• Meek’s Cutoff

  • Meek’s Cutoff

  • Meek’s Cutoff

  • Meek’s Cutoff

  • The Horse



Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt
United States, 2010

BAMPFA Collection

  • Introduction
    Leila Weefur

    Leila Weefur is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in Oakland. Weefur is an educator at Stanford University, a founding member of the curatorial film collective The Black Aesthetic, and the guest curator of Landscapes of Myth: Westerns After “The Searchers.”

featuring

Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan,

This stark and poetic Western is set in 1845, during the earliest days of the treacherous Oregon Trail. A wagon train of three families has hired mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. The women, led by Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), emerge as the film’s moral and emotional anchors, their resilience and intuition contrasting with the men’s faltering authority. Kelly Reichardt’s frequent collaborator Christopher Blauvelt employs quiet cinematography that instrumentalizes the landscape. The stillness of each shot brings to life a sonic resonance, with the horses, wind, and dust building an anticipatory composition along Oregon’s high desert.

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Jon Raymond
Cinematographer
  • Christopher Blauvelt
Print Info
  • Color
  • 35mm
  • 104 mins
Source
  • BAMPFA
Permission
  • Oscilloscope Laboratories
Preceded By

The Horse

Charles Burnett, United States, 1973

Charles Burnett’s The Horse delicately captures the complex bond between a young Black boy and an ailing horse in the rural American South. The boy’s presence along the muted stretches of yellow fields is a soft contrast to the unsympathetic and vitriolic white farm owners. The Horse is Burnett’s subtle sociopolitical reminder of the inevitability of death and its threat of imminence in Black life.

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • 16mm
  • 14 mins
source
  • UCLA Film & Television Archive
Additional Info
  • preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

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