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Who Better Than Richard Linklater to Reflect on the Passage of Time in Cinema? (Video)

Inspire

The director of 'Boyhood" talks about an obsession that has touched him both cinematographically and philosophically.

Among our era’s film directors, perhaps none has dedicated as much of his work to the meditation on the passage of time as Richard Linklater has. His most recent film, Boyhood, was an ambitious project in which at times the cinematographic pretext appears to be left to one side in the face of the overwhelming and minimal action that is reflecting on the passing of time.

As we see in the video essay we share here (originally made for Sight and Sound) that motif runs through Linklater’s work as a constant or an obsession. The characters in his films ask themselves repeatedly about the nature of time and admit being perplexed by the effect that this has on existence and on relationships with others, on the memories that accumulate in our minds like dreams we had a long time ago and how all of that, the minimal and the grandiose, always occurs in the present.

But Linklater is a director and, as a result, although his meditations are almost philosophical, they also refer to cinema and its possibilities, the artifice that the cinematographer can operate regarding time to make us see what is not there, to make us play with our own perception of time, which is perhaps Linklater’s most distinctive trait.

 

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