Richard Linklater’s mission in life has apparently been to make experimental cinema techniques as accessible as possible. As a writer, his specialty is a certain humdrum ordinariness, which has had the virtue of giving his work a dollop of generalized familiarity even as it risks being colorless, plotless, meandering, or humdrum. (I say this as a fan—seriously.) His most recent movie Boyhood was one of the most lavishly praised movies of 2014, failing to win the Oscar for Best Movie last night but was still nominated for a bunch of important awards; it did win Best Supporting Actress for Patricia Arquette’s performance.
Despite its uncontested power to resonate emotionally, Boyhood possesses a near-total absence of plot and a protagonist, Mason, who is generic to the point of being a cipher, qualities that, as we shall see, have been part of Linklater’s directorial persona from the very start. In his career, Linklater’s efforts to represent Everyman have sometimes have resulted in movies about nobody in particular. Ethan Hawke’s Jesse from the “Before” trilogy, benefiting from oceans of dialogue, is more individuated than Mason, to be sure, and yet still flirts with becoming a statistically average member of Generation X. I had not heard of Linklater’s 1988 feature It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books until a couple of weeks ago. You can’t buy it on its own; you can obtain it only as an extra on the Criterion Collection edition of Slacker, Linklater’s breakthrough 1991 effort.
It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, shot on Super 8, is an almost entirely plot- and dialogue-free travelogue about a young dude, played by Linklater himself, who travels all over the western half of the country, mostly by train—he starts out in Austin (of course) and visits Missoula, Montana, and San Francisco, among other locales, before returning home.. Huge swaths of the movie were shot in train stations or aboard Amtrak trains.
Linklater employs two strategies that are very helpful to the novice filmmaker, being a commitment to ambient sound and an eschewal of reverse angles. The movie reminds me somewhat of Jarmusch’s first feature Permanent Vacation, although that movie was far talkier and unmistakably “downtown New York” in spirit. Atitudinally, Linklater is unsurprisingly gentle—you may not see the point of all the footage shot out of a train window, but it doesn’t make you angry, either. The train footage is reminiscent of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 as well as countless other experimental movies, while the emphasis on train stations reminded me of Chantal Akerman’s later D’Est (From the East).
It might be suggested that Impossible to Learn to Plow is a mix of Slacker and Before Sunrise. Given that Linklater himself kicks off Slacker by emerging from a bus station to narrate his multiverse dream to an indifferent taxi driver, it’s fun to imagine this movie as a prequel of sorts, ending a few minutes before Slacker begins.
The closest thing the movie has to a comedic scene is a bit towards the end in which the protagonist drives in a car and dips into a whole bunch of radio stations in a vain search for some good music (it’s the ‘80s, so he gets a lot of generic pop, although he does pass the Pretenders by). At the end, Daniel Johnston, of all people, pops up briefly to inquire after the protagonist what his shirt says (it turns out to be the movie’s title) and to give him a demo tape.
LInklater is said to have consumed 600 movies a year over a ten-year period, so one of the leitmotifs of It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books is the movie diet of our traveling hero. We see him watching Kubrick’s The Killing while perusing a recent obituary of Sterling Hayden with the suggestive subtitle “Actor loved the sea, loathed Hollywood” (Linklater might feel the same way). Later on he catches a few moments of another Hayden feature, I think it’s The Come On? He also catches bits of an old Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud and a Vincente Minnelli feature with Frank Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine called Some Came Running.