Screening times:
Friday, November 28, 8:30 PM
Kelly Reichardt | USA | 2010 | 101m
Each month this year Carbon Arc presents a director for a mini-restrospective of their work. This month the Carbon Arc programmers have selected American indie icon Kelly Reichardt!
The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage.
Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other’s instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as the natural enemy.
In Meek's Cutoff, as in previous films River of Grass and Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt hews to a vision of small scale cinema characterized by naturalism and close observation of the dispossessed.
Loosely tagged as a Western, it could be tempting to look back to the so-called “anti-Westerns” of the early 70s (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Ulzana’s Raid, Bad Company, Dirty Little Billy) as the antecedents of Meek’s Cutoff’s unorthodox take on the genre. But unlike those films, for all their revisionism, this is not the Wild West; there are no sheriffs to be found, no saloons, no cavalry.
Meek's Cutoff continues Reichardt's penchant for foregrounding those too often ignored by society, history, and Hollywood - in this case, the women in the story.
“Meek's Cutoff is told from the vantage point of those without the power, from the people who don't get a say in the decisions that are being made," says Reichardt. In researching the film, Reichardt read diaries of women who made the migration west. "The women's stories offer such a specific take on the history - one totally different from the one portrayed in the Hollywood Western. The diaries really get across labor and the monotony of that labor. They call to mind Flaherty's Nanook of the North more than say Ford's The Searchers. You know: build the igloo, catch the fish, make the fire. Or in our case: set up the tent, empty the wagon, build the fire, make the beans. The diaries paint a picture of an endless landscape and a trance-like feeling of one day rolling into the next. So in Meek's the routine of chores, the rattle of the carriages, the squeaky wheel, and the intense silence that falls at night - those things are intended to reflect a journey dominated by time and space and repetition."
Tickets $12 ($11.40 cash at the door if available)
