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b. 1964, Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA

Kelly Reichardt is a most unlikely ambassador of current American independent cinema. Her films are not remotely violent or boundary pushing. She has never competed for a Palme d’Or or piqued the attention of Oscar voters. She does not write scintillating dialogue and shocking twists are not in her vocabulary. She is certainly political but her work has not reached a remotely wide enough audience to thrust her into the discourse dominated by provocateurs like Michael Moore. She is not out to shock or titillate in the slightest; in fact, none of her theatrically released features contain a single sex scene. Yet few American directors working within the realm of independent cinema in this century have garnered more acclaim than Reichardt, whose acutely observed depictions of marginalized characters journeying in search of a better life have consistently cast a spell on the country’s most influential critics, publications and audiences privy to her limitedly released works. Reichardt’s first feature to receive national distribution, Old Joy (2006), landed on a handful of year-end top ten lists. Her next effort, Wendy and Lucy (2008), cemented her stature among the most prominent auteurs of her generation; the film was cited as one of the year’s best by multiple New York Times critics and claimed first place in the prestigious Film Comment End-of-Year Critics’ Poll. In the 2011 poll, her most recent film, Meek’s Cutoff (2011), was sandwiched between the most recent works by Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy, 2010) and Martin Scorsese (Hugo, 2011).

This annual poll is not the ultimate litmus test of acclaim but certainly a premiere indicator of appreciation for filmmakers operating, for the most part, outside Hollywood. While few directors can be expected to regularly compete with titanic auteurs such as Kiarostami and Scorsese this standing among fellow filmmakers has become a reasonable expectation for Reichardt. Her transcendent depictions of outsiders on seemingly endless journeys, all of which are co-written with Jonathan Raymond and frequently based on his short stories, have qualified her as a formidably talented storyteller, eminently fascinated by outsiders and their brave but ultimately fruitless attempts to find a place to settle down, fueled by modest ambition that does not extend beyond fulfillment of their most basic survival needs, be it shelter, employment or drinkable water. Reichardt’s last four films are set in Oregon, the locations varying between the mountains, impoverished cities and the Oregon Trail circa 1845. Favouring a sparse, undecorated aesthetic, subtly cultivated suspense, contemplative pacing and reverence of the otherwise mundane that combines to achieve laudable Bressonian realism, the unpretentious and soft-spoken director has asserted herself as the poet laureate of the Pacific Northwest.

Reichardt was born in Miami, Florida and earned her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her debut feature, River of Grass (1994), was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and earned three Independent Spirit Award nominations but the issue of gender in cinema soon became, well, an issue, as it has for seemingly every female auteur: “I had 10 years from the mid-1990s when I couldn’t get a movie made. It had a lot to do with being a woman. That’s definitely a factor in raising money. During that time, it was impossible to get anything going, so I just said, ‘Fuck you!’ and did Super 8 shorts instead.” (1) Reichardt retaliated with a series of shorts that eventually accrued sufficient recognition to fund a feature: Ode (1999), a 48-minute long adaptation of the Herman Raucher novel Ode to Billy Joel, followed by Then, a Year (2002), championed by the Amy Taubin, and Travis (2004), a haunting lamentation on the Iraq War. Most crucial to Reichardt’s long overdue reincorporation into the realm of independent cinema was the support of Todd Haynes, who would serve as an executive producer on her next three films.

River of Grass

River of Grass

As it would turns out Haynes’ greatest contribution was not necessarily his connection to financiers but to the little-known novelist Jonathan Raymond. The Portland-based writer published his first novel, The Half-Life, just as Reichardt was searching for potential source material for a feature. Haynes and Reichardt had been friends for more than 20 years and when he learned that Reichardt was a fan of Raymond’s novel he was eager to introduce them. In an interview with Trespass Magazine near the release of Meek’s Cutoff Raymond recalls, “I published a novel in about 2004 that Kelly liked, and she was looking to make a film soon thereafter, around 2005 or so. She asked if I had any smaller stories to potentially adapt, because the novel was beyond her resources at that time. I had the story Old Joy, which incredibly she liked also and decided to adapt into a film. That experience was really fun for both of us, and we just kind of gone on from there.” (2) The relationship has evolved to become one of the most fruitful in the medium over the past decade. Reichardt turned to Raymond’s work again for her next feature and the duo transposed his short story, ‘Train Choir’, to the screen as Wendy and Lucy. Reichardt and Raymond together wrote Meek’s Cutoff as well as the soon-to-be-released thriller Night Moves, a departure as their first modern genre film, marking four consecutive acclaimed collaborations in a span of eight years, Reichardt summoning profound visual expression from the words of her veritable creative soul mate. The austerity of Raymond’s fiction lends itself ideally to Reichardt’s minimalist aesthetic and the products are invariably sublime. When Haynes signed on to direct a five-part adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce for HBO in 2012 he tapped Raymond as his co-writer and the pair was nominated for an Emmy.

