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Boyhood
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López
Looking In
1. What is Life? (George Harrison)
Many documentary filmmakers have tried to live with
their subjects over a long period of time — so as to insure they are there, on
the spot, to capture every significant, dramatic moment when it really happens.
The same filmmakers have, usually, also avowed the impossibility of this
quixotic quest to “nail” reality: because the moment when the camera is not
there – overnight, or while the equipment is being set up, or in the car on the
way to the destination – is when something really does happen. Somebody dies,
or leaves, or makes a scene.
So the documentary then has to stage its own catching
up with what it missed: through breathless eye-witness accounts, and leftover
traces. Most documentaries, in fact, are almost never there to film the primal
scenes that motivate them. They are more like detective inquiries into what
they have missed.
In the recently restored, Italian masterpiece Anna (Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli, 1975), the
principal encounter that inaugurates everything – when one of the filmmakers
meets destitute, teenage Anna Azzori in a town square – was not, could not, be
filmed. So it has to be restaged. From that moment on, we are constantly placed
in a position of confusion, as viewers, as to what is spontaneously captured,
and what is re-performed in order to fill in those gaps when the camera was not
rolling. In this way, Anna becomes
one of the most honest documents in cinema history.
The impossible dream of keeping the camera on all the
time has, as its ambition, not only to record the drama of life, but also the
process of change: people will grow
older, history will move on, the world will mutate – slowly, in an unwinding
flow, but compressed by cinema into a golden thread that we can finally see and study. Jean-Luc Godard commented in 1978: “Cinema can
be used for this, to see the creation of forms, their embryology”.
Raúl Ruiz once told a cautionary tale about this mad
dream: talking about his young star, Melvil Poupaud, he said that, during the
shooting of Treasure Island (1985),
he framed one take: Melvil as a child. Then the camera was turned off for a
moment for reloading. They began again: Melvil was now an adolescent, a totally
transformed human being! He had grown up in the interval between two shots. But
the visible moment of his sudden evolution was what, precisely, eluded film’s
ability to capture it.
2. Band on the Run (Paul McCartney and Wings)
In Boyhood,
Richard Linklater manages to both have his cake and eat it, too. He kept his
cast and crew attached to him for 12 years. He dismisses comparisons with
either François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle (1959-1979) or the ongoing British
documentary series Up (1964–2019), because
those projects were always planned as a string of separate works, not one
whole, entire, unfolding movie like his. And so he captures the golden thread:
everyone in the story visibly ages before our eyes, over 2 hours and 40
minutes. The compression is impressive, no matter what is actually happening in
each scene.
Yet, at the same time, Linklater cannily adopts a
narrative method which is exactly the same as what those earlier filmmakers
did: he films, goes away and takes a break, and then looks in on his subjects – whose changes he has, of course,
carefully scripted, all the while drawing in some elements of the actors’ real
lives (Ellar Coltrane, for instance, became interested in photography, rather
than the teenage rock band destiny that Linklater first envisaged for him).
And so, each time Linklater returns – each time a new
year, or a new scene, begins – there is that surprise moment of catching-up,
often of the same kind that Ruiz observed in Poupaud: the revolution of puberty,
for the both Mason Jr. the boy and his sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the
director’s daughter), is the central spectacle of the film.
3. Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
Linklater steers a very particular path here. His view
of life – perhaps a wishful one – is
that “nothing dramatic really happens in ordinary, everyday existence”. At
every point, Boyhood avoids great
catastrophe and crisis – and he even expresses mild disappointment in those viewers
who immediately assume that the appearance of a sharp wheel-blade or an episode
of drunk driving signals imminent, life-or-death disaster.
Yes, there are tense moments – especially involving
the succession of stern boyfriends of Mason Jr’s mother, Olivia (Patricia
Arquette) – but no problem so great that an ellipsis cannot swiftly wash it out
of the film’s flow. For a while (for example), Mason Jr and Samantha have
another brother and sister, and when Olivia forces her children to leave with
her in a hurry, they wonder what will happen to them; but by the next scene,
those ex-siblings are as forgotten as completely as anything in last week’s TV
sitcom episode.
How different this is to, for instance, Michael
Apted’s Up documentaries. Here,
surely, are the most ordinary people ever assembled before a camera. But
faithful viewers of the series are always shocked by the endless revelations of
what has transpired between the periods of filming: there have been momentous
health crises, marital divorces, geographical relocations – and even death by
suicide.
