Q: Haynes has seemingly taken radical shifts in direction from film to film. Is there a commonality that can be found in each of his works?

White: Roughly speaking, Haynes alternates between films about “rock’n’roll suicide” (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and domestic melodramas (Safe, Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce). Then there are Poison and the TV short Dottie Gets Spanked, which make up a kind of early 1990s “New Queer Cinema” interlude. The music films are narratively complex mosaics whereas the family movies are linear, and that difference reinforces the pattern of alternation. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to split his work like this but of course it’s not a hard and fast division. There are numerous interconnections and one in particular comes to the fore in my book: it’s the drama of leaving home—which is both a specific story incident in almost all of Haynes’s films and something more symbolic. This ordinary life event takes on a larger metaphorical significance as a defining act of social noncompliance.

Home in Haynes’s films isn’t a happy place, even when it’s loving and protective. It’s a place of danger, especially for the misfit (though normality is tough too). Sometimes home is horrible or haunted—somewhere to get trapped or go mad. In perhaps the most powerful scene in the glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, away from all its music-industry glitz and glamor, the teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) is humiliated by his father. Soon afterward he escapes on a bus from Manchester to London, and while the scene is made poignant by the fact that his mother runs after the vehicle to wave goodbye, it’s a scene of liberation, temporary and insufficient though it proves to be.

A more complex example is the journey Safe’s Carol (Julianne Moore) takes from her affluent life in southern California to a recovery community in New Mexico. Her conventional life has become unendurable—the comfort of it has actually started to make her sick—but her search for something better is much more risky than she realizes. Through such stories, Haynes dwells on the fundamental political question of what it means (and costs) not to belong, and I very much wanted in the book to stress the
consistency, coherence, and seriousness of this preoccupation in his work.

Q: How useful is the “New Queer Cinema” label to describe Haynes’s work?

White: Haynes’s place in gay cinema is somewhat paradoxical and this goes for the narrower question of his affiliation to New Queer Cinema too. The difficulty is that Haynes doesn’t dwell on gay subject matter in the obviously direct (and oppositional) fashion of New Queer Cinema films like Greg Araki’s The Living End, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, or Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Haynes’s gay stories and characters are more ambivalent or tangential. For example, the men who have sex with men in the “Homo” storyline (adapted from Jean Genet) of Poison couldn’t be called role models. Then there’s tormented Frank (Dennis Quaid) in 1950s Far from Heaven, who meets a young man by the pool while on holiday and later admits desperately to his wife before he leaves her that only now does he comprehend what love is. Self-hatred and inhibition are burdens it’s hard to imagine ever lifting from him.

The problem is only resolved if “queer” is understood to be something that encompasses but goes beyond homosexuality itself. In a Film Quarterly interview published in 1993, a year after critic B. Ruby Rich baptized the New Queer Cinema movement, Haynes said: “People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film. . . . I think that’s really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?” Queer is perhaps most usefully thought about in relation to Haynes’s films not as a sexual orientation but as a general name for refusing social and artistic norms. (After all, gay people can be just as
conservative as straight.) Once the idea is broadened like this, the heroically rebellious queers in Haynes’s films include not only the centrally important character of Richie in Poison’s “Hero” story, a boy who kills his father and abandons his mother, but also Carol in Safe and even, perhaps, for a little while, Mildred (Kate Winslet) in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce.  

Q: Unlike many “serious” filmmakers, Haynes does not shy from melodrama. Why does he embrace this cinematic tradition?

White: Haynes’s relation to melodrama really needs a whole book to itself. Haynes inherits both from directors like Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls—emigrés who mastered the Hollywood domestic melodrama after World War II—and from the validation of their work in the 1970s by radical film critics and by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder as stinging critiques of the American mainstream rather than apolitical lightweight entertainment. (This question of the politics of melodrama continues to be debated, particularly in regard to Sirk: some insist that there’s no true subversive force in his films, though I certainly disagree.) Fassbinder updated Sirk in films like The Merchant of Four Seasons and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by making the attack on normality more explicit: the depiction of social cruelty and regimentation isn’t ambiguous in Fassbinder’s melodramas, as it mostly is in a Sirk film such as All That Heaven Allows. Haynes knowingly revives a lot of the Sirkian ironic varnish, but in full consciousness of and
affinity with Fassbinder’s less guarded reinvention.