The film that closed the 12-year gap between features, Old Joy, focuses almost exclusively upon two characters: vagabond hippie Kurt (Will Oldham) and his best friend, Mark (Daniel London), who’s settled down in a quaint suburban town near Portland with his wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith). Mark is wrestling with fear of fatherhood and his potential financial straits. The free-spirited Kurt appears to not care about anything, but as the men set up camp in the woods one comes to suspect that his issues and desires may be considerably more weighty than those of his more mature pal. Accompanied by Mark’s dog, Lucy (Reichardt’s dog and frequent star), the men smoke pot as they drive to the Cascade Mountain Range and Hot Springs a few miles north of Portland. Kurt does not have much to share by way of experiences in the years that have elapsed since their last meeting but no shortage of slyly profound philosophical musings. The men build a campfire, drink beer, shoot at cans with pellet guns in an all too conscious effort to avoid discussing the tribulations of their past, engendering a palpable tension that increases as they completely undress to bathe in the hot springs. The climax, however, turns out to be nothing more than a simple but haunting goodbye; Marks returns home to his pregnant wife, but Kurt, it is revealed, has nowhere to go.

Old Joy

Old Joy

Old Joy introduces Reichardt’s predilection for long takes and conversation scenes defined by silence more so than what is said, ennobling the mundane in a manner reminiscent of Robert Bresson. Reichardt is not one to load the frame with symbolism, preferring instead to dwell on the characters’ faces for long periods in the car, on the greenery of the path that they take en route to the hot springs and the delicate firelight barely illuminating Mark and Kurt’s faces at nighttime. Her contemplative pacing amplifies tension as the ambiguity of any kind of resolution between the two enraptures. Homoerotic undertones rise to the surface as the men strip naked and submerge in the hot springs as well as in the silence that accompanies and follows their baths. In his four-star review of the film, Roger Ebert writes, “Some may think of it as ‘leisurely’ or ‘slow-paced,’ but those qualities contribute to the almost unbearable suspensefulness of Old Joy. There are unarticulated tensions, feelings of sorrow, unease and even dread that course through the movie like a hidden creek.” (3) The infinite journey in Reichardt’s oeuvre is inaugurated in the purgatorial depiction of Kurt and emerges as the most compelling narrative quality of her following works.

The journey at the heart of Old Joy is not that which the friends embark upon in the mountains but that of the enigmatic Kurt, a lost soul nearing middle age with nothing to his name. Reichardt does not depict Kurt’s arrival in town or his departure. The film concludes with an emotionally haunting image of Kurt caught in the middle of the street at night, turning his head this way and that as if searching for a sign. Kurt arrived in town with a suitcase and a tiny red cart holding an ancient television. The audience infers that Kurt does not have a car, and through his conversations with Mark, certainly no job. Mark has settled down and despite his wariness of the duties of fatherhood he is content, a recognizable if not necessarily idyllic portrait of a near middle aged man negotiating the joy of marriage with the accompanying stagnation and boredom it can impose. Mark’s relatively complete journey is not of particular interest to Reichardt, who foregrounds Kurt as the film’s enigma, an existential figure with no known home and no perceived destination. We come to understand that he is not a vagabond by choice but because his nature has assigned him to this purgatory of endless journeying. He is the proverbial outsider and the prototypical Reichardt protagonist.

Reichardt writes her films with Raymond but otherwise commands the production with stunning self-sufficiency. Reichardt edits her films herself and has garnered a reputation as one of the most altogether efficient filmmakers working today; the cost of transferring Old Joy from 16mm to 35mm, subsidized by Kino, exceeded the cost of the production itself at $40,000. (4) The budget of Wendy and Lucy was ten times that of Old Joy…a staggering $300,000, shot on 16mm in just 18 days and edited by Reichardt in her apartment. (5)

