There is something compelling about seeing people age through time. However, if not on our own memories throughout time, the ability of seeing each other growing old, or the world-at-large in its change is not something we can naturally achieve in the day-to-day life. We require comparison and artificial mechanisms to perceive change, and the Seventh Art is by excellence a media in which this effect can be accomplished at its most.
Cinema is the narrative of time and more than any other form of expression it is the Art of time, as it goes on. Its very appreciation occurs in the movement of the clock. It needs sequence — one frame after another. Both in theory and practice, so, it deals with the essence of dimensional time. Despite that, not many filmmakers have used the screen to philosophy about this nature, as in the passing of frames in seconds, hours, years or decades.
The first author to set a frame for this type of reflection was François Truffaut, a French director considered one of the heads of the Nouvelle Vague, movement that took place in France on the late 50s and 60s. By his time, Truffaut was one of the major inspirations for another director, that throughout a series of either coincident and intentional moves, repeated the “studies” on time the first one have brought to light half a century back. His name is Richard Linklater, a Texas filmmaker born at same time French New Wave was being born by the hands of some of the more inventive and groundbreaking directors the Cinema world has ever had.
The similarities between the two directors go beyond the purpose of the present essay. As for the movies we further analyse, there are surely too — especially for both are huge creative artists — several differences and peculiarities of each. The interest of this analysis, though, is to throw some light on the aspects they share, which show clearly the influence the French movement and especially a specific series of Truffaut’s movies had on Linklater’s independent Cinema. The main and first one being their common exploration of passing time as a narrative element of the story: using not only the same biography but also the same actors, taking advantage of how they age and mature as persons through time.
For this comparison, the Truffaut movies in the spotlight are in order of release Les 400 coups (1959), Antoine et Colette (fragment of the movie L’amour à vingt ans,1962), Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugal (1970) and L´amour en fuite (1979). Linklater’s are Before Sunrise (1994), Waking Life (a fragment, 2001), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013).
As numerous directors have dedicated their movies to tell stories in which time is an inner element like any other, Linklater and Truffaut have chosen to use it as a protagonist of the storytelling. More than a link between facts, time is the very bridge that constructs them. More than a small resource on the screenwriting, it is the meaning of the plot itself.
Despite the complexity and size of such projects, it all started by chance. Even when Linklater stated that Les 400 Coups was one of his favorite movies, the reasons that led the two directors to follow equal paths on the exploration of time came naturally rather than by design. Both series of films also share the amount of how personal they are for theirs directors, or better said, how much of their actual life story is on them.
On the auditions for the Antoine Doinel, the child actor in Les 400 Coups, Truffaut would later say he was looking for himself as a kid. Even so, that personal narrative would have met its end by the time the credits went up on the screen, when Antoine closes a chapter and achieves the freedom he kept looking for. The ground and chance for a sequel came three years later, in 1962, when the producer Pierre Roustang invited François to work on a collaborative compiled movie about being in love at the age of 20. The logical choice for him was keep going with Doinel, using then the same actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud, for the role. It was the birth of the saga.
On his side, Linklater wrote Before Sunrise after an experience he had on a Europe train trip. As a creative, prolific and philosophical auteur, about the time Waking Life (one of his masterpieces, a priori unrelated to the saga) was being developed, and given its very unique nature of a movie that freely explores dreams, ethics, ideas, politics and the humankind itself throughout several fragments of dialogues, was very natural to use Before Sunrise protagonists, Céline and Jesse, relation as one of the fragments. The couple scene takes place in a parallel narrative not strictly pertinent for the saga as it later came out. Nevertheless, it was then that their story asked for further development.
As both sequels go, the characters grow in years, experience and in the natural cycles of life. Love romances, entering into adulthood, becoming involved in careers, getting married, having kids.
Making Cinema, or good Cinema, is a work for few. Mainly because good stories, compelling, attractive and meaningful stories come from intelligence, but even more from a heavy luggage of experiences. That is the natural path for one to achieve the layers and deepness that creates good storytelling. And on that aspect, Truffaut and Linklater, each on their own inimitable way, are masters.
As for the last, with his fearless verbose narrative style, there are so many levels on the dialogues that a distracted viewer could easily lose track of the characters dialogues. They are not, though, only words thrown at wind, for they reflect in every instance the journey Céline and Jesse face in their lives and hungrily share in their meetings.
Antoine journey is also fulfilled with words (he becomes a writer, and so does Linklater’s Jesse), reflections, digressions, attempts and mistakes. All of them try to fill their lives with art, movies, books, philosophy, music. For one thing, music is a feature that plays a very distinct role for both sagas. Rather than a narrative support and a background to set up scenes, it works within the characters’ lives to more richly outline them. Especially on the Before saga, where elements of the music scored slowly turn into an important resource as the script unravels.
The choice to use the same actors as the story goes give a whole new meaning to their development as human beings. The characters share te actors’ learning, matureness and immatureness, their body marks, their goals. On Linklater saga, they even participated at the pre-production stage helping to build the characters with their own experiences. It could be argued that this always happens in Cinema — actors giving bits of themselves to the characters — , but rarely at this level.
Using the same people naturally creates an effect of bringing time within the tape, as for the first time it is a palpable physical prop on the movies. Both directors were conscious of this fact, which allowed them to extract the most of it. For instance, the auto references inside the stories achieve a new purpose and go beyond the simple appeal to aesthetics. They show us that real life is on the screen like never before. The characters are not frozen in time as the Cinema magic can do. Instead, they are growing old, getting fragile, gathering wisdom through pain and yet living the poetry of human lives, which only time is able to give us and also take away. Truffaut, immersed on the Nouvelle Vague effervescence, was the first to dare that step. Linklater after him was the one that respectfully took the move further, sat out for different achievements and accomplished a result as vanguard, groundbreaking and unexplored as his influencer.
It is very clear that the historical moment, the technics, resources and intentions of both go separate ways. Still, for the clinical eye, the sequels as they have been created share so many similarities and minute details that whole books could be written about it.
In the big lines, their work dialogue like no other on the verge of the experimenting with the mix between Cinema and the inherent philosophy and poetry a human life portrays on the go of time. The difference in their styles and subjects only broadens the value they offer for the Seventh Art for what it is: a deep look into the beautiful colors, words and movements of our existence in space and time. For his singular vision, it has been said that Truffaut “extended the borders of film to go beyond the screen and create a connection between movies and life itself” (Preminger, 2004). Linklater, his devotee, kept up the job working on one of the greatest roles of Cinema — playing with that connection.
In parallel with the Before saga, he sailed for an even more audacious project — a single movie shot along 12 years, that tells the story of the same character from the age of 6 to the age of 18. Boyhood was released in 2014 and despite the judgment of how astonishing it is as a movie, it is a project with no precedents that again broke the boundaries of the impossible in this infinite element of reality we call Cinema. By its time, as if all the other lines of conversation are pulled apart, Linklater project on Before saga is a scathing and beautiful homage to the evocative and vanguard Cinema Truffaut helped to establish in Nouvelle Vague. A tribute that also reflects Truffaut’s boldness on opening new ways.
Aside from their great filmography, and unlike any other creators in screen history, François Truffaut and Richard Linklater left an audacious and unmatched mark that will echo for ages, surpassing the frames of the movies they created: they both dared to try and capture time.