Perhaps the crucial thing is that cinematic melodrama allows its exponents to play on
two boards: sympathetically exploiting the dramatic pathos of family strife at the same time as exposing the dark side of small-town conformism. Perhaps what appeals to such intelligent directors about melodrama is precisely that it can work in different and even conflicting ways at the same time. You can consider Far from Heaven, Haynes’s most direct homage to Sirk and Ophuls and Fassbinder, to be mainly a playful postmodern pastiche full of knowing allusions; you can be moved to tears by the characters’ struggles; or, as I do, you can regard the film as Haynes’s most hopeless and disturbing account of social entrapment. Maybe you can even do all three, and no doubt there are other alternatives too.

Q: You interviewed Haynes at length for the book: what struck you most about his responses?

White: There were three interviews, which were eventually edited together. The first two
occurred when the writing was underway, the last when it was nearly finished. Talking to the subject of a book of criticism is of course both rewarding and potentially inhibiting because of a certain “anxiety of influence.” Even by the high standards of many directors, Haynes is precise and persuasive about the intended meanings of his films—his DVD commentary tracks are particularly interesting and absorbing. (There wasn’t a commentary available on Velvet Goldmine for a long time, but fortunately for my research the 2011 Blu-ray edition put this absence right.) We discussed each of Haynes’s films, including his high-school effort (which unfortunately wasn’t available to view), The Suicide, and his graduation film, Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (which I did see and so could identify its traces in the subsequent Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There). As it happened, by the way, Haynes’s comments about Safe ended up being the most directly influential on my interpretation.

I decided after the first interview not to quote from these new discussions in my analyses. There were a couple of reasons for this decision. The first is that the commentary tracks have a particular immediacy—Haynes is there actually watching the film while commenting—that gave plenty of detail to engage with. The second is that to partition analysis and interview in this way offers the reader the opportunity to consider Haynes’s statements without my explicit commentary on them. The separation obviously isn’t complete, the interviews permeate the analyses, but I hope this decision makes the reader’s experience more interesting. In any case, at the heart of my sense of Haynes’s work are representations in his films of mysterious solitude and psychic remove—but I
think it’s fair to add that the author himself doesn’t stress these depictions to the same degree.

What was very interesting to me about the interviews was Haynes’s undiminished
commitment to a radical critique of society—for example, when he affirms the continuing inspiration of Jean Genet or says: “The society is telling you that if you do these things you’re gonna be fine, and everything’s good, and you’ll be accepted, but you never really believe it, and we’re haunted by that.” But such remarks aren’t surprising, finally. Of all his films, I’m Not There probably has the bluntest political edge and for a while it could have seemed like Haynes was mellowing. But then, in many ways unexpectedly, along came the really tremendous Mildred Pierce, which is as edgy and haunted as anything Haynes has made (and in many ways the best synthesis yet of the different strands of his work). It’s just a masterpiece and I absolutely relished the opportunity to write about it early on in its life.

*****

Photo courtesy of Rob White.

L. Andrew Cooper

Q: How does Dario Argento’s work fit into the genre of “giallo?”

Cooper: The “giallo” is an Italian crime thriller set apart by violent, extravagant set pieces. “Giallo” means yellow, and the term refers to the yellow covers traditionally associated with the crime novels (often Italian translations of English-language originals) that inspired many of the films.  Argento’s directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) took the giallo to new levels of intricate mayhem, and his fifth feature, Deep Red (1975), experimented with nightmarish visuals that helped make it one of the genre’s most successful films.  Giallo conventions appear in almost all of Argento’s films, but Suspiria (1977) and other supernaturally-themed films stray too far from the giallo’s core of crime and mystery to qualify. His purest later gialli are probably Tenebre (1982), which features one of Argento’s easiest-to-follow (yet still awfully baroque) storylines, and Sleepless (2001), a late return-to-form that has helped to keep the giallo alive in the twenty-first century.

Q: Argento is thought of mostly for his horror films.  Is his work in other genres overlooked?

