My Kingdom for a Cow
A major figure in American independent cinema, Kelly Reichardt, born in 1964, made her discreet appearance in the early 1990s, in the entourage of Hal Hartley and Todd Haynes. In the space of six feature films, from the intimate chronicle ( River of Grass [1994], Old Joy [2007], Wendy and Lucy [2009], Certain Women [2017]) to the pastoral western ( Meek's Cutoff [2011]) and the ecological thriller ( Night Moves [2014]), Reichardt takes hold of American mythology in order to deconstruct its stereotypes. In First Cow (2020), her latest feature film, a moving story of friendship and theft during the time of the first settlers, serves as a pretext for retracing the genesis of free trade and the exploitation of territory stolen from the Native Americans. The Centre Pompidou is presenting a retrospective of his films: L’Amérique retraversée (22 January - 7 February 2021).
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Subtly political, brushing the surface of things with a muffled torpor, without spectacular effects or breaks in rhythm, Kelly Reichardt’s Americana reveals the landscapes of Montana and Oregon through the prism of lost or lonely individuals, outcasts in spite of themselves, who try by any means to flee the destiny that society offers them. No sanctified heroes, but broken lives—a microscopic examination of human frailty and uncertainty in the folds of an America unable to extricate itself from a productivist scheme blazing in its final fires. For Reichardt it is also a question of “degenerating”—and thereby regenerating—a certain genre cinema (road movie, buddy movie, western, thriller, melodrama...), from which she turns round the most blatant gimmicks to deliver an intimate (re)vision, a counterpoint to the harshness of a system that her characters are forced to face.To emotional underscoring and coarse narrative threads, she contrasts a delicate, minimalist tone, where the ellipse and the off-screen are as important as what is woven on screen. By resisting the imposition of speed and the frenetic editing of Hollywood studios, Reichardt imparts her own rhythm to film, the slow, gentle pace of a forest escapade, of a footloose journey to the farthest reaches of America, of crossing a desert with no way out or of a refuge in the forest that has nothing to envy of Thoreau’s log cabin. In this neo-pantheistic way of confronting the world, Kelly Reichardt could be likened to an alter ego of Gus Van Sant, a Portland friend and neighbour. Moreover, she gives back all their dignity to the overlooked, to those who don’t conform to the norms of a system that crushes the most vulnerable. Reichardt’s films are the re
sult of a careful observation of anodyne lives that are tied to disillusionment, both romantic and political. They bring out of the most ravaged American territory another story, that of ordinary men and women struggling to cope with the disarray of a daily life from which they are trying to extricate themselves. Telephone conversation, the day after an election that was then still uncertain.
Somehow, your latest film First Cow sheds new light on today’s world and the crisis we are going through. It’s an obvious parable of capitalism and the early days of property. How did you decide to introduce the archeological discovery as an insight on the history of America itself? The script came from Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half-Life, which was the first thing I ever read of Jon’s (1). In the novel, the chapters are going between contemporary life and around 1820.You’re in the novel where you’re getting these beginnings of capitalism. Then the contemporary parts of the story revolve around the discovery of these bones and the politics of claiming the bones: the Native American tribes think that they might be ancestral bones, on the other hand there’s the property owner where the bones are found and then, there’s the scientist. The contemporary politics over who owns these bones are weaving back and forth with these early entrepreneurial days, before America’s America even. In the script, we obviously just walked around the 1820s because the themes of the novel sort of eclipsed anything I could do. They go to China on a ship and it’s over four decades. We were trying to get these themes of capital, the early seeds of capitalism from the book, but in a workable way. The cow, which is not in the novel, became the vehicle for us to do that. But in the opening, I wanted to start with the discovery of the bones. There’s this shot of this barge coming up the Columbia River. Columbia River was really a trading highway for the tribes of the first people that lived on the Columbia. Back before anybody arrived, there was a lot of trade already happening there.The idea was to begin with the contemporary shot on the Columbia region, in that very place. I just wanted to establish that and then go back to the 1820s. The beaver trade that’s happening is somewhat modeled off of the Hudson Bay Company. They came to the area and, of course, the beaver will be wiped out quite quickly, and the Chinook and the other tribes living in the area get sick the more the settlers come. Our film takes place in 1820, and over the next five years, the whole landscape would be different. And those tribes, the first people who lived there forever, were going to be pretty wiped out. It’s really the beginning of capitalism wipes, as far as the land goes. From then, that becomes the model, I guess. But I’m not a history teacher or anything. Jon Raymond, the writer, is actually quite good at speaking about that. I always feel like whatever I’m saying can probably be proven wrong by someone that knows more. But that’s my light understanding of it.
The use of flashback is a new process in your cinema. Was it an evidence as far as the writing process went? For over a decade, I was always asking: Jon, we’re always in between projects, we’re always just thinking about how could we ever turn The HalfLife into a story I could make. At times, we contemplated just doing the contemporary part and at other times the 1820s. But I never thought of going back and forth. I would not have been able to get into the details the way I wanted to. But I did find it easy, maybe because it was so easy to picture in the novel. I really liked the prologue, the idea of seeing the Columbia and saying: “This is where we are”, and then going back in and, sort of saying, here’s the ending here, the bones. As a prologue, it was easier because I could get into my own time frame after that. And that opening shot to me is really awesome. It’s paying homage to the filmmaker