The enduring appeal of Slacker

By Alistair Harkness
Published on Wednesday 8 February 2012 17:37

It’s a rambling, plotless movie featuring a succession of effusive weirdos relentlessly gabbing about everything from art and politics to conspiracy theories and Madonna’s pap smear.

It launched the career of one of American cinema’s most consistently interesting filmmakers and put Austin, Texas firmly on the map as an alternative hub for creative activity in the US.

Its elegantly simple title, meanwhile, together with its philosophical belief in the value of inactivity (inspired in part by Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers), helped define and give voice to an over-educated, under-represented and wilfully under-employed generation.

Perhaps more than anything, though, Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker revolutionised independent filmmaking by legitimising a rough-and-ready DIY approach to narrative cinema that was defiantly anti-Hollywood.

Clerks director Kevin Smith, for one, cites seeing Slacker on his 21st birthday as a sort of “this counts?” eureka moment in which he realised he could be a filmmaker too. What’s more, while it may not have been seen by many people at the time, the effect on those that that did see it has been likened by Smith and Young Adult director Jason Reitman to that old adage about the Velvet Underground’s first album inspiring the few who did buy it to form bands of their own.

Proof of this legacy can be found in Slacker 2011, a scene-by-scene remake of Linklater’s film commissioned last year to mark its 20th anniversary. The film – which receives its European premiere tomorrow as part of the Glasgow Short Film Festival – was shot by the new generation of Austin filmmakers (among them Cyrus co-director Jay Duplass, Baghead producer John Bryant and Mars director Geoff Marslett), each of whom were inspired to either become a filmmaker or move to Austin by early exposure to Slacker.

“When we brought all the filmmakers together for the first time, everyone went round the room and talked about that and about how Slacker had directly influenced their lives,” confirms the remake’s 23-year-old producer Daniel C Metz.

With each of the 24 directors re-imagining one segment apiece, the end result is a fascinating, dreamlike echo of Linklater’s original – which feels very apposite, not only because it’s exactly the type of project one might expect one of Linklater’s verbose characters to obsess over, but also because it fits with the baton-passing nature of the storytelling.

“That was a wonderful coincidence,” says Metz of the way different directors doing each vignette mirrored the narrative structure of the film. Indeed Metz wanted to make it even more symbolic by having Linklater (who was fully supportive of the project) recreate his own role from Slacker’s opening scene. “I thought it would be really interesting because it would be like him passing the baton on to younger filmmakers, but he was like, ‘No way, that would be too weird.’” Slacker 2011 screens at Glasgow Film Theatre on Friday 9 February, as part of the Glasgow Short Film Festival.

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