Cooper: Argento has often said that he can accomplish everything he wants to do with character and imagery in horror films and gialli.  His one feature outside these genres, The Five Days of Milan (1973), is worth seeing because it carries the director’s visual and narrative eccentricities into new territory, but it is a minor work.  In Argento’s films, genre provides a platform for stylistic experimentation unbounded by the norms of realism and rationality.  Horror is a starting point for thinking and feeling in Argento’s films: looking at where each film goes from that point, rather than focusing on genre as a limitation, might be the best way to approach Argento’s work.

Q: Early in his career Argento was called “the Italian Hitchcock.”  Was that a valid comparison?

Cooper: Yes and no.  The giallo, like its American cousin the slasher, builds explicitly on Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).  Because Argento gave the giallo visual intensity akin to what Hitchcock typically brought to his subjects, Argento was branded as “the Italian Hitchcock” almost immediately after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  As I argue in my book, Bird is already in dialogue with Psycho and the traditions it inaugurated; the label “the Italian Hitchcock” helped to extend this dialogue throughout Argento’s career, culminating in Argento’s film Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005).  Despite the obvious importance of Hitchcock in Argento’s work, however, the comparison is somewhat superficial.  Popular perceptions of Hitchcock frame him as a master storyteller with acute psychological insight.  By contrast, Argento’s films privilege neither story nor psychology, preferring disorienting, abstract imagery and narratives that defy human agency and logical sense.

Q: Who are some filmmakers which Argento has influenced over his long career?

Cooper: Filmmakers around the world acknowledge Argento as an important influence. George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), John Carpenter (Halloween, 1978), James Wan (Saw, 2004), Pascal Laugier (Martyrs, 2008), Mick Garris (Masters of Horror, TV, 2005 – 2007), Takashi Miike (Audition, 1999), Eli Roth (Hostel, 2005), and Quentin
Tarantino (Death Proof, 2007) are only a few of the filmmakers who have  explicitly acknowledged Argento’s contributions to their stylistic development.

Q: Many of Argento’s films are both violent and visually striking.  His critics have claimed his  excessive visuals are at the expense of narrative.  Is this a valid criticism?

Cooper: The many critics who condemn Argento’s films for bad storytelling and bad acting miss one of Argento’s most important contributions to the history of cinema: over several decades, his work has developed a sustained critique of narrative and psychological conventions.  My book explores this critique in detail, so here I’ll limit myself to saying that Argento gives horror/grindhouse audiences what Michelangelo Antonioni started giving arthouse audiences in the 1960s.  Like Antonioni’s, Argento’s films explore untenable searches for truth amidst the fragmentation of (post)modern
existence.  The two filmmakers’ generic and visual vocabularies differ radically, and they don’t always point toward the same conclusions, but their attacks on traditionally accessible narrative follow similar courses.

Q: How does Argento handle sexuality and gender issues in his films?

Cooper: Controversially.  I believe that the man himself has views of sexuality and gender that most people would call progressive, but the man’s views are less important than the difficult depictions of sexuality and gender in his works.  He most often comes under attack for the films’ graphic violence against women, whose bodies are objectified and torn apart in film after film.  As a result, some critics dismiss his films as misogynistic.  Such  dismissals rarely take into account the self-conscious strategies that the films use to call attention to the cultural processes that dehumanize women and men alike.  Some critics also see the frequent appearance of queer characters as symptoms of homophobia, but they also fail to account for ways in which the strikingly frequent appearance of queerness undermines sexual prejudice.  In Argento’s films, aestheticized violence turns toward ethical ends, and those ends include exposing misogyny and homophobia as shallow and ignorant structures of feeling.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Cooper: Argento is one of the most written-about directors in popular cinema, but very little of that writing is academic.  Academics are often blinded to his work’s cultural significance because they can’t see past (or see with and through) the lowbrow status of the horror genre or the disturbing violence of the horrific imagery.  What surprised me most is how consistently and pervasively Argento’s films speak to academic critics’ concerns.  I find a lot of “auteur” criticism uninteresting because it indulges in myths of solitary artistic genius and fallacies of intention, but even as Argento’s films raise questions about the possibility of individual agency and the desirability of coherent narrative, the corpus as a whole is individually distinct and offers a remarkably coherent vision.  I don’t really care whether this vision was born from Argento’s conscious intent, but I see the vision clearly across his works, and the longer I look at this vision, the more profound it seems.

