The Films of Kelly Reichardt
FMS 3233
Michael Lee, School of Music
Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has established herself as a signal voice in American and global cinema today. The director of six independently produced feature films, her work invariably finds its way onto the top-ten lists of influential critics. Her work is now widely seen as central to the "slow cinema" movement, a critical term used to describe films that unfold slowly in minimalist narratives in which keen and even minute observation delivered in long takes substitutes for the mythic, sentimental, and polemical strategies dominant in Hollywood films.
Reichardt provides film students and students generally with two urgent models. First, from the standpoint of film making, she has crafted a career in the ultra-expensive and extremely alluring field of narrative feature film without the benefit of independent financial means nor the backing of conventional producers working within the exclusionary world of film finance. Young people similarly drawn toward feature film production could have no more realistic model. Second, her films explore the issues of her day through intimate examinations of people and their choices. Her work has been hailed in the New York Times as "neo-neo-realist" alluding to the groundbreaking work of postwar filmmakers who sought to make politically engaged art through a similarly minute examination of small choices embedded in the context of plausible lives. Her work frequently offers a ferocious comment on the sentimentalizing tendencies within mainstream cinema while challenging audiences with peculiarly disturbing experiences owing to the strong reactions they invite.
Public Lecture Series
The School of Music presents a public lecture series in conjunction with the Presidential Dream Course. Presentations are free and open to the public. For information or accommodation to events on the basis of disability, contact Michael Lee, melee@ou.edu.
River of Grass
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
7:00pm
Gaylord Hall, Rm. 1140
Reichardt's first feature film offers a comical and searing satire of the cinematic crime couple.
Old Joy
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
7:00pm
Gaylord Hall, Rm. 1140
Kristi McKim
Assistant Professor of English/Film Studies at Hendricks College
Dr. McKim will speak on relationships/time/cinema prior to a screening of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy." Reichardt's second feature provides an intimate examination of a weekend camping trip by two old friends whose lives and relationships are taking them in different directions.
Kristi McKim teaches courses in film studies. Her teaching and research explore the ways that cinema can enrich our perception by correlating our experience of time (through clocks, calendars, bodies, histories) with environmental changes (gravity, weather, seasons) and human emotion (such as nostalgia, desire, love, melancholia). She has published on Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life (in Camera Obscura) and Agnès Varda's Jacquot de Nantes (in Studies in French Cinema) in Fall 2008; her work also appears in Film-Philosophy and Senses of Cinema, and is forthcoming in Film Quarterly and Film International.
Wendy and Lucy
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
7:00pm
Gaylord Hall, Rm. 1140
Amelie Hastie
Professor of English and Film and Media Studies, Amherst College
Film scholar and Amherst College film professor Amelie Hastie will speak on the pleasures of painful spectatorship prior to a screening of Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy." The film offers a detailed and hyper-realistic look at the last act in a woman's fall from working poor to homelessness.
Amelie Hastie is a distinguished professor of Film and Digital Media at Amherst College. She has published two books: Cupboards and Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (University of California Press) and The Bigamist (British Film Institute). Her work centers on women and film as both filmmakers and spectators. Her current project on identification and spectatorship will include a chapter about Kelly Reichart.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
7:00pm
Gaylord Hall, Rm. 1140
Kelly Reichardt's feminist western examines the true story of several families lost on the Oregon Trail when their hired scout Meek proves unreliable.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
7:00pm
OKC Museum of Art
Kelly Reichardt introduces her 2016 film "Certain Women" at the OKC Museum of Art.
Kelly Richardt is the director of six feature films: River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2009), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2014), and Livingston (2016). Her films have earned her widespread critical praise and numerous awards and nominations, including six Independent Spirit Awards (River of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy); Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival (River of Grass), Los Angeles Film Critics Prize for Best Picture (Old Joy), Best Picture from the Toronto Film Critics Association (Wendy and Lucy), and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves) to name only a few of the accolades her films have earned. Her work consistently wins a place on the annual top-ten lists of the nation’s most influential critics. She has won the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and currently serves as artist-in-residence at the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College in New York City.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
7:00pm
Gaylord Hall, Rm. 1140
Dawn Hall
Professor of Film Studies, Western Kentucky University
Dawn Hall, professor of film studies at Western Kentucky and author of a new monograph on Kelly Reichardt from University of Edinburgh Press, introduces a screening of Kelly Reichardt's "Night Moves." Reichardt's meditation on a small group of eco-terrorists in the Pacific Northwest who plan and execute the bombing of a dam.
