Certain women
I interviewed Kelly Reichardt for AnOther Magazine.
In director Kelly Reichardt’s most recent film Showing Up (2023), Lizzy, a Portland-based artist played by Michelle Williams, fights for slivers of time in which to finish the sculptures she is making for her upcoming solo show. Working as an art school administrator by day and sculpting in her garage by night, her access to time is the film’s central conflict: how Lizzy wants to spend time, how capitalism eats into it, the dread of time being wasted, the frustrations of an artist waiting for ‘her’ time and being ready to ‘show up’ when it strikes. In the backdrop there is also the febrile, experimental ‘time’ of art school—when Lizzy is done with filing and printing for the day, she wanders the campus and watches students fiddle with yarn, pottery, and performance, observing their total immersion in this capsule of creativity.
I have been thinking lately about the time that I spent in undergrad discovering artists, thinkers, writers, and filmmakers whose work seemed to beckon to me. I was learning how to have ideas about things, and these ideas often started as feelings, a deep sense that a work of art was doing something to me, actively changing and shaping the way that I saw the world and what was possible to do in it. I think a lot about the most formative course in my first semester at NYU, “Slow Looking” taught by Eugenia Kisin, in which I read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, bell hooks’ Black Looks, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” all of which still rattle around my brain almost everyday. Conceptually, ‘looking’ has become inextricable from the questions I want to ask in my research, even as I have moved on to literary (ostensibly non-visual) texts.
In this course, I wrote my first paper on Reichardt’s 2016 film Certain Women, which I had rushed out to see at IFC Center during its opening week.1 I wrote that Reichardt’s spare dialogue required us to notice all of the other ways in which bonds are (de)formed in Certain Women, arguing that through attention to looking and gazing, Reichardt was “supposing a new language for how women relate to one another in film.” The paper is naive and sweet, like all freshman writing should be, but it is still true that Reichardt’s women are not onscreen to be objects of pleasure—it is not their looks (as in appearance) but looking that is crucial. Their ways of seeing the world do something. Think about the heartbreaking performance of desire that Lily Gladstone gives in the film’s final act. Or about Michelle Williams’ character, who is bartering for some stone with which to build a new house, but the man who owns the stone will only make eye contact with and address her husband. What does it mean for us to see these women as themselves seeing subjects? There is always a sense that they are not here for us, that we are just passing by and accompanying (not judging or demanding something of) them. I think about how Williams’ Lizzy in Showing Up is anti-social and cantankerous, but the film never punishes her for it. Reichardt’s films often have a kind of asexual trajectory, which allows for an emphasis on friendship or ambiguous/unnameable desires, but also for women to not have to fit themselves into pleasing shapes for others.
This is all to say that Reichardt’s films have been ones that I have always found beautiful and original, and so it was an honour to speak with her in an interview for AnOther at the beginning of the month. The story, in which we discuss the “films that made her,” is out now, and if I were asked to answer the same prompt, her work would be all over my list.
What I’m Reading:
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad: I don’t know how to write about this book. It was simultaneously subtle and searing—I guess the main thing to say is that I think it is very sophisticated and very special. In my last newsletter, I wrote about my interest in performance studies, and Hammad is doing a lot of interesting work with concepts of ‘acting’ here, referring both to the profession and to the matter of acting out a duty or task, as her protagonist Sonia returns home to Haifa to act in a West Bank adaptation of Hamlet. This is best read slowly, feeling toward every detail and meaning that Hammad offers, groping through the ambiguity not as something to be resolved but as a state of ongoing suspension, confusion, and uncertainty under occupation. I now want to read everything Hammad has written, including grocery lists and diary entries (when I finished Enter Ghost, I sat staring at the final page for several minutes before I could bring myself to close it. If you’ve read the ending, you might understand why). I strongly suggest her conversation with Sally Rooney that appeared in The Guardian this past December, in which the two writers discussed art, politics, grief, hope, and Irish-Palestinian solidarities. As she wrote then, “the bombs are still falling. My heart breaks every day. It’s unbearable.”
Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica Cardwell: I am just starting this but so far, it is really scratching my itch for good longform criticism. Cardwell’s style hooks and immerses, while offering elegant close-readings of artworks by Blondell Cummings, Carrie Mae Weems, and numerous others.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey: Friends have insisted that I will adore this experimental, fictional biography of a mysterious performance artist, and I imagine that they will probably be right! I received this as a birthday gift from my friend Abby Lacelle, with whom I will soon be reading the novel in tandem. Watch this space for a possible discussion to come…
Gareth Fearn on “liberalism without accountability” and complicity in systems of violence and capital in LRB / Lauren Fadiman on the contemplative life, gender, and the decline of the American nun in The Baffler / Ali Winston in The Guardian on the encampment counter-protests that are “part of a broader rightwing effort to sow unrest and undermine an alleged ‘liberal agenda’ at US schools” wherein counter-protestors tend to belong to anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, anti-semitic, anti-vaccine conspiracy groups who see Palestinians and Muslims as a threat to (their) traditional society and Christian nationalism / “Gardens of Good and Evil” by Olivia Laing in The New York Times—especially her reading of the 2024 Met Gala’s garden as a retreat from the proletariat / Sarah Stillman’s “Do Children Have the ‘Right to Hug’ Their Parents?” in The New Yorker, which investigates the rolling back of in-person visitation rights in U.S. jails, in favour of for-profit, highly-surveilled video conference systems.
What I’m Watching:
(Not) Riddle of Fire, dir. Weston Razooli: One of my favourite films from TIFF has just landed on streaming; however, it is too difficult to access in Canada and so I haven’t yet been able to re-watch it (I have literally been harassing the distributors on Instagram, lol). If you live somewhere where you can rent it though, I highly recommend Riddle of Fire, a film about three scrappy kids on a quest to bake a blueberry pie for their mom and stop a coven of evil poachers. It’s sort of a more fantastical, very low-budget Moonrise Kingdom. There are so many lines from this film that made me cackle in the theatre and still play on a loop in my head.
What Else I’m Doing:
I turned 26 last week! It was nice to celebrate and rest after my exam (which I also passed a few days prior). Thank you to everyone who reached out or made it special in some way. I spent the day of at the mall and then had ice cream cake in the evening with my family, which felt very teenaged of me—I guess I am in denial about trending towards 30?? And yet I have also always really been an old crone, so perhaps I will finally start aging into my personality soon.
I started auditing a free online course through MoMA called “Reimagining Blackness & Architecture.” I took a few courses on architecture for my undergrad minor in Art History, but these were mostly surveys focused on memorising aesthetic movements, features of buildings, materials, etc. and less about the social histories of architecture, which have now attracted my interest.2 For my birthday, I also received a copy of The Women Who Changed Architecture, which likewise offers an alternative view of the history of buildings, one which in the feminist instance has often been about the intersections between housing and modes of care work (some of the earliest women architects in the Americas were also socialist utopians, planning to build large cooperative residences that would redistribute and equalize labour, childcare, food access, laundry, etc.).
By now we have all heard that on Monday, May 13, the Canadian writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro died at the age of 92. In my previous newsletter, I had shared my intentions to write my first dissertation chapter on Munro, a writer to whose large body of work I am still quite new, but that I find utterly radiant and shining with possibilities.
I had been toying with the idea of running a summer book club on Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are (1978) this August, and it now seems that this may be a nice way to honour her writing and to also introduce it to those who remain uninitiated. I’m thinking about something in the spirit of Haley Larsen’s “Wharton Wednesday” read-alongs, though for a shorter period of time. We would read a few chapters at once, and then I would share some analysis, close-reading, and opportunities for discussion as I embark on my own Munro research (I am definitely working on Lives of Girls and Women, but Who Do You Think You Are has a good deal of similarities that I may want to investigate as well).
If this is of interest, please let me know, as well as whether you have any particular shapes in mind that you would like for the read-along to take. I should also note that in the U.S., the book tends to be sold under the title The Beggar Maid.
At this point, I think I had only seen Wendy and Lucy (2008), which my parents had shown me probably sometime in middle school. I often think this was the first truly indie film I had seen, one which was so adamantly on its own wavelength compared to the rhythms and styles of commercial cinema. I was transfixed, disturbed, excited. I told all of this to Reichardt once when I met her in the bathroom at Metrograph in 2019 (I was wearing a pink faux fur coat, a look quite opposite to that of her films, and so it must have been a really bizarre interaction for her).
When I studied modern architecture, I used to play a game where you had to look at a building and guess whether the architect had been a fascist, a serial philanderer, or both. This seems to be almost universally true of the major Euro-American architects of the 20th century. Needless to say, I am looking forward to learning about those who break the pattern!