Life of Pi

Shilpa Davé, author of the forthcoming University of Illinois Press book Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, writes about the “South Asian Invasion” of this year’s Academy Awards.

In an article for the South Asian American Digital Archive blog, Davé writes that Life of Pi wasn’t the only film recognized by the Academy in which Indian accents were thriving.

(Photo: Loren Javier, Flickr Creative Commons)

She will be sharing the microphone with A.O. Scott of the New York Times, David Denby of the New Yorker, and Dana Stevens of Slate.com.

Her critically acclaimed book in our Contemporary Film Directors series was published earlier this year.

“A thoughtful, scholarly study of one of America’s most underrated filmmakers.”–Leonard Maltin

“A sympathetic, in-depth, and entirely jargon-free look at Kaufman’s work.”–DGA Quarterly

“A shrewd and very readable study.”–Filmmaker

“Superb.”–Hollywood Reporter

“A study so closely tuned to his work and so neatly supplemented with his own insights from interviews and e-mails that it reads like a biography of an oeuvre.”–The New Yorker online

Barbara (2012) was recently named Germany’s submission for the Oscar for best foreign-language film (it also won the Silver Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival for best director).  The film, set in East Germany in 1980, is a historical drama that extends Petzold’s interest in a determined female protagonist moving, and moved, along a political and economic precipice.  In what seems a pointed response to other recent films about East Germany, Petzold offers a microscopic, and micropolitical, examination engaged with the experience of different political systems, those systems’ ideas as well as modes of existence and above all work.

Over the past fifteen years and across some ten feature films, Christian Petzold has established himself as the most critically celebrated director in Germany, probably the most acclaimed director there since Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. With his reputation established in Europe and rising elsewhere, Fisher’s forthcoming book analyzes his cinema’s unique negotiation of art and popular genre
cinema.  This volume investigates how Petzold explores a variety of popular genres, including horror, film noir, and melodrama. He explores these popular genres while injecting them with themes like terrorism, globalization, and immigration, central issues for European art cinema. The volume also includes a long, original interview with the director about his work.

Jaimey Fisher is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Technocultural Studies as well as Director of Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author of Disciplining German: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (2007).

Click here for more information on the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Film Directors series.

David Johnson: You’ve talked in the past [about college] being a time when you started getting interested in literature, in theater, in film, and so forth. Were there any particular experiences around that time that turned you on to that, or was it just a general disposition to being open to those sorts of things?

Richard Linklater:  You know, I had always been a reader, but in the school system I grew up in, it felt like a small part of the big experience. In high school I wanted to grow up and be a novelist of some kind, that’s what I was thinking—I wanted to write or express myself, I knew that at an early age. But . . . the great thing about college for me was to have that go up a notch, where suddenly I’m in English classes, and there’s a professor, and he makes a living talking about that. And then all of the students, they don’t care about sports—that wasn’t the emphasis. The emphasis was these great books; we’re talking about  Kafka, we’re talking about Dostoevsky. To have that kind of excitement, and to feel like that was sanctioned—it wasn’t just a little subdivision, a little asterisk of your life, it was like, wow, it can be front and center, you can be an English major. Then, through that, I took a playwriting class that was, while technically in the English Department—this is my sophomore year—a lot of drama majors, and I met a lot of people in the Drama Department. I think the summer before I had started dating a girl who was in the Drama Department, an actress, and I remember going to a couple of productions she was in, then meeting her friends, and that whole world opened up. It just seemed exciting.

Taking a playwriting class was very different than taking an acting or directing class. Playwriting was a good foot in the door for me, just to study playwrights. And that’s when I could feel my ambitions shifting from literature to drama; my new heroes were Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill, and Sam Shepard. I thought, maybe I’m a playwright. I wrote
a few plays. I really enjoyed it, and that’s where I was going, just for a semester, but it has fueled my lifelong love of theater ever since—the romance of it, the atmosphere of it. But then, somewhere in there, right on the heels of that, was watching movies. That was the early days of the VCR—no one had them at home yet, this is like ’81—but in the English Department there was one. And I noticed there was this little film [group]. [I’d get] a couple of friends, and we’d go watch the movie. The professor—every English professor is a film critic, right?—was Ralph Pease, who was a real film buff. And so we sat there and would talk about the movie after. I really enjoyed that. And that was just enough to get me started with movies.

