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Far Out Magazine, 2024
There’s a certain quality to the work of Kelly Reichardt that is hard to put into words. A feeling of carefulness, patience, something lost and something gained, connecting you to the loneliness of the world in a way that simultaneously enriches and depletes any feeling you have. It’s the image of old friends trying to fill the silence with nostalgia. Of a woman sleeping in the quiet threat of a forest at night, completely alone. A ranch owner earnestly waiting in an empty classroom. The joy of a loose pigeon flying in an art gallery. Sometimes, saying nothing can be more powerful than any words.
Reichardt’s filmography captures the interiority of people who are rarely the recipients of attention, lending her voice to those who aren’t typically seen. By staying true to her roots of independent filmmaking and remaining free from Hollywood’s aggressive input, she’s touched upon something that no one else has: that sometimes it’s better to be selective, to be slow, to listen.
Silence can be the best judge of character, a way of knowing that you’re truly comfortable around someone. It can be an olive branch, the silent acknowledgement after an argument when you realise you were in the wrong. It can be a reflection, thinking about something that makes you look at the world in a different way. It can connect you with the people around you, knowing when to speak and when to listen. It’s a form of compassion, a way of giving someone space. A way of learning and letting go.
But in recent times, we’ve become obsessed with avoiding and filling silence. We have worse attention spans than ever, and if something isn’t overstimulating our brain, then we don’t want it; we lose patience and label it as ‘boring’. However, the work of Kelly Reichardt and slow cinema in general revolves around silence, creating a feeling of openness and ambiguity that allows the spectator to see their own lives within the stillness.
When describing the ‘stillness’ that is often associated with her work, Reichardt said, “It’s static, but it’s not always static. It’s not Jarmusch. In addition, there are many things crossing through the frame. The camera is deliberate”.
The use of this word is important because stillness somewhat implies passivity, something unmotivated and objective. But the stillness in Reichardt’s films is emotionally demanding; the gaze of a camera lingers on someone’s face as it’s about to fall apart, a feeling moving to the surface. The stillness is built into the landscape of the mountains, lakes and forests, a character that is unmoved by the pain of the people around them, still in their detachment from the people that are often left behind. The stillness creates silence, which in turn allows for connection and compassion.
In Old Joy, the quiet of the forest emphasises the pain of acknowledging a fading friendship. In Wendy and Lucy, the silence emphasises the unique danger of being a woman walking alone at night. In Certain Women it highlights the loneliness of not having seeing yourself reflected in others or being appreciated by the people close to you. In Showing Up, it shows people relishing in the joy of spontaneity and unexpected moments.
By confronting her audience with the small-scale tragedies that exist in the quiet spaces all around us, Reichardt creates a rare space for us to sit with the unseen sadness of misunderstood people, leaving us to reckon with the collective loss of compassion in the realisation that these types of stories largely go untold.
On the surface, the silence in Reichardt’s work could be dismissed as unmotivated, a criticism often used to label slow cinema as ‘boring’. However, the work of Reichardt is a cumulation of subtle moments, exploring the intimacy that comes from watching everyday moments unfold and the realisation that by letting ourselves sit in these moments, we can better connect with the world around us. If you think nothing is happening, then the work is simply lost on you – it should wake you up to the joy and pain of the people we pass every day, joining us in the unspoken universality of our experiences that largely go unacknowledged.
When describing Reichardt’s work, Hope Dickson Leech said, “We must remind ourselves that we are all human, that one person’s life affects another, and that there is no straightforward way of seeing something. We can’t fully understand the truth of anything by looking from one angle. We can’t understand the world by only looking at the experience of the people making the headlines. We need to look beyond – to the voices excluded but affected nonetheless.”
Our discomfort in seeing these quiet moments on screen reflects our own impatience to sit with the lives of other people and the death of compassion itself. As a society, we are uncomfortable with silence; we fill it in every possible way we can. Some say that our eyes are the window to the soul, but I disagree – silence is the window to the soul. Sometimes, you only truly know someone once you’ve experienced their silence, as there are always people who will misinterpret your quiet.
Nothingness reveals the core of who you are, and when people have no patience for nothingness, something that fills and defines our everyday lives, it makes me wonder – have we lost patience for humanity itself?