The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt 

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(the text) Kelly Reichardt is an American independent filmmaker celebrated for a neo-realist meditative cinema focusing primarily on disenfranchised white characters enmeshed in some sort of crisis. Both intimate and structural, her films dwell on deceptively small stories, such as the lost dog in "Wendy and Lucy," the difficulties of sustaining old friendships in "Old Joy," the theft of a cow’s milk in "First Cow," or fragments of unrelated lives in "Certain Women." Reichardt excels at sensing the reverberations of the long disaster of settler colonialism in its social, economic, environmental, and metaphysical dimensions at the micro scale of the quotidian, the banal. The opening scene of "Meek's Cutoff" is paradigmatic of her ability to capture worlds on the brink. White settlers set on going west are crossing a river, an enterprise whose durational qualities are captured in long terms. They walk slowly and precariously against the waters, the weight of their own body and soaked clothes, of their belongings on their head or at arm’s length, and the slipperiness of the river's bed. Yet the presence of a caged canary establishes an exquisitely absurd contrast between settler attachments to signs of indulgence and mastery and their current precariousness. Ironically most of the arduous journey from that moment on will be in arid brushes[?] and salt flats in search of the very water that threatened to submerge them. Most of their processions, including the bird, either renounced or lost. Significantly, among the belongings thrown away figures a clock, a particular claim on time, coordinates, and certainty. Reichardt is most recognizable for the sense of time she curates. Often defined as “slow cinema,” that is, in the words of critic Jonathan Romney, “a certain rarified intensity in the artistic gaze that downplays event in favor of mood, evocativeness, and an intensified sense of temporality.” Slowness refers here to an approach, a softness and lingering of the cinematic gaze, and diegetic gestures, an attunement asked of the viewers rather than an absolute metric. In Reichardt's work slowness is also the melancholic mood of a neoliberal moment charged with suspended and festering aspirations, disenchanted with the linear telos of big plans and big narratives, but still mourning them. In "Night Moves," in which three environmental activists blow up a hydroelectric dam, she draws attention to the strenuous labor of making the explosion happen rather than the explosion itself which takes place off-screen. It sounds muted and almost drowned out by the breathing of the protagonists. Reichardt concerns herself with the minor frequencies of the myriad small detonations of an everyday life in crisis and their reverberations or lack thereof. “Events” generally fail to take hold but tension is everywhere simmering under the surface, though never quite erupting. Often dwelling in places in excess of narrative demands, her sensuous camera - as in, close to the senses - refuses to romanticize the environment while also displacing the agential human project to think other sites of efficacy. Her sonorous landscapes are thus not just whistling, rustling, chirping, but also full of buzzing, humming, drilling, and grinding. In the cacophony of the entangled postindustrial, agricultural, and suburban soundscapes of Oregon, Montana, and the Florida everglades, the volubility of animals, objects, machines, laboring bodies, radios gestures underscore the sparseness of words exchanged. Traditional approaches to her filmography often stresses the 12-year hiatus which separates her first feature from her later ones with s shift in tone, style, and mode of production. The post- River of Grass work is less satirical, minimalist, attached to particular recurring geographies, self-edited and produced with a small set of collaborators such as producer Todd Haynes, screenwriter Jonathan Raymond, and actress Michelle Williams. Yet, enduring predicaments traverse Reichardt’s oeuvre. Maybe more than any other, she traffics in popular signs and idioms of Americanness - the wagon, the car, the road, the gas station, the diner. That is, elements of mobility and sites of transit, while also undermining them at every turn as she delivers an autopsy of the American dream they used to scaffold. Reichardt's chronicles of U.S. failures register only in so far as she focuses on subjects whose upward mobility had come to signify the pulse of the nation, rather than populations who were never meant to be folded into its logics of conquest. There is much to be said about how indigenous and black characters figure in Reichardt’s work but I make the choice to focus on whiteness as an often unmarked category of analysis. Reichardt frames her cinema in the wake of the Bush elections and the kinds of liberal pessimisms brought by these conservative, warmongering, and neoliberal administrations. Critic Elena Gorfinkel notes the “aesthetics of austerity” which pervades her films in terms of budget and style, an economy of means in which every gesture becomes intensely charged with meaning. For the primarily white disenfranchised characters populating the films American idioms of progress remain powerful structures of identification even as the infrastructure to materialize such progress has disappeared. The films deploy a pessimism at the level of aesthetics and narrative structure which counters the cruel optimism of their protagonists, asking what might be done in a world in which the certitudes and protections of racial privilege no longer prevail. Westerns, road movies, and crime films are foundational cinematic genres in which America narrates itself. Reichardt disrupts all three. In "First Cow" and "Meek’s Cutoff" she departs from westerns in her complex portrayal of gender, reflecting on the forms of quiet, soft masculinity which were also part of the fabric of settler colonialism, and the complicity of white women and their silent witnessing or active participation. Contrary to the large and unrestricted panoramas of mainstream westerns, she selects a boxier 4 : 3 aspect ratio eschewing monumentality, as hanged laundry and tents invade the frame. These obstructed framings of the landscapes hint at the restricted, colonial cosmos which links domesticity and domestication of the land. In "River of Grass," a satire of the crime films of the 1990s, and described by Reichardt as, “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime,” the police appear as a fundamentally useless and parasitic institution. A cop loses his gun, only for his bored daughter to encounter it and accidentally shoot at a black man with it. Unaware that the bullet missed, she tries to skip town but never quite manages to do so as a toll gate forces her into a circuitous route and traffic stalls her exit. In "Wendy and Lucy," Wendy’s dreams of mobility are constantly deferred. Her car breaks down, she is arrested for shoplifting, and loses her dog. The arrested time of transit becomes full of weight and urgency. Throughout the movie, Wendy is framed in isolation, fading into the depressed landscape of the decaying postindustrial town, as the color palette of the clothes she hasn't been able to change in days echoes her bleak surroundings. This is not simply that Reichardt’s work puts destination in crisis. Arrival is also a pyrrhic victory, and even as the risks the characters take are rarely rewarded, the emphasis is on process rather than outcome. In "Old Joy" and "Certain Women," arrival failed to provide a sustained ferment for strained friendships or emerging connections. Jamie, who drove eight hours to see Beth, leaves as her feelings are unrequited. If Beth is a rare example of social mobility, she also exemplifies another kind of pyrrhic victory. Between two jobs and a commute, her entire life is absorbed by the instrumental time of capitalism, a time of social dislocation, fragmentation of the self, which leaves her perpetually out of sync with her surroundings. The thwarted desires for change which animates Reichardt's films question the kinds of ethical relations possible in a world disabused or disillusioned with whiteness and its organizing myths of the “good life,” a world in which manifest destiny has left the stage for some, and only uncertainty remains.