July 28, 2016
Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
(Dir. Gabe Klinger, 2013)
Free screening! Los Angeles premiere!
Introduction by director of photography Eduard Grau!
DOORS
6:30 PM
SCREENING
7:00 PM
LOCATION
USC, Ray Stark Family Theatre
SCA 108, George Lucas Building
900 W. 34th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007
Gabe Klinger's intimate and unassumingly insightful documentary––winner of the Venezia Classici Award at the 2013 Venice Film Festival––brings together two masters of modern filmmaking for a series of casual, wide-ranging conversations touching on cinema, sports, and the unexpected artistic corollaries between their indelible corpuses. Forgoing tired nonfiction storytelling tropes, Klinger allows the natural rapport and shared camaraderie of his subjects, the Texas-born indie icon Richard Linklater and the Milwaukee-bred avant-garde figurehead James Benning, to shape a narrative that follows their discussions from the baseball diamond (where each spent a great deal of their youth) to the editing room (where we see Linklater working on Boyhood). The result is a portrait both unique and refreshing, locating affinities and drawing parallels between two unlikely comrades.
~ Join us for post-screening drinks at The Lab Gastropub, 3500 S. Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90089
The graceful flow avoids the spoon-feeding of pocket biographies... Mr. Klinger shepherds along a valuable encounter with a sense of easy, generally uncanned observation.
- Nicolas Rapold, New York Times
Excellent....Time is the most obvious thematic link between these two filmmakers, but the question that ultimately seems to carry the most weight for both Benning and Linklater, upon reflection, is, “Why art?”
- David Hudson, Keyframe
A master class in film editing, gliding seamlessly yet intelligently from footage of the two serenely conversing in Linklater’s Texas ranch to archival material from a vast back catalogue of their respective œuvres.
- Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema
An ambling, but never rambling, journey backward into both of their memories, refracted through each man's experience of cinema.
- Steve Macfarlane, Slant Magazine
Klinger's patient montage achieves a sense of flattened time: all of Linklater and Benning's cumulative six decades of work is prone to being called upon and scrutinized at a moment's notice, assuming it pertains to a concept, memory, or idea demonstrated in conversation. The standard hierarchies of past and present/primary and secondary sources that implicitly guide so much documentary filmmaking are broken down.
- Carson Lund, Are the Hills Going to March Off?
(Available to download after screening date)