Schwartz calls Scar­let Street, “with a par­tic­u­lar­ly acute Amer­i­can accent.” In Cin­e­ma Jour­nal, Matthew Bern­stein called it “dense, well-struc­tured film noir.” But the pic­ture came in for a crit­i­cal drub­bing at first: the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a slug­gish and man­u­fac­tured tale,” and Time bemoaned its “painful­ly obvi­ous sto­ry.” But what­ev­er the argu­ments about the movie’s artis­tic mer­it, it clear­ly touched a nerve with the New York State Cen­sor Board, who banned it on grounds that it “would tend to cor­rupt morals.“ ‘ The city cen­sor of Atlanta cit­ed “the sor­did life it por­trayed, the treat­ment of illic­it love, [and] the fail­ure of the char­ac­ters to receive ortho­dox pun­ish­ment from the police,” call­ing it “licen­tious, pro­fane, obscure and con­trary to the good order of the com­mu­ni­ty.” Does Scar­let Street retain its pow­er to shock? Did Lang craft it with a com­plex­i­ty and ele­gance not obvi­ous to Amer­i­can audi­ences of the mid-for­ties? Click play and find out for your­self.

Scar­let Street appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Film Noir Movies and our larg­er col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Hitch-Hik­er by Ida Lupino (the Only Female Direc­tor of a 1950s Noir Film)

Orson Welles’ The Stranger: Watch The Full Movie Online

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

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Visit the World of Little Nemo Artist Winsor McCay: Three Classic Animations

in Animation, Film | October 17th, 2012

If you stopped by Google’s home­page Mon­day, even for a moment, you sure­ly caught the incred­i­ble, ani­mat­ed doo­dle above, made in homage to car­toon­ist and ani­ma­tor Win­sor McCay (1869–1934). The occa­sion was the 107th anniver­sary of what has proved to be McCay’s most loved and endur­ing com­ic strip, Lit­tle Nemo in Slum­ber­land. Some­thing of a god­fa­ther to the philo­soph­i­cal whim­sy of car­toon­ists like Bill Wat­ter­son and Chris Ware, McCay’s com­ic art dom­i­nat­ed the car­toon genre in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry with strips like Nemo, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, and Lit­tle Sam­my Sneezes.

Google’s approach was to bring him into the 21st cen­tu­ry with a doo­dle that adapt­ed his style for the web. Chief doo­dler Jen­nifer Hom says, “we want­ed his style def­i­nite­ly… and his col­or palettes, but we also want­ed to take it from the per­spec­tive of how it would look if he designed it for the inter­net.” That’s all very well, but it became clear to me when perus­ing the online com­men­tary that many, many peo­ple do not know McCay’s work at all, nei­ther his style nor his col­or palettes. And after see­ing this doo­dle, many peo­ple want­ed to. I couldn’t rec­om­mend enough pick­ing up an edi­tion of McCay’s com­ic art. Below is a brief sur­vey of some of McCay’s finest work as an ani­ma­tor.

McCay got his start work­ing a “Dime Museum”—part amuse­ment park, part vaudeville—in Detroit, draw­ing por­traits of cus­tomers for 25 cents a piece. Dur­ing this time, he devel­oped his abil­i­ty to draw amaz­ing­ly fast, which served him well as a car­toon­ist but also played an impor­tant role in his work as an ani­ma­tor. Ear­ly-20th cen­tu­ry ani­ma­tion was, of course, drawn entire­ly by hand; unlike large stu­dios like Dis­ney, McCay did almost of the draw­ing him­self with occa­sion­al assis­tance. For the very pop­u­lar 1914 short film, “Ger­tie the Dinosaur” (below), McCay cre­at­ed 10,000 draw­ings in six months. Watch McCay him­self act the vaude­vil­lian impre­sario as he presents the mis­chie­vous Ger­tie, a very ear­ly exam­ple of live-action com­bined with ani­ma­tion.


As you can see above, McCay had a knack for show­man­ship. He went on vaude­ville tours with his short films, pre­sent­ing lec­tures on ani­ma­tion. While Ger­tie was a cre­ation made specif­i­cal­ly for film, much of McCay’s oth­er ani­ma­tions fea­tured char­ac­ters from his beloved com­ic strips. One of those comics, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend began the theme McCay would take up in Lit­tle Nemo, the strange, unset­tling, unpre­dictable world of dreams. This strip, how­ev­er, had no recur­ring char­ac­ters. In each “episode,” dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters expe­ri­enced some sort of bizarre or night­mar­ish fan­ta­sy after eat­ing Welsh rarebit, a cheese-on-toast dish. The strip catered to adults, express­ing grown-up anx­i­eties and fan­tasies, and spawned a live-action film in 1906 by Edwin S. Porter. McCay him­self ani­mat­ed four “Rarebit” dreams: How a Mos­qui­to Oper­ates in 1912 and The Pet, Bug Vaude­ville, and The Fly­ing House (below) in 1921. For con­trac­tu­al rea­sons, McCay drew the strip under the name “Silas,” hence the cred­it to “Silas” Win­sor McCay in the film.