The critical success of Old Joy enabled Reichardt to attract a legitimate star for her next picture, Wendy and Lucy, a minimalist drama so dynamically resonant that it was cited as the emblem of a movement in American cinema which A.O. Scott termed ‘Neo-Neo Realism.’ Scott’s article, “Neo-Neo Realism – American Directors Make Clear-Eyed Movies for Hard Times,” begins, “It is now almost a year since Wendy and Lucy played in Cannes – not a watershed moment in the history of cinema, perhaps, but quite a harbinger.” (6) The movement did not gain significant traction with fellow critics but the film firmly imprinted itself on an era of American independent cinema and serves as the prime example of the infinite journey in Reichardt’s cinema. The seed of Scott’s article on Neo-Neo Realism can found in his review of Wendy and Lucy, which appeared in the paper as the New York Times’ critics’ pick upon it’s release: “This movie, which was shot in August 2007 and made its way through various international festivals before arriving in Manhattan on Wednesday, seems uncannily well suited, in mood and manner, to this grim, recessionary season. We may be seeing more like it, which I suppose would be a silver lining of sorts.” (7)

Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy

Traversing the West in search of work in Alaska, Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her dog, Lucy, are separated when Wendy’s car breaks down in a nameless, borderline decrepit city in Oregon. Accused of theft at a grocery store while Lucy waits outside, tethered to a pole, Wendy is held in the manager’s custody until the police can apprehend her, by which time Lucy has disappeared. Wendy’s progress in searching for Lucy is hampered by devastating news regarding the condition of her ancient Honda when it refuses to start one morning, plunging Lucy into full-fledged economic turmoil. The security guard at the Wal-Mart outside of which Wendy illegally parks and sleeps (the heartwarmingly sensitive and sage Walter Dalton) and the mechanic tending to her Honda (a matter-of-fact but empathetic Will Patton) do everything in their power for Wendy as they come to admire her grit and resolve. Together they nurse a flicker of light at the end of Wendy’s increasingly gloomy tunnel. This being a Reichardt film, the tunnel, which is to say the journey, is indeed endless. Stranding her protagonist in Oregon yet again, Reichardt is not as interested in the scenic beauty of the state as she is its purgatorial nature, stripping away its beauty in service of illuminating themes of poverty and loneliness. Wendy and Lucy is the most vivid example of the infinite journey and all that informs its construction, visually and thematically, in Reichardt’s cinema.

Wendy and Lucy is generally regarded as Reichardt’s finest work not merely for qualitative reasons but for the endearing comparisons that it summons both political and cinematic, though the former aspect will be analyzed later in this profile. A simple story in which a far from earth-shattering ordeal is rendered transcendent and spiritually significant, Wendy and Lucy is much the film that Bresson would have made today. A concise, eloquent and unflinching depiction of noble suffering – Wendy leaves Lucy with her new, more financially stable owners – the pitiable but virtuous outsider Wendy Carroll is a veritable reincarnation of legendary Bresson characters Fontaine (A Man Escaped/Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, 1956), Marie (Au hasard Balthazar, 1966) and Mouchette (Mouchette, 1967), abused outsiders who endured a tragic existence in service of a deeper, often religious cause. Fontaine is not quite as comparable – he does indeed escape to freedom – but for practically the duration of the film he is trapped, desperate and no more expressive than Wendy. In considering Lucy’s well being rather than selfishly pry her from a family that can feed her and provide her with a yard to romp around in, Wendy is a protagonist after Bresson’s own heart. In her understated and empathetic treatment of Wendy’s plight, Reichardt’s film is affected with Bressonian realism as thoroughly as any work released since her career as a feature director was rejuvenated.

The undecorated, even drab aesthetic perfectly suits the position in which Wendy Carroll is mired, stuck in a small, dreary town with $262 to her name, no vehicle and no company. Hands in pockets, eyelids weighing heavy, lips practically pursed, Williams physically embodies the profound sadness of her situation to utter perfection. Reichardt is able to mobilize vital themes of loneliness and hopelessness through the extraordinarily talented actress’s expressions rather than resort to the expository dialogue crutch. Williams is as elemental to the effectiveness of Reichardt’s undecorated aesthetic as the positioning of her camera; her long, blonde Dawson’s Creek hair cut in a boyish style and dyed a murky brown, an ill-fitting plaid shirt and dark blue sweatshirt her uninspired uniform, a backpack and not a purse her only functional accessory, Williams is rendered destitute and asexual, Reichardt playing off her iconography and subverting her star persona as a way of highlighting the direness of her ordeal. In diluting her physical beauty Reichardt and Williams effectively reconfigure the term.

