Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/23xbe2zy9780252041242.html
Coauthored with Nicole SeymourKelly Reichardt's 1994 debut River of Grass established her gift for a slow-paced realism that emphasizes the ongoing, everyday nature of emergency. Her work since then has communed with--yet remained apart from--postwar European realisms, the American avant-garde, independent film, and the emerging slow cinema movement.
Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour read such Reichardt films as Wendy and Lucy and Night Moves to consider the root that emergency shares with emergence--the slowly unfolding or the barely perceptible. They see Reichardt as a filmmaker preoccupied with how environmental and economic crises affect those living on society's fringes. Her spare plots and slow editing reveal an artist who recognizes that disasters are gradual, with effects experienced through duration rather than sudden shock.
Insightful and boldly argued, Kelly Reichardt is a long overdue portrait of a filmmaker who sees emergency not as a break from the everyday, but as a version of it.
“The organizational structure is superb, as the concepts they’ve isolated seem excitingly to cut to the heart of Reichardt’s motifs. . . . These pages dazzlingly force their readers-as Reichardt’s films force their viewers their viewers- to reflect on the political implications of our empathy, or lack thereof, to imagine other kinds of relationships beyond empathy and judgment."--Cineaste
"An engaging and thoughtful book. Fusco and Seymour persuasively use political theory and affect studies to analyze Reichardt's unique deployment of realist traditions and the politics of temporality in her films. The authors' striking insights illuminate the filmmaker's style and her importance not only in contemporary art and indie cinema spheres but for American cinema more broadly."—Elena Gorfinkel, coeditor of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/23xbe2zy9780252041242.html
Coauthored with Nicole SeymourKelly Reichardt's 1994 debut River of Grass established her gift for a slow-paced realism that emphasizes the ongoing, everyday nature of emergency. Her work since then has communed with--yet remained apart from--postwar European realisms, the American avant-garde, independent film, and the emerging slow cinema movement.
Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour read such Reichardt films as Wendy and Lucy and Night Moves to consider the root that emergency shares with emergence--the slowly unfolding or the barely perceptible. They see Reichardt as a filmmaker preoccupied with how environmental and economic crises affect those living on society's fringes. Her spare plots and slow editing reveal an artist who recognizes that disasters are gradual, with effects experienced through duration rather than sudden shock.
Insightful and boldly argued, Kelly Reichardt is a long overdue portrait of a filmmaker who sees emergency not as a break from the everyday, but as a version of it.
“The organizational structure is superb, as the concepts they’ve isolated seem excitingly to cut to the heart of Reichardt’s motifs. . . . These pages dazzlingly force their readers-as Reichardt’s films force their viewers their viewers- to reflect on the political implications of our empathy, or lack thereof, to imagine other kinds of relationships beyond empathy and judgment."--Cineaste
"An engaging and thoughtful book. Fusco and Seymour persuasively use political theory and affect studies to analyze Reichardt's unique deployment of realist traditions and the politics of temporality in her films. The authors' striking insights illuminate the filmmaker's style and her importance not only in contemporary art and indie cinema spheres but for American cinema more broadly."—Elena Gorfinkel, coeditor of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image
Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138183483
Typically, studies of early cinema’s relation to literature have focused on the interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, however, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public’s attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era’s varying experiments with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel’s shared privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of early film genres, this is the first book-length study of the reciprocal media exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature, Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138183483
Typically, studies of early cinema’s relation to literature have focused on the interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, however, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public’s attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era’s varying experiments with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel’s shared privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of early film genres, this is the first book-length study of the reciprocal media exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature, Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.
