ABSTRACT
This chapter frames Before Sunrise within the youth cultures of the mid-1990s, when the film was conceived, produced and released. Starting from Céline and Jesse's meeting on the train to Vienna, we note the paradox between the relatively sparse information that we have about them and the fact that they spend the rest of the train journey and then the remainder of the film mostly talking to each other. This narrative choice has led critics to associate the characters, and the film, with US contexts such as Generation X and ‘slackers’. We review the historical journey of the term Generation X from Hungarian photographer Robert Capa to Douglas Coupland's novel. We conclude that the importance of the term as a context for the movie lies more in the ways in which the critics and the filmmakers themselves made the association than in the actual dynamics of a story that takes place in Europe and in which one half of the couple is European. In spite of the ‘Americanness’ of the term ‘slack’ at the time of the film and also a long history that goes back to World War I, we find the notion more useful to describe the film's dynamics, its place in Richard Linklater's early career and its importance within a certain type of US cinema in the 1990s.
