Slacker cinema is a small genre of independent film that came out of the late 80s and early 90s. The name comes from Richard Linklater’s film Slacker (1990) and the idea is basically that nothing happens. There’s no real plot, no dramatic storyline, just people existing and talking and getting through normal boring life. Its a genre that rejects the idea that a film has to be polished or have a massive budget or a big story to say something meaningful. Kevin Smith’s Clerks is probably the most well known slacker film.
Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” is a black and white film predominantly set in and around an American convenience store. That’s it. The whole point of the film is that nothing really happens at all. This genre of film is called a “slacker” film, and is quite a ‘cult’ genre. Nothing major happens and its mostly just conversations, waiting around and dealing with small pointless problems that come with the every day, with these passive moments in life – being at work. It might feel a bit slow, a bit static and kind of repetitive but under the surface of the film is a slow, often self-referential dry humour. It gets better as the film goes on, you get to know the characters and their inside jokes.
The way Smith made this film is what really interests me though. He made the whole thing for about $27,000. He shot it on 16mm black and white film and he filmed it at night in the actual convenience store where he worked during the day, using his real friends who were not actors. He was 23. He paid for it by selling his comic book collection and maxing out credit cards which is kind of insane. The black and white wasn’t even a creative decision it was literally just cheaper, but it ended up being the thing that makes the film feel the way it does. It looks rough and unpolished and cheap but thats why it works. It doesn’t feel like something made for an audience, it feels like you’re just watching someone’s real life and thats kind of exactly what it is.
That whole approach connects to what I’m doing a lot. Smith didn’t ask anyone for permission to make his film, he didn’t wait for a studio or funding, he just did it with whatever he had. Thats the exact same thing driving the rave scene I’m documenting. We don’t have venues or budgets or official permission we just have abandoned bunkers and a sound system and people who want to make something happen. Both Clerks and my project come from the same place – you don’t need anyone to give you the go ahead to do something that matters to you. The fact that the police shut our party down almost straight away kind of proves this point even more because its literally what happens when you try to create something without asking.
Smith was also an insider which is something that keeps coming up in my references. He was filming his own life, his own workplace, his own mates. He wasn’t some filmmaker coming in from outside to make a film about convenience stores, he was behind the counter every day living it. Tillmans was inside the club scene. Goldin was inside the relationships she photographed. I’m inside the rave scene I’m documenting. Its the same idea across all of them – when the person with the camera is actually part of the thing they’re filming, it feels different. People don’t perform for the camera in the same way, the camera just becomes part of the moment and the footage feels more natural because of it.
While this film does follow a narrative and has character development on a small scale, the overall concept is still relevant to my idea of documenting the passive side of life to an extreme level. Standing around, doing nothing and time dragging on. This links to my conceptualised idea that most of life is just standing around and waiting. Dante the main character literally spends the entire film stuck behind a counter not really doing anything, just letting life happen to him. Thats the passive existence I want to contrast against the rave. In my opinion it makes my concept stronger because it’s not just showing chaos, it’s showing what entails all around it, all the inbetween moments and the boring, the drag. Life actually is like that most of the time and this makes it more realistic.
The pacing does something similar too. Long drawn out conversations that go nowhere, then suddenly something kicks off and the energy changes completely. My video works the same way – surfing is calm, getting ready is just normal boring stuff, the drive is quiet, the setup is slow, and then the party starts and it all shifts. That contrast only works because the slow bits are there. Without them the chaos doesn’t hit as hard.
Theres also the visual quality which I think is really relevant. The rough 16mm black and white footage makes Clerks feel like a memory of someones real life rather than something thats been made and produced for entertainment. That connects directly to my Mini DV footage. The grain, the low resolution, the weird unpredictable lighting – it does the same thing. It makes everything feel more honest and less constructed. I talked about this in my Tillmans case study with Gestalt theory – when an image is rough and low quality the viewer fills in the missing detail with their own imagination and emotion which actually creates more engagement than something perfectly clean. Both Smith’s 16mm and my Mini DV work in that same way, shifting the focus from what things look like to how they feel.
One last thing that connects is that Smith captured something that would have just been forgotten. The boring everyday reality of working in a shop in the early 90s, the conversations people had, the small culture around it – without that film it just disappears and no one remembers it. Thats exactly why I’m documenting the rave scene. It exists right now because a handful of people are pushing it forward and if they stop it just goes away. Its temporary, its not officially recorded anywhere, and without a camera it only lives in peoples memories and stories.
(written after party filming)