Richard Linklater’s Adventures in Moviegoing

While other budding directors were honing their craft in film school, Richard Linklater was getting a crash course in the art and history of cinema his own way: by watching anything and everything he could at the local repertory theaters in Houston and Austin, where he discovered the world-cinema masterworks and avant-garde rarities that would inspire him to create independent touchstones like SLACKER, DAZED AND CONFUSED, and BEFORE SUNRISE. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Linklater sits down to discuss his path from working on an oil rig to directing, why he considers the eighties to be an underrated cinematic decade, and how his Austin Film Society grew from a DIY labor of love into a cultural powerhouse. A seasoned film programmer dating back to his early days as founder of the AFS, Linklater brings a curator’s omnivorous sensibility to the lineup of favorites he has chosen to present, which include a radically subversive family drama by Nagisa Oshima (THE CEREMONY), an outrageously stylized tour through the Berlin underworld courtesy of Ulrike Ottinger (TICKET OF NO RETURN), a torrid François Truffaut deep cut (THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR), and a haunting work of pure cinema by James Benning (LANDSCAPE SUICIDE).