MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010)
Kelly Reichardt’s take on the Western differs wildly from John Ford’s. Ford was a classical filmmaker working in the studio system and did more than any other single director to deepen the Western as an art form, but the genre has long been associated with male characters in front of the camera, and male visions behind it. Reichardt tries to distort that perspective by focusing on her female characters and privileging their point of view (much more on this below), but also through demythologizing traditional Western archetypes.
ASPECT RATIO
The size of the image you see on screen is not always the same. Over time, as film technology changes, what cameras and film stock can capture affects how stories are told. For the first fifty-plus years of cinema history, all around the world, film images were largely bound to one aspect ratio: 1.33 (width) to 1 (height). In essence, the images look like a square - they are not literally square, but very close to it.
A 1.33:1 Academy ratio shot from The Cabin in the Cotton (1932, Dir. Michael Curtiz). The square image motivated framing, placing actors in tight spaces with one another.
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Even Alfred Hitchcock was bound by the 1.33:1 ratio in films like Notorious (1946), demonstrating that filmmakers innovated within limitations. Academy ratio shots used vertical design to their advantage. Notice the bedpost and doorframe.
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Though widescreen technology was available for experimentation earlier, the first major film released in the widescreen format (Cinemascope) came in 1953: it was The Robe (Dir. Henry Koster), a biblical epic set in ancient Rome. There were a number of motivating factors propelling the proliferation of this technology, but one major one was cinema's need to compete with television. Because many American households now had TVs, studios scrambled to offer an experience that viewers could not get on their television sets at home. Color photography likewise expands in this period, as does the creation of gimmicks like 3D.
The widescreen frame is particularly well suited to epic filmmaking, which made The Robe a perfect candidate to pilot the Cinemascope technology. The filmmakers and the studio (20th Century Fox) behind The Robe wanted to make a big, grandiose movie, and the widescreen frame created an opportunity to photograph ancient Rome in a big, grandiose way. In the widescreen frame, Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson argue, “the director then had to guide our attention to a single figure at any given moment, chiefly through lighting, camera position, sound, and frontal positioning. In framing a single figure in medium shot, the dominant widescreen practice is to avoid exact centering; the actor is positioned slightly off-center, leaving space for his or her gaze or for pertinent background material.”
Notice the dramatic difference in framing between the 1.33:1 Academy ratio shots above and this widescreen, Cinemascope frame, in which the ratio was 2.35:1. In short, the Cinemascope frame is nearly double the width of the Academy ratio frame, which allows it to incorporate much more narrative information. Filmmakers responded to the availability of wider image compositions by staging actors laterally, whereas Academy ratio films often used depth and height to their advantage.
Television continued to have an impact on aspect ratios, as the proliferation of home video technology, especially VHS tapes, often resulted in widescreen films being radically altered for their home video releases. This process was called pan and scan, during which the image would be manipulated after the fact in an effort to fit a wide frame into a smaller one. For instance, a pan and scan version of the shot above might look like this in order to fit into the square television frame.
Think about all the narrative information that is lost when this change is made. Because Koster framed the original shot with Gallio (Richard Burton) on the far left side of the frame and spread the other characters across the 2.35:1 frame, the image is literally not suited to squeeze into a 1.33:1 frame. The women on the right side of the Cinemascope frame are eliminated entirely because the Roman soldier who has entered the room is dramatically more important, as he brings news for Gallio. According to Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, “Henry Koster, director of The Robe, asserted that a cut in to a close-up was no unnecessary, since virtually every detail in the shot was magnified.”
The arrival of widescreen 16x9 televisions would seem to have solved the problem, making room once again for the widescreen frame. However, inattention to the Academy ratio leads to the opposite problem, where widescreen televisions actually stretch the 1.33:1 image to fit the 16x9 screen. Here's the shot from Notorious as it might look on a widescreen television, stretched to fit the empty space.
A properly framed Academy ratio shot on a widescreen television would look like the shot below from The Cabin in the Cotton, with the black, negative space on the left and right sides of the shot preserving the original aspect ratio. As a public service announcement, you can adjust this on your flat screen television at home.
Today, filmmakers have a menu of aspect ratios to choose from. Most opt for widescreen, preferring to use the expansive frame to design grand images, especially because those images have a natural home on widescreen televisions. In general, filmmakers no longer have to fear that their work will be compromised in some way when it moves to home video. However, this dynamic means that when filmmakers decide what story to tell, they think about the aspect ratio they should shoot in. Throughout the 2000s, a number of films were shot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio, a notable difference from widescreen cinema, to which audiences have become accustomed.
WESTERN GENRE CONVENTIONS
In contrast to classical Westerns like Stagecoach and other films by Ford, Reichardt’s approach foregrounds the conventions of the genre in order to undermine them. During the classical period, when genre conventions were still being established, it was rare to see filmmakers so overtly taking those conventions and deliberately subverting them. As we saw in our examination of Stagecoach, filmmakers sometimes played on audience awareness to make different stylistic choices—Ford cutting away from the climactic shootout at the conclusion of Stagecoach is an excellent example—but for the most part, adhered to the generic rules. By the time Reichardt comes along, especially in the aftermath of the Western genre’s steep decline, its conventions are ripe for parody and distortion.
