A life at different speeds
"Boyhood" is the name of the film that is the big winner at this year's Golden Globes and is winning many other awards. A long film that slowly tells the story of a boy growing up and in whose production a lot of time was invested, sets a counterpoint in our short-winded world.
Isn't it anachronistic that an author who takes twelve years to write a work and a film that lasts 166 minutes strike a chord? Apparently not, because Richard Linklater is winning one award after another with his film "Boyhood.
He started filming in the summer of 2002. Mason is a boy of six at this point. His father is absent, and his mother tries valiantly to provide an appropriate environment for Mason and his sister. Over the next twelve years, the crew met for a few days at a time to develop footage for episodes of about 15 minutes. The script was developed together. Everyone involved embarked on the adventure of shaping the banality of a not-so-ordinary life into an extraordinary cinematic work.
All those involved remained true to the project. The top-class actors Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette document their own aging in the film. The child actors Ellar Coltrane and the director's daughter Lorelei Linklater grow up in two parallel worlds, in the film and in reality. Thus the film becomes more than a depiction of the coming of age of the main character: it becomes a contemporary history of a life world in which people develop their existence and identity.
Flow of events
Development takes time. It is not a string of moments. It is a process with a dynamic, both on a horizontal and vertical level. The flow of events is reflected in the snapshots of the images of a situation. These images are always in motion. They are constantly changing with the new information, emotions, decisions and their consequences. In addition to everyday experiences, stories experienced through the media flow into our world of experience. Be it the news from Paris, Syria or Haiti, the news from politics or the economy. Fact-oriented information is an essential part of our world. However, its weighting and interpretation is shaped by all the invented stories. Fiction, for its part, is a cultural reality that plays around concrete events. Creativity frees us from the powerlessness to accept events as forces of nature. With our imagination we shape the world according to our dreams. This includes living through fears, confronting dangers and taking risks seriously. We use our life energy to repeatedly bring together the different narrative strands, to gain clarity about motives and effects, and thus to gain sovereignty over our own story.
Reduce speed occasionally
The film encourages us to examine our own pace of work. Not all projects succeed under great time pressure. If you slow down the pace occasionally, you can let ideas mature and carefully hone their implementation. Speed and slowness are not mutually exclusive. Different work processes can run in parallel with different timetables. Richard Linklater took twelve years to make Boyhood. During the same period, he produced other successful films such as "Before Sunset" and "Before Midnight". The success of the film "Boyhood" reminds us that we should always take time out from the hustle and bustle of the news ticker. Let's occasionally not be disturbed while reading a thick book, let's let the music at a concert take us away from our world of words and images, and let's dive into the world of experience of strangers for a subjective eternity in the cinema.
Josefa Haas, Media Expert/ Rector EB Zurich
