by Cláudio Alves

With First Cow, Kelly Reichardt reaches an apotheosis in her career. Watching the director's filmography, one wouldn't suppose she was building up towards a monument, a grand summation of an auteur's cinematic idioms and preoccupations. Yet, here we are. While Reichardt has a very characteristic style and collection of favorite themes, one of the main elements of her oeuvre is a conspicuous lack of grandiosity. She's one of the great voices in contemporary American cinema, but her works seldom underline their mastery or call back to the films that came before, their predecessors in the Reichardt canon. 

Because of that, it feels like a good time to meditate on Kelly Reichardt's cinema, to revisit her features' wonder and, perchance, reevaluate what each one was trying to say. It's also an opportune moment to examine how those films were made, the methodologies of the artist. The way something is created imbues it with particular qualities, both aesthetic and ideological, thematic, and even spiritual. Helping us through this odyssey of discovery on the films of Kelly Reichardt, we now have Seventh Row's latest e-book, Roads to Nowhere: Kelly Reichardt's broken American dreams, as a handy guide…