AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FEMALE FILMMAKERS: KELLY REICHARDT in FOCUS by E. Dawn Hall a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
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AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FEMALE FILMMAKERS: KELLY REICHARDT IN FOCUS by E. Dawn Hall A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctorate in English Middle Tennessee State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Linda Badley, Chair Dr. Marion Hollings Dr. Elyce Helford ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation chair, Dr. Linda Badley, for first taking me on as her research assistant for a year and then agreeing to be my dissertation chair. I would have been lost without her direction, resilience, clarity, and passion; Dr. Badley made writing my dissertation a wonderful experience. I would also like to thank my dedicated dissertation committee, Dr. Marion Hollings and Dr. Elyce Helford for their student commitment and feedback that served to make this dissertation better in every way. I felt honored to work with and learn from them. I would also like to thank Dr. David Lavery for his support as the graduate director and for the many wonderful classes I was privileged to take from him. Many thanks to the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, Tim Brotherton, my department head, Dennis George, my dean and Gordon Emslie, my provost at Western Kentucky University. I was able to finish writing my dissertation within a year due to the sabbatical I was awarded. I appreciate the flexible course scheduling from my department. Thanks to the WKU Writing Center, especially Geneva Ged, for working with me all summer on revisions. I owe a great debt to Dr. Ted Hovet, who advised me throughout the past four years and who also offered suggestions during the dissertation phase. I would finally like to thank my family for their constant encouragement and support: my sister, Dee and her family, my mother, Kitty, and my father and step-mother David and Janice. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Jason Heflin, without whose support none of this could have been possible. Thank you. i ABSTRACT Female directors are historically underrepresented in the film industry. By studying the careers of independent women directors, scholars can identify their opportunities and challenges to create a more diverse and equitable industry. After synthesizing recent studies of women in film, this project focuses on the career of Kelly Reichardt as one example of the creative methodology, production, and content of women’s work in the indie sector. After the introduction, a current snapshot of American independent female filmmakers’ careers, chapter one introduces Reichardt’s early influences and growth. Chapters two through five focus on micro-budget production decisions that affect content, aesthetic, and cinematic choices. Chapter two analyzes Reichardt’s experimental techniques and feminist themes in her first feature River of Grass (1995) and begins a discussion of genre mixing that extends to subsequent films. Chapter three examines her turn, after a twelve-year hiatus from filmmaking, to minimalism and a focus on cultural concepts of masculinity in Old Joy (2006). In her next film, Wendy and Lucy (2008), highlighted in chapter four, Reichardt responded to a lack of political will in addressing the pervasiveness of poverty and homelessness, issues complicated by gender. The chapter also explores ecofeminist themes of human collateral in the wake of natural disasters. With her largest budget to date, Reichardt made Meek’s Cutoff (2010), a feminist Western that critiques contemporary political landscapes, as detailed in chapter five, which also discusses her strategic uses of slow cinematic techniques and 1.37:1 screen ratio. The conclusion draws from Reichardt’s production model to address issues facing women in film. ii By chronicling Reichardt’s career and production methods, this project explores women’s underrepresentation and attempts to draw conclusions about female career longevity in the independent sector. Reichardt offers a contemporary, sustainable career model for independent filmmakers; one that does not aspire to commercial success, but instead impacts scholarly and industry communities. With Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, and Nicole Holofcener, Reichardt belongs to a small group of American women filmmakers with a distinctive and growing body of films. This project hopes to expand the existing body of research and support changes in perception and opportunity related to women in the film industry. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION The Film Industry and Female Directors…………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER TWO: KELLY REICHARDT An Overview ………………………………………………..……………………… 19 CHAPTER THREE: PRECURSOR—RIVER OF GRASS ……………………….. 