Abstract
Director Kelly Reichardt has been celebrated as an independent filmmaker who takes risks in developing complicated and often fraught storylines, especially for her female characters. In Meek’s Cutoff (2010), she uses the aesthetics of slow cinema to show details frequently overlooked in the Western. In doing so, the film lays bare the violence of the settler-colonial West, highlighting the underside of European-American dreams of progress and prosperity. Addressing settler women’s investments in nation-building projects, the film traces how their commitments to Whiteness helped underwrite expansionist history. Noting the limits as well as the forms of agency White women claimed in the West, Reichardt pushes the boundaries of the women’s Western in ways that foreground Indigenous lives and the possibilities of decolonization.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York, NY: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Ahmed, Sara (2013). “Critical Racism/Critical Sexism.” Feminist Killjoys. December 19.<https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/12/> (June 1, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Armatage, Kay (2003). The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.10.3138/9781442681378Search in Google Scholar
Combs, Richard (2011). “The Way West: Kelly Reichardt Explores a Weightless Future.” Film Comment 47.2, 30–33.Search in Google Scholar
Comer, Krista (2017). “Accountabilities: Authority, Feminism, West.” Studies in the Novel 49.3, 419–424.10.1353/sdn.2017.0038Search in Google Scholar
Fraser, Caroline (2017). Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.Search in Google Scholar
Fusco, Katherine and Nicole Seymour (2017). Kelly Reichardt. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.10.5622/illinois/9780252041242.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte (1996). The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gómez-Barris, Macarena (2017). The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.10.2307/j.ctv1220n3wSearch in Google Scholar
Gorfinkel, Elena (2015). “Exhausted Drift: Austerity, Dispossession, and the Politics of Slow in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff.” Tiego de Luca and Nuno Burradas Jorge, eds. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 123–136.10.1515/9780748696031-014Search in Google Scholar
Grandin, Greg (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.Search in Google Scholar
Hall, E. Dawn (2018). The Films of Kelly Reichardt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411127.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Holmund, Chris (2016). “Mutual Muses in American Independent Film: Catherine Keener and Nicole Holofcener, Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt.” Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber, eds. Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 257–275.10.1515/9781474403931-019Search in Google Scholar
Kaplan, Amy (1998). “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70.3, 581–606.10.2307/2902710Search in Google Scholar
Kois, Dan (2011). “Reaching for Culture that Remains Stubbornly Above My Grasp.” New York Times Magazine May 1. 52–53.Search in Google Scholar
Kollin, Susan (2000). “Race, Labor and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3, 675–694.10.1353/mfs.2000.0053Search in Google Scholar
Lewis, R.W.B. (1955). The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Littman, Sam (2011). “Splice: Trailblazer: Sundance Director Recreates Concept of Western Film.” The Daily Orange. <http://dailyorange.com/2011/01/splice-trailblazer-sundance-director-recreates-concept-of-western-film/> (June 18, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Longworth, Karina (2011). “Meek’s Cutoff: Go West, Young Women.” LA Weekly. April 14. <https://www.laweekly.com/meeks-cutoff-go-west-young-women/> (June 12, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Martin, Theodore (2017). Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.10.7312/mart18192Search in Google Scholar
Meek’s Cutoff (2010). Dir. Kelly Reichardt. Evenstar Films.Search in Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco (2019). Far Country: Scenes from American Culture. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Search in Google Scholar
Patel, Raj and Jason W. Moore (2017). A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520966376Search in Google Scholar
Pejkovic, Matthew (2011). “Interview with Meek’s Cutoff Writer Jon Raymond.” Trespass Magazine. June 11. <http://www.trespassmag.com/interview-with-meeks-cutoff-writer-jon-raymond/> (June 1, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Prats, Armando José (2002). Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.10.7591/9781501729539Search in Google Scholar
Quart, Leonard (2011). “The Way West: A Feminist Perspective: An Interview with Kelly Reichardt.” Cineaste 36.2, 40–42.Search in Google Scholar
Scott, A.O. (2009). “Neo-Neo Realism.” New York Times Magazine. March 22.<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/magazine/22neorealism-t.html> (June 5, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Smith, Paul Julian (2010). “At the Edge of History.” Film Quarterly 64.2, 12–13.10.1525/FQ.2010.64.2.12Search in Google Scholar
Vida, Vendela (2011). “Michelle Williams.” Interview Magazine. April 18. <https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/michelle-williams> (June 12, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Wexman, Virginia Wright (1993). Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9780691238180Search in Google Scholar
White, Patricia (2018). “Pink Material: White Womanhood and the Colonial Imaginary of World Cinema and Authorship.” Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelaca, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro, eds. Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender. New York, NY: Routledge, 215–226.Search in Google Scholar
Zeitchik, Steven (2016). “With Rugged Feminist Piece ‘Certain Women,’ Kelly Reichardt Shows Why She’s the Last Indie Purist (For Now).” Los Angeles Times. October 10.<https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-kelly-reichardt-certain-women-nyff-kristen-stewart-20161010-snap-story.html> (June 3, 2019).Search in Google Scholar
©2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Degeneration of Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of the U.S. West: Introduction
- Uncertain Wests: Kelly Reichardt, Settler Sensibilities, and the Challenges of Feminist Filmmaking
- The Perpetuation of Myth: Ideology in Bone Tomahawk
- Portrayals of Degenerate Religious Leaders in Contemporary Film Westerns
- True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns
- Settler Colonial Disease and Dis-Ease in August: Osage County
- Appropriating the Comanche: Hell or High Water and the New Southwest
- Book Reviews
- “A Feast that Lasts a Year or Two”: Writing, Reading, and Editing Serials in the ‘Quality Monthlies.’
- Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Degeneration of Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of the U.S. West: Introduction
- Uncertain Wests: Kelly Reichardt, Settler Sensibilities, and the Challenges of Feminist Filmmaking
- The Perpetuation of Myth: Ideology in Bone Tomahawk
- Portrayals of Degenerate Religious Leaders in Contemporary Film Westerns
- True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns
- Settler Colonial Disease and Dis-Ease in August: Osage County
- Appropriating the Comanche: Hell or High Water and the New Southwest
- Book Reviews
- “A Feast that Lasts a Year or Two”: Writing, Reading, and Editing Serials in the ‘Quality Monthlies.’
- Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation
- Books Received