The lack of riveting action in Wendy and Lucy is not to be mistaken for lack of conflict. Reichardt certainly dwells on the seemingly mundane for reasonably long stretches but every frame in the film serves to further the plot and enhance characterization. A trim 80 minutes, the film’s pacing is eminently contemplative but not at the expense of cultivating tension. On the contrary, the relatively languid pacing amplifies the tension, Reichardt drawing out Wendy’s search for Lucy in such a way that the “almost unbearable suspensefulness” which Ebert acknowledged in Old Joy is even improved upon for in this case the determinant of suspense, Lucy, is animate and emotionally significant. Lucy is out there somewhere, and while the audience fears for the worst – justifiably, given the consistently mounting hindrances to Wendy’s journey – the audience inherently harbours a semblance of hope, for no fate has been sealed and Wendy has shown no signs of forfeiting her search. Reichardt brilliantly sustains the tension by developing the friendship between Wendy and the elderly Security Guard with nuanced warmth. The Security Guard allows Lucy to use his cell phone once a day to call the pound, legitimizing our hope that Lucy may indeed by recovered. When the Security Guard shows up on his day off to inform Wendy of Lucy’s whereabouts, he hands her eight dollars – “Don’t let her see,” he demands, referring to his wife – a profoundly heartwarming moment that illustrates the theme of poverty so relevant in every scene but not reversed to Wendy’s favour until this very instance. In the context of Lucy’s predicament and that which the Security Guard can afford to give, eight dollars carries more meaning than a blank check.

Meek’s Cutoff sets its gaze not on one single outsider but many, a triplet of families led by narcissistic trail guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a charismatic but increasingly untrustworthy figure who may or may not have the slightest clue where he and the gang are headed. A journey initially projected to last two weeks has taken longer than a month, testing not only the settlers’ patience but their ability to survive. The settlers, led by Solomon Teatherow (Will Patton) and his strong-willed wife, Emily (Michelle Williams), are days away from running out of fresh water and increasingly pessimistic regarding the odds of happening upon a lake anytime soon. The group’s decision-making dynamic is ruptured upon capture of a Cayuse Indian (Ron Rondeau) who does not speak English but may nevertheless be able to lead them to fresh water. Fed up with Meek’s verifiable incompetence, Emily takes charge of the group, ingratiating herself to the Cayuse while the others regard him as a demon. A heated debate regarding the group’s course ensues with Emily emerging as the only member of the gang with stern convictions, wresting the reigns from the defeated Meek. The film concludes with the settlers no closer to water and society than they began.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff

In proclaiming Meek’s Cutoff the best film of 2011, Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post writes, “The director Kelly Reichardt deconstructs, de-mythologizes and thoroughly redefines the American western with Meek’s Cutoff, a mesmerizing cinematic journey that is often as arduous and spare as the lives of its hard-bitten protagonists.” (8) Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy do not redefine their genre but “an arduous and spare journey of hard-bitten protagonists” could seamlessly be applied to Reichardt’s previous works. Meek’s Cutoff provides the least context of all her films; she does not hint at where they originated or where they are headed, opting instead to foreground the search for drinkable water, a supremely vague destination. Naturally, the poor settlers never reach water and their journey is cast as an infinite trek with a morbid edge, the first Reichardt film to introduce a legitimate threat of death. In the vein of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt ensures that her characters are registered as ultimate outsiders in that they cannot be oriented culturally or experientially. The audience has not a clue where they are from, Reichardt denying us the need to associate characters with a place that must have to a large extent shaped their identity. Meek’s Cutoff pressures this existential setup to a new extreme, for the opening title card which reads “Oregon, 1845” is literally the only context provided for film’s exhausting and fittingly infinite journey.

Meek’s Cutoff is indeed an extreme exercise on multiple levels, not merely in the depiction of the outsider. Reichardt’s undecorated aesthetic is of particular significance; Meek’s Cutoff contains only one interior scene, a conversation between Solomon and Emily Teatherow inside their wagon and consisting of a single shot. Every other scene can literally be called undecorated, for Reichardt and her crew have done nothing to affect the landscape, a crackling, rocky, practically treeless terrain that needs no artificial embellishment. The sparse aesthetic can be attributed to a shooting philosophy specific to the film. In an interview with Joy Dietrich of The New York Times, Reichardt addresses her decision to utilize a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio. Reichardt states, “I was trying to deromanticize the place. We had this rule that there would be no vista shots and the square really helped that. Also the immigrants are traveling 7 to 12 miles a day, so it keeps you really with them. You can’t tell what’s around the corner, especially from the perspective of the women. Their bonnets allow no peripheral vision.” (9) Reichardt’s aim to “deromanticize the place” suits her approach to Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy as well, ever committed to presenting her stories as sparsely as possible through an undecorated aesthetic that emphasizes focus on the destitute characters’ repressed agony. It is also the most effective allegory of George W. Bush’s failure as President.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff

