The Temporal Resistance of Kelly Reichardt's Cinema

Across her six feature films since 1994, American director Kelly Reichardt has taken time as a mechanism to reveal and question social, political, and economic structures. This article looks closely at how her films display a range of temporal interventions and resistances to features of capitalist temporalities. While film theorists and critics often locate Reichardt’s films within “slow cinema,” this article expands the range of temporal concepts applied to her films to explore the sociopolitical critique at work through this auteur’s aesthetics. The analysis focuses on time in three of Reichardt’s feature films, starting with commodified and metaphysical time in Old Joy (2006), then addressing impatience, entropy, and environmentalism’s temporalities in Night Moves (2013), and ending with an exploration of disconnection—and denial of coevalness—in Certain Women (2016). This article applies close scene analysis—along with a range of philosophical, political, and sociological concepts of time—to demonstrate how Reichardt elucidates and resists the temporal tensions underpinning social relations within capitalist culture.