Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

February 22, 2015 · Knoxville Museum of Art · 2:00 p.m.

In 1986, five years before the release of his breakthrough film, Slacker, Richard Linklater spearheaded the creation of the Austin Film Society. He was 26 at the time, a college dropout and former baseball player, who had spent two years on an oil rig and was just beginning to make his first experiments with a film camera. Among his heroes then was James Benning, who had, over the previous decade, established himself as one of America’s preeminent avant-garde filmmakers. By chance, Benning was also a former baseball player. The two eventually met and struck up a fast friendship.

Inspired by the French documentary series, Cinéastes de notre temps, which over the past 50 years has spotlighted Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and dozens of other prominent filmmakers, first-time director Gabe Klinger got Linklater and Benning together in Austin, where they spent a week hanging out, talking about movies, and shagging fly balls. In the years since they first met, Linklater has worked largely on the margins of the Hollywood system, directing Dazed and Confused, the Before Sunrise trilogy, School of Rock, and the Oscar-nominated Boyhood, among others. Benning has continued to teach and to make groundbreaking experimental films — among his many honors, 13 Lakes was one of the 22 films added to the National Film Registry in 2014. Double Play is a rare opportunity to sit in on their conversations. What gradually emerges is their shared curiosity and their almost heroic idealism about film art.

Double Play premiered at the 2013 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Venezia Classici Award (Best Documentary on Cinema).