Shortly thereafter, I was done with school, and I was working offshore in Houston, but in my time off, I started looking up movies, and that was still the heyday of repertory cinema. That’s when I found myself in the theater all of the time; I would watch four movies a day. That’s where that started. And a few people I knew were doing theater in Houston, so I would go to a play or something. But for the most part, I just found myself at the movies. So all of that is a pretty quick little segue, from literature to theater to film, in six months.

The New Yorker

“Welcoming East Coast members of Wanderers Nation to the Film Society of Lincoln Center screening will be Annette Insdorf, author of ‘Philip Kaufman,’ a study so closely tuned to his work and so neatly supplemented with his own insights from interviews and e-mails that it reads like a biography of an oeuvre.”–Michael Sragow

Michael Kaminer: There’s a bright spotlight on you, 48 years after  your first film. Why now?

Philip Kaufman: You tell me. I try to resist the “overview,” and to leave that to others. I just want to make films, live the life of making  films, to dream constantly of films. Thinking about the consequences — reviews,  box-office, retrospectives, etc. — wakes me from the dream, like waking from a  nightmare. Maybe a better alternative answer: Why not? Another answer: I love Annette Insdorf.

*****

Us too! Annette Insdorf is the director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and author of Philip Kaufman, a new volume in our Contemporary Film Directors series.

Q:  On paper, the subjects of Linklater’s films seem very diverse—Before Sunset, Fast Food Nation, School of Rock, Waking Life, etc.  Is there a pattern to how he has chosen his projects?

Johnson:  That’s a really interesting question, and it’s actually how I begin the book:  how do we compare that moment when Jesse first sees Celine in Before Sunset to the moment when Sylvia takes her place on the slaughterhouse line in Fast Food Nation, neither of which are really at all like the moment when the kids rock out over the closing credits in School of Rock?  The answer is, in one sense, we can’t—these are totally different moments that reflect totally different films.  So there isn’t a clear answer there, at least initially, but my argument has been, let’s not allow that to stop us from taking these films seriously or talking about them as a group.  One of the fascinating aspects of the writing right now on Linklater, for example, even if we look just at the reviews that have been coming out around the release of his new movie Bernie, is how much of it reflects this very idea—that there isn’t a really clear pattern in his work.  I think this response has often led to a certain trepidation, on the part of writers, whether journalists or academics or both, to talk about his filmmaking with the kind of seriousness it deserves—that and the fact that humor plays such an important part in so many of the films.  And that’s too bad, because it’s meant we tend to undervalue the work that Detour, Linklater’s production company, has been putting out now regularly for over two decades.  My own approach has been to say that, like others, I recognize that the movies do not present any identifiable patterns—but let’s push past that and see what else the movies have to say.  Let’s treat them seriously and put them into dialogue with one another, while trying to respect what makes each one unique. My entrance into that conversation has been the subject of time, which broadly encompasses many different impulses within the films, even though I try to acknowledge that this is just one of many ways we might talk about them.

Q:  What drew you to these films in the first place?

Johnson:  I had one of those experiences in my twenties where I  realized that several movies I admired a great deal were all directed by the  same person—Linklater!  And then, while I  was in graduate school, I had a friend with whom I’d often talk about  Linklater’s movies, but we’d complain that we couldn’t really find any articles  or books about his films that treated them at greater length.  A few years later, some great material started to show up, particularly online—the online journal Reverse Shot did a symposium on him, with a long interview, that  really inspired me quite a lot.  But I  still felt as though we had not yet reached a point where there was enough critical material on his work.  And so I thought that this book might provide an opportunity for us to start to talking even more seriously about the films, and my hope is that others, too, will continue to move that conversation forward.

Q:  Where did Linklater’s preoccupation with the concept of time arise?