Although Linklater artfully dodges the more ghoulish
implications of this thought, the pact he entered into with his actors for Boyhood was truly vampiric and Faustian:
if someone had died during those
twelve years, wouldn’t that fact have had to be incorporated, tastelessly, into
the fiction?
4. Watching the Wheels (John Lennon)
Some cinephiles will recall the bizarre rumours that
circulated around Stanley Kubrick’s closed-shop development of A.I. over many years: did he really have
a small child incubated in a secret location, a prisoner of his camera, whose
development would be painstakingly recorded for the sake of his movie? It was
all nonsense, of course, but the mere presence of Kubrick in that tall story –
the director who implanted a meditation on B.F. Skinner’s behaviourist tract Beyond Freedom and Dignity into his A Clockwork Orange (1971) – seemed to
make it half-believable: the growing of a sheltered individual did not seem foreign
to his intellectual imagination. Linklater transformed this legend into fact in
one respect: the well-protected secrecy of Boyhood as a project as it evolved.
And Linklater also plants the traces of this debate
about determinism versus free will into Boyhood,
signalling which side he is on: where the Bad Dad, Bill (Marco Perella),
lectures about “Pavlovian responses”, Olivia favours a more humanistic
revolution that stresses surprising transformations and uneven evolutions in
human personality … And when Mason Snr. (Ethan Hawke) gives no less of a
filibuster lecture on The Beatles while driving his car, what he stresses is
not the death of that band in 1970, but the imaginable, re-united future they
enjoy within the time and space of a blended mix-tape, titled the Black Album, of their solo recordings (from
which the section titles in this text are taken).
5. All I’ve Got is a Photograph … (Ringo Starr)
When Truffaut arrived at this final Doinel instalment, Love on the Run, he revelled in the time-travelling
possibility of free, inspired montage: with two full decades of footage of
Jean-Pierre Léaud (including unused outtakes) at hand, he could go crazy with
leap-frogging comparisons between then and now, between the older and the newer
Antoine, between black-and-white and colour. Linklater stoically resists this
(no doubt great) temptation. There are only ever the small, framed or pinned-up
photographs around the house, casually there in the background of shots (never
given an insert close-up), to serve as a visual aide-mémoire as we glide through the time of the film. It becomes
almost comic in its extreme discipline: will he ever cut to one of these photos? Nope …
All the same, those photographs do point to a certain
cultural history – of artists (such as Nicholas Nixon in USA or Sue Ford in
Australia) who have painstakingly gathered the same people to pose in front of
their lens once every year, all through their lives … In the back of
Linklater’s mind also, no doubt, is a certain tradition of experimental cinema
for which he professes great admiration: films by Jonas Mekas, James Benning,
Robert Kramer or Stephen Dwoskin that – through the everyday familiarity and
intimacy that these filmmakers enjoy with their close-by-hand subjects – seize
the opportunity to show faces and bodies, landscapes and buildings, as
corroded, metamorphosed or cancelled by the march of time. Dwoskin’s Dear Frances (2003) and Kramer’s
ironically named Milestones (1975) are
classics in this mode.
6. My Sweet Lord (George Harrison)
Linklater likes to claim, in interviews, that his film
is about memory – that it captures how we remember things. But this is true
only anecdotally, like when many parents see the film and remark afterwards, “It
was just like raising my kids – they seemed to grow up so fast!” Boyhood is a long way, in this regard,
from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of
Life (2011), which truly does try to capture a remembered childhood in all its
fragmentation and fantasy.
Linklater opts for a more conventional, even
conservative structure: his film is a linear chronicle of social and
developmental milestones – birthdays, graduation, first day at college … His
approach is essentially benign: family affection (even when strained) means
more to him than the systems of control and influence wielded by social
institutions like education, media or law. The film shows, without irony or
disapproval, the God-fearing side of the American South.
Boyhood is a cinematic group hug: it
is about a family that muddles along and survives everything. It deftly swerves
away from both the painful devastation of a Maurice Pialat fictional chronicle
(such as La maison des bois, 1971),
and the cool, sociological eye of a Frederick Wiseman documentary. But its
tenderness and sweet humour are undeniable.
MORE Linklater: The Newton Boys, Waking Life, SubUrbia, Before Sunrise / Before Sunset © Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin August 2014 |
