Reichardt, Kelly

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    Happy 100th Birthday, 16-Millimeter Film

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    The format was initially a boon to amateurs. Now, with moviemaking gone digital, it’s the choice of auteurs like Darren Aronofsky and Kelly Reichardt.One hundred years ago, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a shiny new camera that promised to revolutionize moviemaking. The company had been selling filming devices for more than two decades by then, but this novel contraption — the Ciné-Kodak camera, sold with the Kodascope projector — offered a new thrill: the ability to make and screen movies at home, with no special expertise.The technical marvel, however, wasn’t just the camera but also the film inside. Until 1923, the film used most commonly in motion pictures was 35 millimeters wide. That year, Kodak produced a new format that was only 16 millimeters. The image wasn’t as sharp when you blew it up on the big screen, but it allowed for smaller, cheaper and more portable cameras.16 millimeter ushered in a new era of movies made outside the Hollywood system. Regular folks could now record their own lives, journalists and soldiers could film in the midst of war, and activists could shoot political documentaries in the street. Until digital video arrived in the late 1990s, 16-millimeter film was the mainstay of the amateur or independent filmmaker, requiring neither the investment nor the know-how of commercial cinema.Last week, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which holds thousands of 16-millimeter reels in its collection, the film archivist Elena Rossi-Snook projected some shorts for a group of undergraduates from Marymount Manhattan College. As the projector whirred, a beam of light cut through the darkened room, painting the screen with scenes from the 1946 animated “Boundary Lines,” a stirring movie by Philip Stapp about social integrity in the wake of World War II. That was followed by “The End,” an antiwar stoner comedy directed by a teenager, Alfonso Sanchez, in 1968. The third film, “Black Faces” from 1970, was an ebullient, one-minute montage of portraits of Harlem residents.These productions, precious documents of the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, have endured, Rossi-Snook explained, because their makers had relatively cheap and convenient access to film, a medium that can last hundreds of years if stored properly.Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” another Aronofsky film shot on 16 millimeter.Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight PicturesToday, 16 millimeter is no longer optimal for the amateur filmmaker. Analog film is increasingly expensive, fewer and fewer labs can process it, and the format doesn’t allow the nearly unlimited shooting and instant playback that video does. But even as it turns 100, 16 millimeter still has a unique look that neither 35-millimeter film nor video can rival.When projected on the screen, analog film has a three-dimensional, pointillist texture called “grain,” a product of its synthetic makeup. There is more grain in 16 millimeter than in 35 millimeter, resulting in a fuzzier, flickering picture. In the 20th century, that was a drawback for professional filmmakers seeking crisp, theatrical images. But today, as high-definition media saturate our lives, some directors choose 16 millimeter precisely for its rougher look. It reminds us that what we’re watching is not the world as is, but filtered and transformed, with great creativity, through a chemical process.The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has shot several movies on 16-millimeter film, including “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Mother!” (2017). But when he was making his debut feature, “Pi” (1998), 16 millimeter was a necessity, not a choice. The resolution of available digital cameras wasn’t good enough for feature filmmaking at the time, and Aronofsky couldn’t afford 35 millimeter. But he and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, soon realized that 16 millimeter — especially the high-contrast stock they used called reversal film — emphasized the hallucinatory style of “Pi,” a black-and-white psychological thriller that delves into the obsessions of a paranoid number theorist.“We decided to really lean into 16 millimeter,” Aronofsky said in a phone interview. “I wanted the big grain and the contrast-y look. It’s funny, because we just had the 25th anniversary of the film, and we blew it up for IMAX. And the IMAX people were nervous because of how grainy it was. They wanted to know if I wanted to clear out some of the grain with computer technology. And we said, absolutely not. We loved the look of it.”Several TV shows from the late ’90s and early 2000s, including “The O.C.” and “Sex and the City,” used Super 16, a variation of 16 millimeter with a larger picture area that gave them a sense of real-time immediacy. The first 10 seasons of “The Walking Dead” were also largely shot on 16 millimeter to capture the grimy, crumbling feel of classic horror cinema.The cinematographer John Inwood, who filmed 150 episodes of the comedy “Scrubs,” recalled that 16-millimeter cameras, which are smaller and lighter than their 35-millimeter counterparts (and even many contemporary professional video cameras), were crucial in developing the series’s frenetic mockumentary style.