Richard Linklater Film Studies

The1990s was a revolution period to the American film industry. Independentiflms rose and broke the domination of Hollywood films thanks to Miramax FilmsandSundance Independent Film Festival. The talented and passionate directors broughtfresh life to American iflm industry and at the same time, started a new way ofcreation that was completely free and different from the mainstream. Among them,Richard Linklater, featuring his intellectually serious thinking and various styles,enjoyed equally popularity with Steven Soderberg and Quentin Tarantino. Thepassage aims at analyzing and studying the features of Linklater’s works andproviding an overall knowledge of the director to the audience.The passage discusses the features from four aspects. First, it introduces thebackground of the emergence of American independent films and three of the mosttypical filmmakers in the90s by particularly analyzing the status and influence of hisdirectorial debut “slack”er in the history of independent film making. Secondly,Linklater was changeable in the themes and iflming techniques so that we can enjoytotally different skills in his works. The second aspect discusses his various stylesfrom the points of love, dreams, reality, literary adaption and documentary. The thirdaspect focuses on the text, including characterization, the functions of dialogues andthe study in iflm narratology. In the dialogue part，it analyze the narration of Linklaterby comparing his works with “Four season”，directed by Eric Rohmer of French"N”ew Wave，The mentioned three aspects are used to prove the forth point, which isthe characteristics of the director himself. This part deals with the characteristics bythe method of “Author Theor”y and based on a few works of his.Under the economic and cultural impact of the Second World War, thefilmmakers represented by Linklater in the90s had their own strong personal styles,utterly different from each other in the aspects of narration, camera and themes. In thecase of Linklater，his seemingly “narration-free” way of telling stories，the narrationof applying dialogues to develop the story, has become his speciality. The passagefocuses on a few of Li’nklaters works to analyse the iflms systematically by the method of film narration and through the analysis, explores the changing patterns inhis iflming by the theory of directors to illustrate the characteristics of the director.