Background


Richard Linklater's new film, Boyhood (2014), continues his fascination with the passage of time as explored initially in Slacker (1991), and then in the trilogy of films Before Sunrise (1995) Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). This time Linklater compacts 12 years of one boys life into one unique film.


Boyhood is comprised of all the moments in life we might not think of as dramatic, a narrative anathema to most films, yet together they form a dramatic and emotional whole. It's the little things which build over time that make a life a tale to tell, not just the grand dramas. There's a Charles Bukowski line from his poem, 'The Shoelace', which goes some way to evoking that idea of the little things, of lost time, although with a lot more tragedy:

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …




This idea couples with accumulation and the passage of time is represented rather beautifully towards the close of the film where Mason (Ellar Coltrane) finds his mother (Patricia Arquette) in tears reflecting on how quickly time has passed and how much has changed. All of those little things accumulate and they form the backbone of life, a magical poetry that can bring you to tears, a kind of quiet Proustian agony.

Theres been discussion about the similarities with Michael Apted's Up documentary series, and Linklater himself has pointed to Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, but this film stands alone in its originality in fully encompassing coming of age with the same actors over time. 



The first time I saw the film I was reminded of Terence Malick's Tree of Life (2011) and felt there was kinship in that both films covered rites of passage, family and the passage of time in America.

Malick's film is visually stunning, and is in keeping with the visual patterns explored in his other recent films, The New World (2005) and To The Wonder (2012), catching images of life and memory from defamiliarising angles, showing the world from perspectives we don't always see in cinema. What Malick in Tree of Life captured was 'sense' of life, an instinctual sense of existing, relying less on traditional narrative dialogue and more essentially primitive, child-like visual images of wonder, of touch, of smell, of sight, often verging on the pretentious, but equally building a story of American family life in the 20th Century.

In his review of Boyhood, film writer
Michael Smith identifies the Malick connection, but notes Malick's film couched in "pretentious sequences involving digital dinosaurs and voice-over narration cloaked in cosmic-spiritual hokum" something from which Linklater's film entirely avoids.

The use of music in Boyhood is also intrinsic to its overall effect, much in the way Martin Scorsese selects music for effect Linklater does the same here, and the choice of Coldplay's song Yellow, to open the film recontextualised it and perfectly embodied that feeling of a time and place, tugging ever so slightly at the heart strings, I was reminded again of how fond I once was of that song and how fond I am of this film the masterpiece Linklater has been working towards from the beginning.









'Finding Vivian Maier' is creating quite a stir, with audience and critics alike placing her in the posthumously discovered company of Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka and Vincent Van Gogh.

Brian Eno said that we're living in the time of the 'artist as curator, a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention', and given the explosion of available cultural fragments in the internet age, and the almost incessant abundance of every fragment of culture, past and present, digitised forever, we've gone beyond Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Director, and inevitable curator himself, Jon Maloof, discovered Maier's work at a 2007 auction. Maier lived for her work, yet it was her most closely guarded secret. Here Maloof acts as a code breaker, assembling her life from her photographic work and in the process aiming to cut through the mystery of why a woman so obviously gifted failed to make any meaningful attempts to show her work to others.

A mystery to all who knew her, Maier's work as a nanny from the 1950s to the 1980s was a practical convenience to allow her to subsist, to travel and to take photographs. She absorbed the world around her but it never absorbed her. As she says, she was a kind of spy. Through her photographs we enter into a kind of anthropological study of post-war American life including the lives of those she cared for.

One thing each of the families she worked for share in common is their perception of Maier as a distant, unknowable person. Although they each had slightly different stories to tell and provided different fragments of her personality, they each came to the same conclusion: Maier with her a faux-French accent, gave different names to different people, rewrote her early history, stood apart from others, viewed human experience at a distance, yet her distance from others allowed her to capture the reality of everything around her as voyeur.

The images she made display a warmth and humour as well as a sorrow and reveal her interest in morbid stories of human suffering. She captured the very essence of the culture, from the high to the impoverished lows yet during her lifetime nobody knew this. Her work blends dashes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank and some of her very best images are as good as anything those established artists produced.

Stealing intense and personal images of those she encountered, often without their knowledge, while remaining to those she photographed and those acquainted with her hidden from view, Maier's photographs are a revelation and a leave you wondering how many unknown artists must be working today under the shadows of their own anonymous lives.

Beneath the visage, photography became the one true place where she could express herself, not through meaningful contact with others, but by watching them and questioning them. She wanted to understand the world, perhaps before she allowed the world to understand her, or by collecting fragments of the world around her she might make sense of her own role in it. What we discover is that this mere act itself was her life, she lived to watch others live.

Ultimately we are left with the enigma, yet we come to understand this was someone immensely proud and confident of their craft, but who was never able to fulfil what was most certainly a desire to have her work seen by others. Maier was most herself when observing others from behind a lens. Without it she would remain anonymous and invisible, her life's work hidden and her mystery intact, until Jon Maloof came along.