“It was good for ‘Scrubs’ because we moved the cameras a lot, and we were sometimes in tight spaces,” he told me. “We shot in an actual hospital, the former North Hollywood hospital, and we shot in every square inch of it, even down to the morgue.”Chadwick Boseman in a flashback to the Vietnam War in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” The director wanted those scenes to look as if they were archival newsreel footage.NetflixAs digital cameras have become sharper and more versatile, many filmmakers have turned to 16 millimeter to evoke the analog past and the blurry, precarious nature of memory. In an interview with Gold Derby, Newton Thomas Sigel, who filmed Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), said the director had insisted to Netflix that they use 16-millimeter reversal film for the sequences set amid the Vietnam War, despite the costs and logistical challenges. The film had to be shipped from Vietnam to an American lab for processing, and by the time the crew members could see what they had shot, Chadwick Boseman’s acting schedule had already ended. But Lee was adamant that the scenes look authentic, like archival newsreels filmed in the field in the 1970s.The veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman used Super 16 on two of his collaborations with the director Todd Haynes, both of them period dramas: the mini-series “Mildred Pierce” (2011), and “Carol” (2015), which garnered him an Academy Award nomination.On both projects, the format was chosen to mimic photographic images from the 1940s and ’50s, and the grittiness of postwar America. But Lachman realized that the grain also brought “tension to the surface of the image,” paralleling the repressive qualities of the characters in both “Mildred Pierce” and “Carol.”For Lachman, the appeal of 16 millimeter transcends nostalgia. It comes down to cinema’s status as an art, meant to stylize rather than simply reproduce reality. He likened film to painting, and grain to brushstrokes. “The grain changes in each frame with exposure,” he said. “It’s like breathing, almost like an anthropomorphic quality.”Kelly Reichardt turned to 16 millimeter after video shots of the snow looked too flat.Sony Pictures ClassicsThe filmmaker Kelly Reichardt recalled that when she started shooting her 2016 feature, “Certain Women,” she didn’t have the budget for 16 millimeter. But when she and her cameraman, Christopher Blauvelt, did test shoots in Montana, where the film is set, Reichardt was horrified at how “flat” the snow looked on video.“With film stocks, things weren’t so real looking,” Reichardt said. “A lot of it is grain, and 16 has more grain than 35. So when you blow it up, you don’t get the hard lines that you get in HD, which is what you see in sports.”A grant ultimately allowed Reichardt to shoot “Certain Women” on 16 millimeter. It made the production more laborious, but the results — soft, textured images of wide roads, snowy mountains and grassy plains, all shimmering with light, dust and shadow — made it worth it.“I guess it’s about beauty, in a way,” Reichardt said. “I remember on ‘30 Rock’ they did a little thing where Lemon walks in front of the HD camera, and it’s like, she’s a skeleton hag. You know? You see every single thing. It’s very unforgiving. For nature, too.” More

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      A New Kelly Reichardt Movie? These Actors Keep Showing Up

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      The director Kelly Reichardt has developed something of a troupe of performers who are eager to work with her time and time again. A few of them appear in her latest film, “Showing Up.”In her new film “Showing Up,” the director Kelly Reichardt reunites for the fourth time with the actress Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a stressed-out sculptor, in the Portland-set art world comedy. In previous Reichardt films Williams has portrayed a drifter looking for her lost dog (“Wendy and Lucy”), a beleaguered and dehydrated pioneer (“Meek’s Cutoff”) and a Montana woman trying to acquire sandstone for her new house (“Certain Women”). At this point, Reichardt and Williams’s collaboration is one of the most fruitful in the realm of indie cinema.“She has extreme depth perception,” Williams said of Reichardt in a phone interview. “She can see where my sight stops, so I do what I can and I add what I can, but I really am trusting her to take me to the new place, to the next frontier.”But Williams is not alone in being drawn to Reichardt. “Showing Up,” now in theaters, also marks the second time Reichardt has enlisted John Magaro, last of her acclaimed 2020 feature “First Cow,” and the third time she’s brought on James Le Gros, who has shown up in her 2013 eco-thriller “Night Moves” and also in the 2016 omnibus “Certain Women.” In “Showing Up,” Magaro plays the mentally ill brother of Williams’s character, while Le Gros plays a teacher at the art school where she works.Williams and James Le Gros in “Certain Women.”Sony PicturesIn the nearly three decades since her first feature “River of Grass,” Reichardt has developed something of a troupe of actors who are eager to work with her time and time again. In addition to the repeat performers from “Showing Up,” others have made multiple Reichardt films, among them Larry Fessenden, Will Oldham and Will Patton.