Richard Linklater's "Before" Series: Time, Duration, and Memory

This thesis investigates the relationship between the films in Richard Linklater's "Before" series, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).Linklater's career is full of experiments with narrative structure and time.But, the "Before" series is unique among these experiments, and among other series, because of the strategy Linklater used to produce it: what this thesis refers to as Linklater's strategy of duration.This thesis argues that Linklater uses his strategy of duration to explore what it means to be in time.In turn, this creates a temporal experience for the spectator that highlights being in time and their own temporality.Situating this series amongst various approaches to temporality showcases how its simple story belies a complex and multifaceted expression of being in time. 1 The phrase "being in time" is famously related to the philosophy and work of Martin Heidegger.However, for this thesis, it will be used in relation to the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur, and R.G. Collingwood, and to a state of duration and passing time."Before" series. 2 In fact, only after completing Before Sunset was Linklater confident enough to begin Boyhood.While Boyhood is a single film, the "Before" series is three films with a single story stretched over eighteen years.The story in the "Before" series is simple.In Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are young travellers who meet by chance in Vienna, where they spend a romantic twelve hours together.Before they separate in the morning, when Celine has to catch her train and Jesse has to catch his early flight, they promise to reunite six months later, in Paris.In Before Sunset, Jesse and Celine meet again, again apparently by chance, in Paris, having not met as they had originally planned nine years earlier.While they are different people now since the last time they saw each other, their romance seems to be rekindled at the conclusion of the film.A further nine years later, in Before Midnight, Jesse and Celine, having settled into a relationship, and are on vacation in Greece with their twin daughters, but, where their romance was once youthful and spontaneous, they now face the monotony and responsibility of parenting.They argue, seemingly break up, yet seem to save their relationship in the end.What seperates the "Before" series from other fiction film series is the unique relationship between the films in the series to one another, as well as the way this unique relationship manifests in the treatment of time in the individual films.This unique relationship is the result of what I will call Linklater's strategy of duration.Duration is defined as "Lasting, continuance in time; the continuance or length of time; the time during which a thing, action, or state, 2 Maria San Filippo, "Growing Old Together: Linklater's Before Trilogy in the Twilight Years of Arthouse Distribution," Film Quarterly Vol.68 No. 3 (2015): 53. 5 See: Thomas A. Christie, The Cinema of Richard Linklater (Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2008), 27: "…the only real meaningful answer in narrative terms [to the question, what is Slacker about] is that it is about an hour and a half long." 6 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, (Berkeley:

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