The short film below brings togeth­er char­ac­ters from McCay’s beloved Lit­tle Nemo strip. One com­menter writes, the Google doo­dle “brought me here, and I am so hap­py it did.” McCay’s work tends to have that effect; his play­ful style, his elas­tic imag­i­na­tion and rev­er­ence for dream-log­ic, are irre­sistible (despite some dat­ed, stereo­typ­i­cal depic­tions). In this short film, the Nemo char­ac­ters per­form a num­ber of strange feats. Miss­ing only here is Nemo him­self, the boy-dream­er. Per­haps we, the audi­ence, are him, watch­ing our sub­con­scious dance on the screen.


Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Strange Tale of Rodriguez: Detroit Musician Becomes a Star in South Africa … Without Knowing It

in Film, Music | October 17th, 2012

Rock and pop musi­cians, as we all remem­ber from the end of This is Spinal Tap, some­times find fame in the least expect­ed coun­tries. Tufnel, St. Hub­bins, and Smalls found them­selves embraced in Japan, a coun­try that has since become the go-to cliché for the final rest­ing place of fan enthu­si­asm for Amer­i­can and Eng­lish has-beens and nev­er-weres. But what to say about a per­former who becomes famous specif­i­cal­ly in South Africa? It hap­pened to the singer-song­writer Rodriguez, the Detroit-bred son of Amer­i­can immi­grants whose 1970 and 1971 albums Cold Fact and Com­ing from Real­i­ty pro­vid­ed the sound­tracks for thou­sands upon thou­sands of South African ado­les­cences. His poet­ic protest songs seemed to hit home with a gen­er­a­tion fed up with apartheid soci­ety, and you can only imag­ine what a loss they must have felt upon hear­ing that their bard of choice had fatal­ly set him­self aflame onstage.

Both the South African pop­u­lar­i­ty and the rumors of self-immo­la­tion came as a sur­prise to the man him­self, who had remained liv­ing in Detroit as a stu­dent and demo­li­tion labor­er since the sev­en­ties. He’s since enjoyed occa­sion­al bursts of redis­cov­ery, like the one that sent him on his first South African tour in 1998, but only now, at age sev­en­ty, has he attained the kind of recog­ni­tion that his ded­i­cat­ed lis­ten­ers would insist he deserved long ago. This owes to the efforts of the young Swedish film­mak­er Malik Bend­jel­loul, whose iPhone-shot doc­u­men­tary Search­ing for Sug­ar Man opened the 2012 Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val with Rodriguez’s sto­ry. You can watch its trail­er at the top of this post, and a recent 60 Min­utes seg­ment fea­tur­ing Bend­jel­loul and Rodriguez him­self just above. YouTube also hosts many Rodriguez per­for­mances, includ­ing this ren­di­tion of his sig­na­ture song “Sug­ar Man” per­formed at the Triple Door in Seat­tle.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Making of The Empire Strikes Back Showcased on Long-Lost Dutch TV Documentary

in Film | October 16th, 2012

Note: The film switch­es to Eng­lish about 45 sec­onds in.

Ear­li­er this month, we fea­tured the launch of The Empire Strikes Back Uncut, a fan-dri­ven attempt to re-cre­ate the most beloved Star Wars movie of them all. But for an insight into the cre­ation of the orig­i­nal film, have a look at the Dutch tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above, The Mak­ing of The Empire Strikes Back (part one, part two). The broad­cast focus­es on the painstak­ing cre­ation of the film’s spe­cial effects, most of which still hold up 32 years after audi­ences first glimpsed them. We see the mod­els, the mat­te paint­ings, and even the pha­lanx of per­form­ers and tech­ni­cians need­ed to exe­cute the Nor­way-shot bat­tle on the ice plan­et Hoth. It took $18 mil­lion, so pro­duc­er Gary Kurtz tells us, to pull all of this off. Sure­ly that seemed an extrav­a­gant, no-expense-spared fig­ure in 1980, but today, in light of the prof­its, ded­i­cat­ed fan­base, and place in the zeit­geist, it sounds like a bar­gain.

