After some bumbling back-and-forth between Kelly Reichardt and the Humanitas Master of Ceremonies at St. Anne’s College, the director answered one question last Friday with unheralded clarity: asked why she is drawn to “quieter” characters, she said that “the language of film is outside the dialogue; where the cut is, or where the lines end, or where the camera is pointing.” Reichardt half-joked that this had been a contentious issue for the actors who featured in her 2010 film, Meek’s Cutoff. With more than a hint of a gendered criticism, she noted that some “found themselves shooting a film which wasn’t quite the wild Western they had signed up for;” her later characterisation of Paul Dano as “heroic” also carried this tinge of irony. She describes how lines which seem to hold great significance for certain characters in the script became a whole lot less grandiose (or “heroic”) when the final, edited version had the character delivering them at a distance, with their back to the camera, in one of the few wide shots in the film.
In this sense, Reichardt describes her approach to filmmaking as entirely director-centred. Her camera refuses to follow the speaker in scenes of dialogue, stressing the direction and composition of each shot, rather than the performance. Though she claimed her greatest regret in film was once snapping at her favoured lead actress, Michelle Williams – “just say the fucking line!” – she admitted that it was closely followed by the decision precisely not to be so blunt when filming the ending to Meek’s Cutoff, which ultimately cost her a more “satisfactory” conclusion: the final shot of Williams, staring through the branches of a dying tree at a wandering Native American, had to be filmed on a different day, in a different season, using artificial lighting, due to the delay. Even four years later, sat on a stage discussing a film now quite removed from her present career, Reichardt looked visibly irked by the memory of it. Similarly irritated by the decision to screen DVDs, rather than prints of her films, Reichardt refused to watch clips of her films being displayed as a prelude to the staged conversation. Despite being open and genial for the duration of the talk, and receptive to the suggestions of the audience, she stressed repeatedly the importance of not budging an inch where the compromise of her creative values was threatened.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010), screened on a dour Friday morning at St. Anne’s, is the perfect embodiment of those values. Filmed entirely in the Oregonian desert, it is a painstaking exploration of the hopeless journey undertaken by Stephen Meek and his charges on the Oregon Trail. Journeys, particularly failed ones, are recurrent in all of Kelly Reichardt’s films, a theme which she says is in part due to the duty she feels to erode the romance of the road narrative we might find in films like Badlands (1973) and its ilk. Long journeys are wearying, repetitive, and thankless, and Reichardt does not shy away from this; she aims to show the harsh reality of Meek’s company, particularly how it would have been for those traversing the desert in 19th century America. Her direction, as in her comments on her films, consistently returns to this focus on being true to the characters’ experiences. She puts her claustrophobic use of the academy (4:3) image ratio down to this fact, explaining that she chose it to replicate the limited vision of the bonnets the females would have been forced to wear, which permitted no peripheral vision. Reichardt calls widescreen Westerns “a lie,” and maintains that the closed off camera keeps the characters’ reality in centre focus. A widescreen shot would show entire days worth of travel stretching out in front of them, rendering any plot development artificial – the desert yields no surprises, only constant, wearying terrain.
The only thing worse for Reichardt than this stuttering, unending journey is the alternative, which is the only motivation: being stuck, or unable to move at all. This is the plight of protagonist Wendy in Wendy and Lucy (2008), a deceptively heavy film, despite its simple subject matter and gentle aesthetic. When Wendy’s car breaks down on her way to Alaska and she loses her dog, the alternative is the gaping social abyss: unemployment, homelessness, and isolation. Reichardt argues that she doesn’t make political films, but her characters are too “real” for their political situation not to be felt, and 2008’s economic depression is unmistakeably present in Wendy and Lucy. Like her treatment of road narratives and the West, Kelly Reichardt’s portrayal of the people on the margins of American society is never romanticised. It is in this absence of deception that their reality – political, gendered, or otherwise – becomes inevitably present.