Few filmmakers have expressed their displeasure with the Bush administration and the Iraq War in their work as consistently and eloquently as Reichardt, engaging politics in an understated manner that suits her style better than a Farenheit 9/11 (2004) assault. Her first two films following the commencement of the Iraq War employ liberal radio commentary denigrating it. The 11-minute experimental short Travis is essentially one imperceptibly blurry shot of a young boy under which a snippet from an NPR interview with a deceased soldier’s grieving mother is played, and to haunting effect. Silences in the car occupied by Mark and Kurt in Old Joy are frequently filled by an Air America broadcast bemoaning, somewhat prophetically, the rapidly widening gap of the left and right in US politics, beginning with the assertion that master of the Senate Lyndon B. Johnson’s successful promotion of the Civil Rights Act marked an irreparable fission between the north and the south, “delivering the south to the Republican Party for a long time.” The commentary recurs throughout with an increasingly acute focus on the current divisiveness chiefly wrought by Karl Rove whose influence on Bush’s campaign strategy and policymaking earned him the nickname ‘Bush’s Brain.’ The Air America excerpts did not appear in Raymond’s short story.

Wendy and Lucy is unquestionably one of the preeminently lucid and acclaimed depictions of the economic hardship that afflicted untold millions of Americans due to the astronomical cost of the War and collateral negligence. The film surpasses Old Joy in its prescience; the ballad of the impoverished Wendy Carroll was filmed in 2007 and released theatrically in December 2008, mere months after the financial crisis crystallized. Scott’s positioning of Wendy and Lucy as the standard-bearer of Neo-Neo Realism is due not only to its aesthetic and profundity but thematic resemblance to the most thoroughly Neorealist works that emerged from Italy: “Some of the first Neorealist masterpieces – Roberto Rossellini’s Open City [Roma città aperta, 1945] and Paisan [Paisà, 1946], for example — were stories of war staged in the immediate aftermath of the fighting. But it was in the late ’40s, a moment of economic crisis and political turmoil, that the movement achieved its characteristic form in movies like Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948) and Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), an international sensation at the time and still perhaps the single best known Neorealist work.” (10) Reichardt has confirmed the resemblance between Meek and Bush in practically every instance in which the similarity was pondered by an interviewer so let’s indulge in an instance in which Reichardt’s sense of humour emerged. Amused by the length and content of Meek’s 14-page “autobiography,” Reichardt remarks, “Ten pages is this long-winded joke, and then he’s just like, ‘I led the first wagon train through Oregon territory. Completely successful.’ Probably just like George W. Bush‘s new book: ‘Everything went great. Not to worry.'” (11)

Reichardt’s new film, Night Moves, opened in the United States on May 30th after a long run on the festival circuit, premiering at Venice in September, 2013 and making the rounds from Toronto to Tribeca. The director’s first thriller and most star-studded production to date, Night Moves is headlined by the continually skyrocketing Jesse Eisenberg alongside Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard as environmental activists who blow up a hydroelectric dam and prove not to be as tough as they appear to one another after an innocent is killed by the blast and their psyches slowly unravel. Subsequent paranoia causes the vulnerable trio to suspect that each might go to the authorities, the young activist played by Fanning, especially. Reichardt’s most explicitly political film to date, Night Moves just might have the star power and publicity to get her into that long overdue discourse on politics in current American cinema, promising a considerably wider audience than that which any of her art house-relegated features managed to reach.

It’s about time.

Endnotes

1. Gilbey, Ryan. “Kelly Reichardt: How I trekked across Oregon

for ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ then returned to teaching.” The Guardian, 8 Apr. 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/apr/09/kelly-reichardt-meeks-cutoff

2. Pejkovic, Matthew. “Interview with ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ writer

Jonathan Raymond.” Trespass Magazine, 11 June 2011. http://www.trespassmag.com/interview-with-meeks-cutoff-writer-jon-raymond/

3. Ebert, Roger. “Old Joy.” RogerEbert.com. 2 Nov. 2006.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/old-joy-2006

4. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468526/trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2

5. Chan, Jason J. “Exclusive: Wendy and Lucy Filmmaker Kelly

Reichardt Discusses Her Slice of Life New Indie.” Flavorwire, 10 Dec. 2008. http://flavorwire.com/5019/exclusive-wendy-and-lucy-filmmaker-kelly-reichardt-discusses-her-slice-of-life-new-indie

6. Scott, A.O. “Neo-Neo Realsm: American Directors Make Clear-Eyed Movies for Hard Times.” The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2009. Print.