“There’s no requirement to come back,” Magaro said. “A lot of these people go on and make a lot more money doing other jobs.” But the actor said that there was a reason people return. “At the heart of it is Kelly and that team and that camaraderie and that family atmosphere she creates.”Reichardt works with small budgets and often in and around Portland, Ore., telling intimate stories that often focus on outsiders and the minutiae of life, whether she’s making a movie set in a fur trapping community in the 19th century or at an art school in the present. “Showing Up” is arguably her lightest film yet, a funny exploration of the quotidian struggles of being an artist.The director’s resources have grown since she made “Wendy and Lucy” (2008) — her first collaboration with Williams — but not by much. Reichardt remembered the actress, who had recently received her first Oscar nomination, sitting on an apple box on the side of the road during the filming of “Wendy.” “We had nothing,” Reichardt said. She also explained that, on “Night Moves,” Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning helped push a car out of a ditch and lugged equipment around with the rest of the crew.“You really need to be the kind of person who wants to pitch in and who doesn’t mind that there aren’t walls between people and that you might be asked to drive yourself to work,” Williams said. Over the years Reichardt has recruited big name stars including Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, but she has said that “plenty of people” still say no to her. Acting in a Reichardt movie is not for everyone, she herself admitted.“I have a great rejection letter from Chris Cooper,” she said. “He just wrote, ‘I don’t want to live through this.’” (A representative for Chris Cooper did not have a comment.)Reichardt does not begrudge that response. “People are smart, like Michelle is down for it and is really game and you have to have people that are up for this kind of filmmaking,” she said, adding, “otherwise they’ll be very unhappy.”Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg in “Night Moves.”CinedigmThe lack of hierarchy on Reichardt’s sets also manifests onscreen, in some of Reichardt’s artistic choices. Patton recalled throwing away his ego on “Meek’s Cutoff,” about a group of pioneers in the arid Oregon desert under the guidance of a bloviating leader (Bruce Greenwood). “At a certain point you say, ‘OK, maybe you see me in a distance walking up a hill for this whole movie,” he said. “That’s kind of wonderful in a way.”That said, it was a wide shot in “Meek’s” that first made Magaro take notice of Reichardt as a filmmaker. The “brave” choice made him want to seek out more of her work.In addition to “brave,” Reichardt was described in interviews for this piece as a “genius” (by Williams), a “rascal” (by Hong Chau, who makes her Reichardt debut in “Showing Up”), and scary, of all adjectives, by Le Gros. “She scares me a little bit,” he said. “I don’t want to get her on my bad side.” When asked to explain why the small-in-stature Reichardt scares him, Le Gros said, “Any room that she’s in, she’s the toughest one there.”André Benjamin with Chau in “Showing Up.”Allyson Riggs/A24Reichardt knows what she wants and she is relentless in her pursuit of that. “She’s very decisive and uncompromising and she has a vision in her head and nothing is going to stop her from getting that on the screen whether that’s hail storms or oxen or 120-degree heat,” Williams said. But rather than Reichardt’s vision being restrictive, it’s actually liberating, according to Williams. “You can trust her to the ends of the Earth because of the filmmaker that she is,” the actress added.Reichardt, for her part, doesn’t think about actors when writing her films, which she often pens alongside Jon Raymond, who co-wrote “Showing Up.” When it came to Lizzy, an exhausted artist preparing for a show, what first made Reichardt consider Williams for the role was a photo of the sculptor Lee Bontecou.There’s no rehearsal on a Reichardt film, but Reichardt does provide her actors with reference materials before they arrive on set. Chau recalled the casting director Gayle Keller arriving at her house with a box of books and art supplies Reichardt wanted her to have before portraying Lizzy’s landlord Jo, a fellow artist with a slightly haughty demeanor.Beyond reading, there is also often an experiential element to preparing for a Reichardt film. The cast of “Meek’s Cutoff” went to a “pioneer camp,” while Magaro ventured into the wilderness with his “First Cow” co-star, Orion Lee, and a survivalist who gave them roadkill-skinning lessons. In the case of “Showing Up,” Chau shadowed the artist Michelle Segre, while Williams observed Cynthia Lahti, who provided the delicate statues of women that Lizzy makes.“I feel like that’s what it is with getting to work on films like ‘Showing Up’ or getting to work with Kelly Reichardt is what you do offset is just as important or if not more important than what you are doing on set,” Chau said.Williams has now been traveling to Portland to make films with Reichardt for 15 years and considers it a “homecoming.” She has even considered moving there full time. Williams remembered that way back when she was joining “Wendy and Lucy,” Reichardt told her, “I can’t promise you much but on set we’ll have good coffee and good sandwiches.” To Williams, that sounded great.Now they have some more amenities but the spirit of their work remains the same. “As these movies have gotten a little bit bigger and have gotten more attention, we still carry this incredible intimacy,” Williams said.And others want to come along. “I hope I get to join her little troupe of actors,” Chau said. “I will always show up to whatever Kelly does if she invites me.” More

