Jean-Luc Goddard's 1967 film ended with the title "Fin du Cinema". And ever since then Goddard has been hanging around places like the Cannes Film Festival telling everybody that cinema is a dead art-form.
What I wouldn't give to sit Goddard down in front of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" and see if he truly believes that art in cinema is dead.
This brilliant new film was shot on digital video and then a team of animators took years painstaking animating every frame. The result is a film which is an assault of ideas on consciousness, our sub-conscious, life, death and our preceptions of the world we inhabit; punctuated with the most exuberantly exciting visuals that I have been seen in a film in a long time.
The film centers around a philosophy student, (played by "Dazed and Confused"'s Wiley Wiggins.), who wanders around Austin, Texas encountering a lot of intellectuals, poets, philosophers and eccentrics. As the main charcter wanders around, he notices there is something very bizarre about the world he is currently inhabiting. His surroundings pulsate like a heartbeat, several existentialist philosophers morph into the very ideas that they are trying to communicate. It soon becomes clear to our main character that he may in fact be dreaming. Unfortunately for him, he seems to be trapped in his dream-state; waking up from one dream only to immediately enter into another one. Amd then his plight appears to be even more drastic when it's suggested that he may in fact may be dead wandering around in some alternate state of consciousness.
This is an incredible film jammed-packed with ideas and visuals. The viewer is bombarded with ideas on how to live our lives and how to interpret our consciousness and sub-consciousness. The film requires multiple viewings to even begin to process all these ideas. I saw the film twice at the Toronto Film Festival and I know I have a long way to go before I can really grasp the depth of this film. Linklater's past films, ("Slacker", "Before Sunrise"), discussed philosophical concepts, but this is the first time the director has directly tackled philosophical ideas head-on; discussing Kirkegard and St. Thomas Aquanis. In the near-future, this movie will, most likely, be screened by just about every Philosophy professor in the english-speaking world.
I have been saying for years that Richard Linklater is the most brilliant and gifted artist to emerge out of American cinema in the past decade; and with "Waking Life", he may finally get the respect he deserves.
What I wouldn't give to sit Goddard down in front of Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" and see if he truly believes that art in cinema is dead.
This brilliant new film was shot on digital video and then a team of animators took years painstaking animating every frame. The result is a film which is an assault of ideas on consciousness, our sub-conscious, life, death and our preceptions of the world we inhabit; punctuated with the most exuberantly exciting visuals that I have been seen in a film in a long time.
The film centers around a philosophy student, (played by "Dazed and Confused"'s Wiley Wiggins.), who wanders around Austin, Texas encountering a lot of intellectuals, poets, philosophers and eccentrics. As the main charcter wanders around, he notices there is something very bizarre about the world he is currently inhabiting. His surroundings pulsate like a heartbeat, several existentialist philosophers morph into the very ideas that they are trying to communicate. It soon becomes clear to our main character that he may in fact be dreaming. Unfortunately for him, he seems to be trapped in his dream-state; waking up from one dream only to immediately enter into another one. Amd then his plight appears to be even more drastic when it's suggested that he may in fact may be dead wandering around in some alternate state of consciousness.
This is an incredible film jammed-packed with ideas and visuals. The viewer is bombarded with ideas on how to live our lives and how to interpret our consciousness and sub-consciousness. The film requires multiple viewings to even begin to process all these ideas. I saw the film twice at the Toronto Film Festival and I know I have a long way to go before I can really grasp the depth of this film. Linklater's past films, ("Slacker", "Before Sunrise"), discussed philosophical concepts, but this is the first time the director has directly tackled philosophical ideas head-on; discussing Kirkegard and St. Thomas Aquanis. In the near-future, this movie will, most likely, be screened by just about every Philosophy professor in the english-speaking world.
I have been saying for years that Richard Linklater is the most brilliant and gifted artist to emerge out of American cinema in the past decade; and with "Waking Life", he may finally get the respect he deserves.
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