7. Scott, A. O. “This (New) American Life.” The New York Times, 09 Dec. 2008. Print.

8. Hornaday, Ann. “Wagon Train Flies off the Rails.” The Washington Post, 20 May 2011. Print.

9. Dietrich, Joy. “O Pioneers! Kelly Reichardt’s Anti-Western.”

The New York Times, Apr. 2011.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/o-pioneers-kelly-reichardts-antiwestern/

10. Scott, “Neo-Neo Realism.”

11. Longworth, Karina. “Going the Distance with ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ Director Kelly

Reichardt.” The Village Voice. 06 Apr. 2011. http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-04-06/film/going-the-distance-with-meek-s-cutoff-director-kelly-reichardt/

Filmography

River of Grass (1993, 76 min.)

Ode (1999, 48 min.)

Then, a Year (2002, 14 min.)

Travis (2004, 11 min.)

Old Joy (2006, 76 min.)

Wendy and Lucy (2008, 80 min.)

Meek’s Cutoff (2011, 104 min.)

Night Moves (2013, 112 min.)

Certain Women (2016, 107 min.)

Bibliography

Chan, Jason J. “Exclusive: Wendy and Lucy Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt Discusses Her Slice of Life New Indie.” Flavorwire, 10 Dec. 2008. http://flavorwire.com/5019/exclusive-wendy-and-lucy-filmmaker-kelly-reichardt-discusses-her-slice-of-life-new-indie

Gilbey, Ryan. “Kelly Reichardt: How I trekked across Oregon for ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ then returned to teaching.” The Guardian, 8 Apr. 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/apr/09/kelly-reichardt-meeks-cutoff

Longworth, Karina. “Going the Distance with ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ Director Kelly

Reichardt.” The Village Voice. 06 Apr. 2011. http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-04-06/film/going-the-distance-with-meek-s-cutoff-director-kelly-reichardt/

McCracken, Kristin. “Kelly Reichardt Talks Her Eco-Thriller ‘Night Moves,’ The Mysteries Of Co-Star Dakota Fanning & More. IndieWire, 11 September 2013. http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/kelly-reichardt-talks-her-eco-thriller-night-moves-the-mysterious-of-co-star-dakota-fanning-more-20130911

McBride, Jason. “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50: Kelly Reichardt.” Canada International Film Festival.” http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/kelly-reichardt/

McGuire, Colin. “In Defense of Kelly Reichardt’s Directoral Style.” Pop Matters, 3 December 2013. http://www.popmatters.com/column/176675-in-defense-of-kelly-reichardts-directorial-touch/

Roriguez-Ortega, Vicente. “An Interview with Kelly Reichardt.” Reverse Shot, Fall 2006. http://www.reverseshot.com/article/reichardt_interview

Scott, A.O. “Neo-Neo Realsm: American Directors Make Clear-Eyed Movies for Hard Times.” The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/magazine/22neorealism-t.html?pagewanted=all

Scott, A. O. “This (New) American Life.” The New York Times, 09 Dec. 2008. Print. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/movies/10wend.html

Stewart, Ryan. “An Interview with Kelly Reichardt.” Slant Magazine, 5 December 2008. http://www.popmatters.com/column/176675-in-defense-of-kelly-reichardts-directorial-touch/

Wigon, Zachary.  “A Completely False Security: An Interview with Kelly Reichardt.” Mubi Notebook, 12 December 2008. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/a-completely-false-security-an-interview-with-kelly-reichardt

Web Resources

Bard College Faculty Page: http://www.bard.edu/academics/faculty/faculty.php?action=details&id=2155

Glass Eye Pix Profile, Early Works: http://www.glasseyepix.com/html/ode.html

“Kelly Reichardt by Gus Van Sant – Artists in Conversation.” BOMB, Fall 2008. http://bombmagazine.org/article/3182/kelly-reichardt

Metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/person/kelly-reichardt?filter-options=movies

Mubi: https://mubi.com/cast_members/4769

About The Author

Sam Littman is a graduate student in the MA in Film Studies program at Columbia University.

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