Reichardt’s use of the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, as discussed above, generated a great deal of attention for its interaction with the Western genre. Now, classic period Westerns like Stagecoach were also shot with the Academy ratio, but that’s because widescreen cinematography was not yet in widespread use, and would not become so until the 1950s. Once more studios started using widescreen framing, the aspect ratio became ideal for the Western, which told epic stories of grand scale in beautiful, expansive settings. Here are a few shots from Ford’s widescreen Westerns, including The Searchers (1956, left) and Two Rode Together (1961, right) that show off how easily he transitioned to the format, using it to capture the relationship between his characters and their environment.
Genres have long appealed to independent filmmakers who can use their iconography for subversive ends. In Reichardt’s approach to the Western, she takes what has often been an extremely masculine genre dominated by gunfighters and cowboys and applies a female perspective, refocusing the narrative around the marginalized women, led by Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams). Meek’s Cutoff has often been called a near-two hour joke about how men won’t stop to ask for directions, a reference to the foolish scout Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who ostensibly leads the party of settlers through the desert but gets them profoundly, hopelessly lost after attempting to take a shortcut. Meek is all bluster and trail wisdom, telling ridiculous stories that inflate his sense of self-importance and are designed to diminish the knowledge of the other characters, especially the women. Meek becomes Emily’s nemesis throughout the movie, thanks to his aggressive ignorance and her increasing frustration with their leader, who obviously has no idea what he is doing. This narrative reversal works as a response to the accumulated knowledge that the audience has about the Western genre, in which male expertise is a prized commodity that helps everyone survive the difficult terrain. In Meek’s Cutoff, the character who might typically be the admirable male lead of a Western not only seems to know no more than anyone else, his overconfidence is actually a threat to the entire group’s survival.
Reichardt’s approach to the genre subverts our expectations. In contrast to most Westerns, there are only two gunshots fired in the entire film—both by Emily, who uses the rifle to send off a warning shot to the men that she has seen a Native American looking at their camp. Though there is a standoff where Emily points a gun at Meek, she never fires it at him, and the conflict is resolved without violence, another dramatic subversion of the Western’s genre conventions, which rely heavily on gunplay to settle narrative disputes.
We have seen something like Reichardt’s approach before in the realistic films we have examined throughout the semester. According to Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour in their book focused on the director, Reichardt’s films use “realism to show us that emergency, rather than constituting a break from the everyday, might be a version thereof.” Her “quiet, austere, and verisimilar films have earned her a reputation for bringing realist sensibilities back to U.S. independent cinema—a cinema that, since its heyday in the 1990s, has been characterized largely by the preciousness and flash of Wes Andersons and Quentin Tarantinos.” Rather than craft a more expressionistic style, which Fusco and Seymour attribute to Anderson and Tarantino, Reichardt instead opts for quiet. Meek’s Cutoff, like many of Reichardt’s other films, is notable for the director’s complete comfort with silence. Even when there is dialogue, it is often spoken in hushed tones, whispered by the fire or against one of the wagons.
Watch the video commentary at right, which illustrates how Reichardt uses both the film’s aspect ratio and her characteristic use of quiet dialogue to undermine the genre conventions of the Western film. Rather than placing the camera in the center of the action, where the men are, she remains frustratingly at the margins, simulating the way that the culture portrayed in the film treats women.
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As we have moved into the latter portion of the semester, we have paid increasing attention to the role of the artist behind the camera. If cinema is often the product of a collaborative effort, an individual artist (the director) harnesses those collaborative energies to create a specific vision. That vision is subject to the various factors that contribute to the director’s point of view, including the specific aspects of his or her identity. For the greatest portion of film history, Westerns were mostly made by men, and thus tended to privilege male stories and male characters that used violence as a means of conflict resolution. Reichardt’s bold approach to Meek’s Cutoff makes the subversion of the Western’s genre conventions into a political act. The film essentially asks, what would happen if a woman told this kind of story? What would her camera be interested in seeing that a man’s camera had rarely, if ever, seen before?
We can’t be as reductive as to say that all women making Westerns would make a film like Reichardt’s. She is an individual artist who is working from a very specific set of ideas that interest her, and the result is a movie that playfully reverses our expectations from the dominant Westerns in the genre. She also shows the genre’s influence, in fact. Her long shots of the landscape are certainly in the tradition of John Ford’s cinematography. We cannot paint with too broad a brush, reducing the gender identity of the filmmaker to an essential set of characteristics: women’s Westerns are always like this, and men’s Westerns are always like that. That’s not an appropriate thing to say. However, because Reichardt’s film deliberately engages with what has been a predominantly male genre, it demonstrates how genre conventions can create dominant impressions of gender roles (among other things) over time. Her treatment of The Indian (who also may be lost) is also an interesting response to the way directors like Ford (especially early in his career) treated Native Americans on screen. In essence, we have to be careful to over-read who is behind the camera, but we also have to pay close attention to that director’s identity—it matters. Art is the product of its artists, and reflects those artists’ beliefs, ideas, and above all, points of view. In Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt demonstrates what happens when you look at a familiar story from a different perspective.