An Introduction to Film

Causal minimalismA fiction movie need not have a
traditional goal-driven plot to be considered narrative.
Richard Linklater’s Slacker(1991) has no central character, no
sustained conflict, and tells no single story: yet it employs a
structure very much built upon cause-and-effect connections,
however tenuous, between the young bohemians that drift in

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and out of the movie. Beginning with a man getting off a

bus (played by Linklater himself), the camera follows one

character to another, drifting through a succession of over a

hundred individual participants as they cross paths in Austin,

Texas. Each encounter leads to the next and so forth in an

extended exercise in causal minimalism.

THE IDEA OF NARRATIVE 69