Features: DVD
Richard Linklater's Slacker presents a day in the life of a loose-knit subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in Austin, Texas. Shooting the film on 16mm for a mere twenty-three thousand dollars, writer/producer/director Linklater and his close-knit crew of friends eschewed a traditional plot, choosing instead to employ long takes and fluid transitions to create a tapestry of over a hundred characters, each as unique as the last, culminating in an episodic portrait of a distinct vernacular culture and a tribute to bohemian cerebration. Slacker is a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants, and one of the key films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s.
"The experience is funny, surreal and weird. Sometimes it's even scary." Desson Thomson, Washington Post
"This is a work of scatterbrained originality, funny, unexpected and ceaselessly engaging." Hal Hinson, Washington Post
Editor's Note
Texan filmmaker Richard Linklater's debut independent feature takes an original approach to traditional narrative, creating an entirely new form of cinema in the process. Shot at a leisurely pace with a style similar to Robert Bresson, SLACKER follows the unmotivated inhabitants of Austin, Texas, over the course of one day, as they waste their time talking about politics, philosophy, and popular culture. Beginning with a cab ride in which the fare (Linklater himself) suggests to the driver a theory about alternate universes (which also happens to mirror what transpires on screen), the film abruptly shifts to another character and situation after an elderly woman is hit by a car. Soon after, another character is introduced, and the camera follows her. This formula sticks for the whole film; by the end, dozens of characters have been introduced and, just as quickly, been left behind. Linklater spent years taking notes in order to infuse original dialogue into every situation, which results in a sometimes pathetic, sometimes poignant, always amusing trip into a lackadaisical college town. Luckily, for fans of new and inventive approaches to filmmaking, Linklater himself wasn't a "slacker," ensuring the film's place in indie film history.
Plot Summary
SLACKER, a unique slice-of-life series of linked but barely related episodes, follows the socially disconnected, overly educated, and barely motivated denizens of the coffeehouses, clubs, bars, apartments, stores, and streets of the college town of Austin, Texas. Richard Linklater's debut feature is a cult sensation that launched a thousand imitators, replete with garrulous, too-cool twenty-somethings debating pop culture phenomena, none of which can match the spacey, floating-camera timbre of the original.
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