ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater

Kim Wilkins is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Screen Cultures at the University of Oslo. She is the author of American Eccentric Cinema (2019) and co-editor with Wyatt Moss-Wellington of Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (2019). She has published widely on American indie cinema, German film, and television in numerous journals and edited collections. Timotheus Vermeulen is Professor of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo. He has published widely on screen media, contemporary art and cultural theory. Books include Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism (2017), edited with Robin van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, Anmerkungen zur Metamoderne, (2015), Scenes from the Suburbs (2014) and New Suburban Stories (2013), edited with Martin Dines. Vermeulen is a regular contributor to Frieze.

• List of figuresNotes on contributorsIntroduction: Linklater’s itinerant oeuvre - Kim Wilkins and Timotheus VermeulenPart 1: Auteur Cinema in Context1. ‘I Think I Still Qualify as a Slacker …Just One that’s Currently Lucky’: The Myths of Slacker, Austin, and Richard Linklater - Mary P. Erickson 2. On Being a Vegetarian in Texas: The Incongruities and Politics of Linklater’s Fast Food Nation - Claire Parkinson3. The Little Space Between Hal Ashby and Richard Linklater - Rob Stone4. On Drifts and Swerves: Linklater’s Love for Lacunae - Jeroen BoomPart 2: Genre5. Richard Linklater and the Field of American Dreams - Timotheus Vermeulen6. Boyhood: Linklater’s Testament of American Youth After 9/11 - Timothy Shary7. The (Un)bearable Weight of Gendered Genre: Richard Linklater’s post-Boyhood Masculinities - Mary Harrod8. Stories So Far: Romantic Comedy and/as Space in Before Midnight - Celestino DeleytoPart 3: Style and Meaning 9. Empathetic Effort in Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Bernie - Kim Wilkins10. Richard Linklater’s Humanism: Moral Primacy, Recency Effects and SubUrbia - Wyatt Moss-Wellington11. Keeping Time in Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Boyhood - Bruce Isaacs12. Rhythm and the Rotoshop: Waking Life (2001), A Scanner Darkly (2006) and Rhythmanalysis - Christopher Holliday

Linklater has quietly developed into one of his generation’s most celebrated directors, and this excellent collection helps to explain why. Fittingly conceptually heterogeneous, its chapters offer innumerable fresh dialogues with key philosophical, aesthetic, and sociopolitical dimensions of the filmmaker's most fêted and lesser-known work. A rich and rewarding text.