Johnson:  Linklater began by making films that were directly indebted to the avant-garde tradition, which itself was fascinated with time in the work of filmmakers like James Benning or Chantal Akerman (two filmmakers Linklater has cited as direct influences).  His first film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, really reflects that tradition (what P. Adams Sitney termed the “structural film”—think static camera shots, often long takes, of a character doing very little that a more conventional film would deem
narratively important).  Another important influence was the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose book on filmmaking, Sculpting in Time, Linklater has cited in a number of interviews. And of course, many of his films have frequently been limited to a very
specific amount of time, particularly in the early part of his career—Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, and subUrbia all take place over roughly twenty-four hours or less.  But he has gone in the other direction too, stretching films out narratively over
years and years, as in an experiment he’s currently working on called Boyhood, where he has been filming the same actors over a twelve-year period to make a narrative film about a boy’s growing up in more or less the same amount of years. (I believe he is now in year ten.)  And then, so many of the characters themselves talk about time very directly, probably none more so than Celine and Jesse in the Before films.  So it is a preoccupation that he has returned to, again and again, and it seemed like a great entrance for me into the films as a whole.

Q:  What is your favorite film that Linklater has directed?

A:  Before Sunset.  It was voted one of the top films of the decade by Film Comment magazine in 2010, and it was a well-deserved honor.  Before Sunrise, a film made nine years earlier, is about a young man and woman, in their early twenties, who meet in Europe, fall in love (in 24 hours), and then depart, making plans to meet six months later.  Before Sunset is what happens nine years later when the young man, now in his early thirties, is on a book tour in Paris and runs into the woman.  What happened nine years ago?  What’s happened since?  All of these and other questions play out in a fascinating, real-time stroll around Paris in the late afternoon.  Since the same actors play the same characters (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke)—and since the actors have aged as much as the characters—there’s almost a documentary effect within these two romantic films.  In fact, Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke—all three of whom wrote Before Sunset (and who also wrote, with Kim Krizan, the first film)—are planning a third film right now that will pick up on the couple, once again, a few years later, to see what’s become of them.  Hawke said of the second film that he thought that eventually they might make several such films that would be a kind of “document on love and relationships,” and I think this film bodes very well for their next effort.  Plus, it has one of the most subtle but best endings in any of Linklater’s films.

Q:  How important is the use of music in Linklater’s films?

Johnson:  Music is probably one of the main ways that my own memory connects with these films, even if it is just one part of the entire experience.  I always think of Mitch at the end of Dazed and Confused putting on his giant headphones after an incredible night on the town, as “Slow Ride,” by Foghat, fills the soundtrack—one of the most blissful musical moments in any of the films—or, at the beginning of the same movie, Pickford’s car pulling into the parking lot as Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” kicks in.  School of Rock, also, celebrates the bliss of rock, whether when the kids perform the title song at the big contest or jam over the credit sequence to AC/DC.  So music has certainly served as an important touchstone to my memories with these films, but in general, I’m not sure I
would say that music plays quite the same role in every film—it’s used to different ends, depending on the subject, the genre, and other concerns, and certainly not always involving rock and roll. Two of the other great musical moments, after all, are when Celine and Jesse listen to “Come Here,” the Kath Bloom song, in the record booth scene from Before Sunrise, or when Celine imitates Nina Simone in her apartment, Jesse lying back on her futon, at the closing of Before Sunset (an ending that never fails to knock me out).  I also think of an instrumental “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” from the end of Me and Orson Welles, a poignant accompaniment to Richard’s going over the memorabilia of his one week in the theater.  And then, to go a little further, some films are notable for the ways they might underplay or withhold music.  Tape, for example, derives much of its power from its not using any musical scoring during its heated exchanges—the raw power of those scenes thus turn in part on not being prompted by any cues from the soundtrack.  So like the films themselves, the approach to music often varies widely, and that’s part of what makes them so interesting.

Q:  What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Johnson:  I hope what readers take away from the book is a desire to learn more—not just about Richard Linklater and the films he has directed—though certainly that!—but
the cinema more generally and, even further, subjects that would fall under the whole notion of a humanities education, such as cinema, art, literature, history, and so many other fields of study.  The humanities tend to get bad press these days—in a climate of economic constriction, why would anyone invest their time in them?  And yet that’s precisely the time when we need the humanities, both in and outside the classroom, and I think that’s an idea that these films, for me, very much encourage and take to heart.