Refocus: The Films of Richard Linklater - (Refocus: The American Directors) by Kim Wilkins & Timotheus Vermeulen (Paperback)

About the Book

The first edited collection of critical essays on American filmmaker Richard Linklater

Book Synopsis

Richard Linklater is a popular American filmmaker who is widely celebrated for the breadth of his oeuvre. Over the past three decades, Linklater has directed more than twenty features, ranging from non-linear independent films to Hollywood genre entertainment. Despite the popularity of Linklater's rich and varied body of work--and perhaps also because of this generic diversity--he remains under-represented in critical and scholarly fora.
ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater addresses this oversight, bringing together twelve original essays attending to Linklater as a filmmaker whose work engages with contemporary debates in American politics, gender, youth, and activism as well as significant concepts in film studies, including time and duration, rhythm, and movement. Together these essays form a dialogue on Linklater's ongoing role in contemporary American popular culture, and the impact his work has on discussions within (and beyond) film studies.

Review Quotes

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.

--James MacDowell, University of Warwick

Rather than trying to fit Linklater's filmmaking and its shifts between scales of production and variances in narrative, style and theme into a singular auteurist vision, this collection skillfully promotes the value of approaching artistic achievement from different perspectives. What emerges is a critically rich exploration of resemblance and relationality.

--Lucy Fife Donaldson, University of St Andrews

In this collection of essays, Wilkins and Vermeuelen showcase recent debates about, and interpretations of, the films of Richard Linklater, an Austin, Texas, auteur whose work has long walked a fine line between art cinema and Hollywood-friendly genre offerings. The best essays look at major stylistic issues across multiple films: for example Bruce Isaacs explores time in Linklater's films, and Christopher Holliday looks at Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly and their innovative mixture of Linklater's long take and smooth style meeting the discordant and sometimes syncopated rhythms of the Rotoshop animation process. Though Linklater still seems young and is identified with youth films, the book makes a case for a mature and deeply considered career. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--K. M. Flanagan "CHOICE connect"

In this collection of essays, Wilkins and Vermeulen showcase recent debates about, and interpretations of, the films of Richard Linklater, an Austin, Texas, auteur whose work has long walked a fine line between art cinema and Hollywood-friendly genre offerings. The best essays look at major stylistic issues across multiple films: for example Bruce Isaacs explores time in Linklater's films, and Christopher Holliday looks at Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly and their innovative mixture of Linklater's long take and smooth style meeting the discordant and sometimes syncopated rhythms of the Rotoshop animation process. Though Linklater still seems young and is identified with youth films, the book makes a case for a mature and deeply considered career. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--K. M. Flanagan "CHOICE connect"

About the Author

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.