Ghost riders: Kelly Reichardt, certain women, certain men

ABSTRACT

Kelly Reichardt pays attention to women’s actions and subjectivities, often when they are alone, but not at the expense of men. It takes seeing her films more than once to understand how intricately her characters are pieced together through unexpected shot progressions, a non-linear sensibility and the overall logic of Reichardt’s mise en scène. That so many points in her films lead to ‘not knowing’ may have something in common with her preference for a-sexuality, a much more radical, subtle project than sex role reversal. Reichardt’s body of work, as a whole, operates through a mise en scène of sexual difference that is irreducible to a theme or an overt subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Kelly Reichardt
• sexual difference
• mise en scène
• a-sexuality
• Native Americans
• homelessness

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was written for presentation in June 2020 in the seminar for the IVAM Chair of Studies X and XXI Centuries, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, IVAM, Valencia, Spain, which was cancelled because of COVID restrictions. My thanks to the Institute and to Professor Giulia Colaizzi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. « [A]vant tout une certaine qualité de regard qui ne fait qu’un avec la chose regardée, tout en gardant ses distances. » Rivette (2018, 358), quoted in Emile Breton’s review « Cinéma-passion », L’Humanité (Paris), 29 November 2018.

2. I have come across much writing on Reichardt proclaiming her as a feminist director (Reichardt explicitly denies this and all categorization) and that neglect her attention to male characters. This tendency runs throughout E. Dawn Hall’s ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt. ‘Reichardt contributes to the discussion of female spectator pleasure by using feminist counter-cinema techniques to construct female subjectivity, and by featuring female protagonists, highlighting women’s issues, and creating scenes that emphasize human connections through relationships rather than actions. These featured relationships are also free of traditional heterosexual romance plots, since the focus in all her films is on working through issues or situations.[…] In River of Grass Reichardt upends traditional filmmaking forms which take away female power and voice, so that they instead highlight the woman as subject’. Hall continues, ‘In River of Grass Reichardt offers alternative views of relationships through gender role reversals and taboo reactions to motherhood, parenting, crime, and heterosexuality. Subverting the male gaze, Reichardt creates a female character who steps outside of socially acceptable boundaries by performing taboo actions’ (2018: Edinburgh University Press), 21, 23.

3. The delicate, respectful segment of Certain Women that raises questions about sexual desire, or not, between two women, is discussed below.

4. See the anthology Cerankowski and Milks (2014) for many ways to argue for a politics of claiming and understanding asexuality, medical and other. I don’t believe Reichardt’s films fall within the purview of the categories proposed.

5. ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt, ‘Interview with Kelly Reichardt’ with E. Dawn Hall and Allison Adams, June 2015, 147. Raymond wrote, or co-wrote with Reichardt, Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2013), First Cow (2019) and Showing Up (2022).

6. Maloy’s screen credits read: ‘Native Sandstone’ and ‘Tome’ from Half in Love and ‘Travis B’ from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. I recommend reading them after seeing the film, and the same for Maloy’s and Reichardt’s separate interviews on Criterion’s Certain Women Blu-Ray.

7. Take a look on a map of Montana, with Native American reservations throughout the state. Livingston is close to the huge Yellowstone National Park. Tourist guides emphasize the comforts and beauty of the town, but warn about the wind and the difficulty of driving from there to Yellowstone (hence, to Belfry, the location of the school and ranch) exactly as Beth described it: https://bozemanrealestate.group/blog/6-things-you-should-know-before-moving-to-livingston-mt.

8. New York Film Festival Selection Committee Chairman Kent Jones with Kelly Reichardt, Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern and Lily Gladstone, 3 October 2016, YouTube.

9. The Making of ‘Meek’s Crossing’ is on the Criterion DVD/BluRay. Many interviews with Reichardt can be found on YouTube. For her work with writer Jon Raymond and other careful information and observations, see the dossier in Cahiers du Cinéma, January 2021.

10. ‘Ou en êtes vous? de Kelly Reichardt’ (lecture), Centre Pompidou (Paris), 1 February 2021.

11. Fessenden and Reichardt from the voice-over commentary for River of Grass (Oscilloscope DVD). For the record, Fessenden is also shown naked, lying on his stomach on his bed when his fully dressed, a-sexual mother opens his curtains one morning. She sits on the bed next to him for a minute, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing sexualized.

12. William Blake, Proverbs of Hell (1790–93) 1906 edition, 16, Internet Archive. About the ambiguity of this line, see https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-does-the-following-quote-by-blake-mean-the-40677 Jim Jarmusch used lines from the same poem in Dead Man.

13. d’Allones (2020, 49). She is referring here to Certain Women, but her point has a wider scope. ‘Kelly Reichardt conjugue le macro et le micro, une opération qu’elle reproduira tout au long du film, ne cessant de tisser le quotidien, au présent, de sa poignée de personnages et la présence fantomatique d’une société plus vaste, d’un temps plus long. Les résurgences de l’histoire collective s’entremêlent continuellement aux trajectoires personnelles que le film ne suit que quelques jours’.

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Janet Bergstrom

Janet Bergstrom is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Cinema Studies at UCLA. She is primarily engaged in archivally-based research on European film directors who have worked in more than one national cinema, such as F. W. Murnau, Jean Renoir, Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, or Fritz Lang. She has created visual essays along the same lines for DVD/Blu-ray, and also published on Claire Denis and Chantal Akerman. She is completing a comprehensive career study of F. W. Murnau.