34 CHAPTER FOUR: DISCOVERY—OLD JOY….………………………………… 58 Production………………………………………………………………….. 60 Complicating Masculinity …………………………………………………... 66 Politics and Personal Identity ……..………………………………………...74 Inserting the Feminine………………………………………………………. 78 CHAPTER FIVE: BREAKTHROUGH—WENDY AND LUCY………………….. 84 Production………….……………………………………………………….. 85 Neo-Neorealism……………………………………………………………. .90 Gender and the Narrative of Homelessness………………………………….96 Social Realism and the At-Risk vs. the Can-do Girl.………………………. 102 Ecofeminist Concerns……………………………………………………… 104 CHAPTER SIX: EXPECTATIONS—MEEK’S CUTOFF…..……………………. 114 The Real Story of Meek……………………………………………………. 115 Production………………………………………………………………….. 117 Format Ratio…………………………………………………………….…. 120 “Politicking,” Race, and Violence…………………………………………. 129 Questions of Genre: A Feminist Western…………………………………. .132 iv Page Slow Cinema and Neo-Neorealism………………………………….….…. 137 The Open Image in Slow Cinema…………………………………………. 143 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION.…………………………………………….. 147 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………… 154 APPENDICES…………………………………………………………..………… 165 APPENDIX A: KELLY REICHARDT LIFE TIMELINE…………………............ 166 v 1 Introduction: The Film Industry and Female Directors “[T]here has been NO sustained growth in women directors over the last decade in both narrative and documentaries. So the next time someone says things are great for women directors tell them that things are not better, they have STAYED THE SAME and that we still have so much more work to do.” ~Melissa Silverstein “I had 10 years from the mid-1990s when I couldn’t get a movie made. It had a lot to do with being a woman. That’s definitely a factor in raising money.” ~Kelly Reichardt While the Hollywood film industry is as pervasive as ever, independent films are seeping into the American mainstream consciousness. The Cannes and Sundance film festivals have infiltrated popular culture and with more assessable distribution through Netflix, Amazon, and Vimeo, many independent directors have become household names. However, as Michael Newman indicates in Indie: An American Film Culture, defining independent film is challenging. Independent film has its roots in the early twentieth century, when the label indicated “production, distribution, and exhibition outside of the Hollywood studios and mainstream theater chains,” but indie or independent film now represents more than a rejection of big business or mainstream values (Newman 3). Any discussion of independent film must consider the cultural context in addition to economic forces and film content. When deciphering the differences between the terms indie and independent, Newman suggests that “indie gained salience as a more general term for nonmainstream culture in the 1990s, . with an added connotation of fashionab[ly] cool. But it also functions as a mystification of the more straightforward category ‘independent’” (Newman 4). This “mystification” stems 2 from the culture created around music, media, news outlets, texts, and businesses that want to be identified as outside the mainstream and youth oriented. In what seems as an effort to further complicate the indie label, Hollywood studios created “indiewood,” or mini-major vintage branches beginning in the late 1990s to buy films at festivals in an effort to profit from and appeal to niche audiences. But according to Newman, “the term indiewood, . can pejoratively mock films of Hollywood mini-majors that aim to position themselves as ‘indie’” adding a level of inauthenticity or at the very least confusion (6). Ultimately, however, no matter the specific or general labels audiences use to describe the type of film they view, “[t]he value of indie cinema is generally located in difference, resistance, opposition—in the virtue of alternative representations, audiovisual and storytelling styles, and systems of cultural circulation” (Newman 2). Within this process of resistance, indie films allow for more diverse voices, and with an ever changing and diversifying American public “[i]ndie films have functioned as an alternative American national cinema (Newman 17). No matter what cinema they operate within, however, female filmmakers represent a segment of directors that have been historically underrepresented. While female filmmakers find a stronger voice through opportunities the independent film industry offers compared to Hollywood, there is a significant lack of support in both industries. By analyzing and exploring the careers of contemporary American independent female filmmakers, scholars can identify their opportunities and challenges in an effort to create a more diverse and equitable film industry. This project synthesizes a number of recent studies on women in the film industry and, through an in-depth look at the filmmaking of independent director Kelly 3 Reichardt, analyzes the creative methodology, production, and content