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      ‘Showing Up’ Review: Making Art in All Its Everyday Glory

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      In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.The stubbornly independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes small-scale movies rooted in specific worlds, both inner and outer; nearly all take place in Oregon, where she’s long lived and worked. She traveled back in time for her last movie, “First Cow,” a moving chronicle of love, land and capitalism set in the Oregon Territory in the 19th century. Reichardt is back on more familiar ground in her latest, “Showing Up,” a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art.The movies love tortured artists, inflamed geniuses who thunder against the establishment, aesthetic conventions, their historical epochs, God or just the nearest warm body. No one rages or slashes a canvas in “Showing Up,” though a few characters do raise their voices. At one point, its stubbornly independent hero, Lizzy — a sculptor played by a revelatory, notably de-glammed Michelle Williams — leaves an angry message on a colleague’s voice mail, an expletive-laced tirade that she ends with a comical bleat: “Have a great night.”It’s a gently funny and true moment in a gently funny and true movie that perfectly captures Lizzy’s complicated interiority. By the time she makes that call, you know a great deal about her. You know that she makes sculptures in her home studio and works at an art school, though what she does there remains unclear. What’s more crucial is that over the course of this delicate, detailed movie you become familiar with the petulantly downward slope of Lizzy’s mouth, the welcoming disorder of her apartment, the tender care that she takes with her art. You also know that she rarely smiles and scarcely ever says please or thank you.Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, “Showing Up” is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.When “Showing Up” opens, Lizzy is putting the finishing touches on the textured, small-scaled figurative sculptures that she molds from clay and then paints before having them fired in a kiln at the school. (The kiln operator is played by André Benjamin, making the charming most out of a modest role.) The figures are of women captured in well-defined poses, with some mounted with rods on wood bases. Several of these little women are erect, and others are recumbent; one stands on her head while a few look like they’ve been captured in mid-leap. A figurine with downcast eyes and a tiny, private smile looks a bit like Reichardt.As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. Things happen in Reichardt’s movies — minor, fleeting and profound things, just like in life. Story can seem both too grand and too impoverished a word to describe the personal, richly inhabited and realistic worlds she creates from faces and bodies, poses and gestures, rituals and habits, and her very specific grasp on time and place. But of course there’s always a story in how human beings navigate one another and sometimes try to bridge — and hide out in — that bristling, ineffable space between us.That space swells and contracts, by turns narrowing and expanding until it seems as vast and impassable as the Grand Canyon. Lizzy doesn’t make it easy to bridge; it’s instructive that she’s more openly affectionate with her cat than with her mother (Maryann Plunkett), who’s her boss at the school, or with her gruff father (a lovely Judd Hirsch). Yet while Lizzy works on her art in solitude (the cat comes and goes), she’s rarely alone for long, and the movie is filled with people, a vivid, eccentric and amusing collection that includes Jo (an essential Hong Chau), a vivacious artist who’s Lizzy’s landlord and the recipient of her angry phone call.Lizzy has reason to be irritated at Jo, who’s taking her time with fixing her broken water heater. But Jo is more than carelessly inattentive. A jolt of energy with a pickup truck and long, sweeping hair, Jo is sexy and popular, the very picture of the hip, hot artist and the apparent polar opposite of Lizzy, with her bob and frumpy look. Jo too is readying a new exhibit, but her gallery is bigger than Lizzy’s and her show more prestigious: It will have a catalog! The women get under each other’s skin, but like everyone else in Lizzy’s life — her family, her colleagues, the art students, her cat and a pigeon who swoops in and stays awhile — Jo sustains her.For Lizzy, making art is an act of self-creation, but it is also and always an act of communion, a way of being in the world and with other people. That makes “Showing Up” a somewhat reflexive self-portrait, one that owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration. This is the fourth movie that they’ve done together (their first was “Wendy and Lucy”), and it’s a joy to witness how perfectly aligned their work has become. Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.Showing UpRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More