Kelly Reichardt and the "Roads to Nowhere"

by Cláudio Alves

With First Cow, Kelly Reichardt reaches an apotheosis in her career. Watching the director's filmography, one wouldn't suppose she was building up towards a monument, a grand summation of an auteur's cinematic idioms and preoccupations. Yet, here we are. While Reichardt has a very characteristic style and collection of favorite themes, one of the main elements of her oeuvre is a conspicuous lack of grandiosity. She's one of the great voices in contemporary American cinema, but her works seldom underline their mastery or call back to the films that came before, their predecessors in the Reichardt canon. 

Because of that, it feels like a good time to meditate on Kelly Reichardt's cinema, to revisit her features' wonder and, perchance, reevaluate what each one was trying to say. It's also an opportune moment to examine how those films were made, the methodologies of the artist. The way something is created imbues it with particular qualities, both aesthetic and ideological, thematic, and even spiritual. Helping us through this odyssey of discovery on the films of Kelly Reichardt, we now have Seventh Row's latest e-book, Roads to Nowhere: Kelly Reichardt's broken American dreams, as a handy guide… 

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The Furniture: First Cow and the Architecture of Settlement

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

First Cow is a mossy and melancholy tragedy. Kelly Reichardt makes the failure of her protagonists clear from the start, showing us their skeletons before introducing them in the flesh. There’s a morbid air to everything that follows, though it’s softened by an atmosphere of tremendous beauty. It’s the best ASMR video of the year.

Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee) clearly think that they are in a land of endless possibility: Oregon Country in the 1820s. Decades before a settled border, the USA and the British Empire “jointly occupied” the Pacific Northwest, in accord with an 1818 treaty agreement that did not even acknowledge the presence of indigenous people.

This is the context for King-Lu’s utterly false observation:

This is still new - more nameless things around here than you could shake an eel at… History isn’t here yet.”

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NYFF: Kelly Reichardt's "First Cow"

Jason Adams reporting from the NYFF which opens tomorrow

First Cow is the sort of blunt title that you immediately have a bit of a chuckle with when you picture somebody speaking it at the theater's box office -- "Two tickets for First Cow, please!" (I'd love for somebody to program a double feature with Her Smell just for such whimsy. "I came for First Cow but I stayed for Her Smell.") It's just this sort of bluntness that sticks and that director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy & Lucy, Certain Women) lovingly specializes in. A first cow is what we are promised and a first cow is what we get, dagnabit.

Reichardt is nothing if not a documentarian of practicality and face value -- as in both that she sees the value in staring at faces, and in that things being what they seem to be is never boring to her. Her camera is always fascinated by ordinary people doing ordinary things, and under her eye the ordinary magnifies, finding itself extraordinary...

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The New Classics - Meek's Cutoff

The New Classics is a weekly series by Michael Cusumano, looking at great films of the 21st century through the lens of a single selected scene. 

Scene: Emily takes charge
The lost pioneers in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff travel with a bird in a cage dangling from the back of a covered wagon. It is a token of happier days, when nature was an ornament that decorated your home, not a force that drained the life from you with its punishing distances and barren terrain.

More than a sad joke, the little yellow parakeet also functions as a poignant symbol for the codes of society the pioneers carry with them into the wilderness, codes which become increasingly absurd in the context of their predicament. Lost, dying from thirst, and led by a guide who is either a charlatan or a mad man, the wagon train’s men still make sure to isolate themselves from their wives when discussing strategy.

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Cannes Begins: Iñárritu and His Jury Arrive

by Nathaniel R

The 72nd edition of the world's most famous festival has officially begun. We'll try to bring you comprehensive daily coverage by astral projecting ourselves across the ocean (i.e. watching online videos from France and following critics on Twitter). Earlier today the president of this year's main jury Alejandro González Iñárritu arrived with his gender-balanced fellow jurors in tow (or "classmates," as Maimouna N'Diaye so charmingly put it in the preference conference)... 

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