Below Dreams / It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s American Neorealism, Part Two: 1984-2020 screening series. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

Adapted from interviews she conducted with passengers she met on a Greyhound bus traveling from New York to New Orleans, director Garrett Bradley’s impressive feature debut follows three 20-somethings—an unemployed father, a single mom, and a new transplant from New York—on parallel journeys into adulthood inflected by their different experiences of race, class, and gender. Through Bradley’s keen and poetic sense of place and time, New Orleans itself, a city in transition, becomes a character in the film presenting obstacles and inspiration, dead ends and leaping-off points. Altogether, it’s a kaleidoscopic vision of the intermingling of inner and outer worlds that pointed towards Bradley’s groundbreaking work to come, including her extraordinary Oscar-nominated feature documentary, Time (2020).

(2014, dir. Garrett Bradley, digital file, color, 82 min.)

Before achieving international acclaim with Slacker, Richard Linklater made this startling and little-seen precursor in Super 8mm on a budget of $3,000, shooting and starring in the film himself—often by turning the camera on and walking into the scene. It loosely follows slacker Linklater’s travels across the country, and his meetings with friends and strangers. But the real tale is in its depiction of that moment some find in their 20s, adrift in the world with time aplenty and no real destination. Linklater walks through it all in a dream. Outsider musician Daniel Johnston also makes an appearance.

(1988, dir. Richard Linklater, DCP, color, 86 min.)