SLACKER

Join us for the 4th Summer Season of transforming the Epsilon Spires parking lot into an outdoor cinema! Picture a picnic under the stars with your friends where you are entertained by innovative films projected on the big screen. Our Backlot Cinema programming celebrates cinema past and present, both popular and experimental, highlighting diverse creative voices from around the world. In the case of weather, the screening will be moved indoors. DOORS 8pm, FILM BEGINS AT SUNSET (8:23)

SLACKER (1991), Directed by Richard Linklater.

A prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressivly philosophical nonparticipants, and one of the key films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s. SLACKER follows a day of coincidental interactions within the eccentric subculture of Austin, Texas. Shooting on 16 mm for a mere $23,000, writer-producer-director Linklater and his crew of friends discarded traditional plot structure, choosing instead to create a tapestry of over a hundred characters, each as compelling and hilarious as the last.  Little did any of them know, however, that the film would help usher in a new wave of indie filmmaking in America—or that it would come to define Austin, as an exemplary “touchstone” for Generation X.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM:

"It’s a brilliant roundelay of idiosyncratic connections between students, ex-students, and eccentrics in Austin, Texas, where Linklater lived; he even plays the first of these characters, appearing in a bravura three-minute take in which he tells a cab driver about his strange dreams of alternate universes. The film presents the teeming weirdness of daily life in Austin as a swarm of individual alternatives, each spinning wildly out of control and crashing into one another’s active fantasies to unleash vast creative energy. The overarching theme is paranoia—many of the characters deliver hectic monologues about nefarious official coverups and deceptions, or lash out with absurd violence. Linklater presents the breezy comedy of casual wandering and easy chat as the artistic ferment of local bands and filmmakers—and as a critique of a country that’s desperately disconnected from its people."

-Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"The film's winding from one set of characters to another through chance encounters, with no overall goal and no single protagonist, deconstructs the traditional narrative of a film. It's not destruction for destruction's sake. It creates something new, and that is liberating. Slacker is inspiration to go your own way despite the pressure to conform. Above all, the film taught me this: Those who wander may not be lost." -Eleanor Capaldi, VICE

A note about seating in The Backlot Cinema: We encourage our guests to come as if to a picnic – so please bring your own blankets, cushions or folding chairs – you want to be comfortable so bring all the coziness you need! Restrooms provided. In the case of rain this event will be moved indoors into our Sanctuary.