Alas, The Mak­ing of the Empire Strikes Back exists on the inter­net only in an incom­plete form, but the sto­ry behind its redis­cov­ery turns out to be inter­est­ing enough to com­pen­sate. Star Wars fan site mintinbox.net offers a detailed four-part arti­cle on this, “one of the most lost doc­u­men­taries about The Empire Strikes Back.” Though direct­ed by famed French “grand-reporter-cam­era­man” Michel Par­bot, it fell into obscu­ri­ty soon after its ini­tial broad­cast. But read­ing of the sub­se­quent search for a dis­trib­utable copy, we real­ize that we under­es­ti­mate the com­pletist ardor of the Star Wars fan­dom at our per­il. A fas­ci­nat­ing read indeed, but per­haps, like the MetaFil­ter com­menter who could only exclaim “I HAVE SEEN A MAN IN A WAMPA SUIT,” you pre­fer sim­pler plea­sures.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hun­dreds of Fans Col­lec­tive­ly Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

Star Wars as Silent Film

Mark Hamil­l’s Star Wars Screen Test (Fea­tur­ing Har­ri­son Ford)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Behold Charles Laughton Delivering the Gettysburg Address in its Entirety in Ruggles of Red Gap

in Comedy, Film, History, Video - Arts & Culture | October 13th, 2012

The Get­tys­burg Address is the sort of elo­quent speech school­child­ren were once expect­ed to com­mit to mem­o­ry, much as they were required to bring apples for the teacher and dip each oth­ers’ pig­tails in ink. Nowa­days, with ever more his­tor­i­cal ground clam­or­ing to be cov­ered, it’s real­ly only those cel­e­brat­ed open­ing lines that tend to stick. No doubt they’ll show up in the Stephen Spiel­berg-direct­ed Lin­coln bio-pic slat­ed to open lat­er this fall.

Stray back in time for a real refresh­er course, cour­tesy of erst­while Hunch­back of Notre Dame and Shake­speare­an wun­derkind, Charles Laughton. His soup-to-nuts recita­tion of the cel­e­brat­ed speech is the unex­pect­ed high­light of Rug­gles of Red Gap, a 1935 screw­ball West­ern that time has rel­e­gat­ed to the semi-shad­ows. It’s a beau­ti­ful­ly under­stat­ed per­for­mance that man­ages to illu­mi­nate the mean­ing of each and every word. (It also makes me more for­giv­ing of the film’s ear­ly min­utes, when Laughton’s por­tray­al of a very prop­er Eng­lish but­ler suc­cumbs to a sil­ver-can­de­labra-up-the-hein­er lev­el of broad­ness.)

Just as impres­sive is direc­tor Leo McCarey’s deci­sion to set the scene atop a gid­dy vaude­ville rou­tine fea­tur­ing a saloon full of clue­less cow­boys and bar­keeps. It’s a ton of fun.

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Ishu Patel’s Oscar-Nominated, Animated Films Reveal a Singular, Handcrafted Vision

in Animation, Film | October 12th, 2012

I’m hap­py to date myself and say this: in the days before com­put­er graph­ics, when ani­ma­tors worked painstak­ing­ly by hand (yes, I know, com­put­er ren­der­ing is painstak­ing), ani­mat­ed films just seemed… I don’t know, pret­ti­er, more impres­sive­ly art­ful. I’ll take the heat for say­ing so and give you two short films as evi­dence, both from inno­v­a­tive ani­ma­tor Ishu Patel. Orig­i­nal­ly from Gujarat, India, Patel has made only a hand­ful of short films in his twen­ty-five year career, most of them for the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da. But six of those films won top hon­ors at inter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­vals and two—Par­adise and The Bead Game—were nom­i­nat­ed for Acad­e­my Awards.

Par­adise (above), made in 1984, uses hand-drawn designs and so-called “under-the-cam­era” ani­ma­tion tech­niques such as cut-out, back-lit plas­ticine, sand, and paint­ed glass to ren­der an exot­ic and shim­mer­ing world. Each frame is a work of art on its own; in fact, Patel includes stills from the films on his site, some show­ing pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es. Much of Par­adise takes place inside a palace that resem­bles an intri­cate chalk draw­ing. There, a lone monarch watch­es as a flam­boy­ant bird (of par­adise?) trans­forms itself into a daz­zling suc­ces­sion of col­or­ful forms. Out­side, in a land­scape right out of Hen­ri Rousseau, a soli­tary black bird lurks, attempt­ing to rival the oth­er bird’s beau­ty, with lit­tle suc­cess. The orig­i­nal score by Ghe­o­rghe Zam­fir (yes, Zam­fir, of the pan flute fame) con­jures Ennio Mor­ri­cone.

In 1977’s The Bead Game (below), Patel’s first ani­mat­ed film, the set­ting is much sparser—a sol­id black back­ground and a spare, per­cus­sive sound­track by J.P. Ghosh. But the activ­i­ty is unre­lent­ing as a col­lec­tion of beads evolve from sin­gle cells, to epithe­lial folds, to a series of crea­tures, each one devour­ing the pre­vi­ous until humans arrive. Once we do, we devel­op pro­gres­sive­ly more destruc­tive ways to kill each oth­er. The finale is a psy­che­del­ic tour-de-force. One can only imag­ine the amount of time and care that went into stop-motion ani­mat­ing these hun­dreds of beads. The effect is sim­ply stun­ning and results in a sin­gu­lar vision one rarely sees in CGI-only work. Again, I’ll take the heat, but I stand by it: ani­ma­tion by hand pro­duced work that no com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed image has yet rivaled.

Patel’s films will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our list of 500 Free Online Movies.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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