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Alex Heeney and Orla Smith have edited a book that celebrates the auteur that is Reichardt without erasing the collectivity of making movies. It's maybe because of such personal loves that I find myself so besotted by Roads to Nowhere. Like theatre, it demands collaboration, its final works birthed out of a dialogue between people, long e-mails exchanged between minds and imaginations, conversations, and arguments. Speaking only for myself, I've always been fascinated, even enamored, by the collective nature of cinema as an art form. One can have cinema without actors, as Reichardt's experimental shorts show, but a film like First Cow requires them to breathe life into delicately sketched characters. The actors too are essential parts of the design. The script, adapted from Jonathan Raymond's novel The Half-Life, by him and Reichardt, lays a foundation for everything that's built on top. Reichardt's heavily involved in the process of creating each aspect of the films, but she's still working with other artists as she does it.įirst Cow wouldn't be the same without the aforementioned cinematography of Blauvelt or the specificities of the score composed by Tyler, the costumes of April Napier, Anthony Gasparro's sets, the sounds designed by Leslie Shatz, or even the animal training done by Lauren Henry. Cinema is a collaborative art form, even though we may err on the side of attributing too much authorship to the directors.
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Someone has to make each part of the cinematic edifice, the cuckoo clock, and Reichardt trusts her craftspeople and creatives who help her along.
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Reichardt may never shine a light on the mastery of such construction, but her works exhibit this exactitude, First Cow most of all. Every spring and screw are there for a reason, building up a filigreed wonder that's more than the sum of its parts. Some films work as perfect machines, cuckoo clocks of cinematic perfection. First Cow crystalizes all this in the amber of Christopher Blauvelt's evocative cinematography while the sounds of nature and William Tyler's lilting tunes complement the vision. Such things are common to nearly all seven features of Kelly Reichardt, loosely articulating a perspective on the world in front of the camera, and on cinema too. The cruelty of capitalism, how it squelches life, and the small majesty of people knowing each other, drawing near or drifting away. Long observations of non-action, stretched through real-time like gossamer fabric that never rips. People alone in communion with the landscape, drifting through space in the Oregon wilderness. 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… The way something is created imbues it with particular qualities, both aesthetic and ideological, thematic, and even spiritual. It's also an opportune moment to examine how those films were made, the methodologies of the artist. 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.īecause 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. 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. 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. With First Cow, Kelly Reichardt reaches an apotheosis in her career.