Book contents
3 - Belief and the Common World of Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Chapter Three analyzes Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves and the “American Neo-Neorealsim” film movement. The relational symptom of melancholy which it proposes is the erosion of belief in a common world of experience. By closely investigating the plastic composition of Reichardt's images and how they engender a play of asymmetrical beliefs, this chapter questions the degree of fidelity to which the cinematic image can depict an experience so singular and incommensurate as melancholy, and proposes that the firee indirect style maintains an ontological link between the film image and profilmic experience since it can psychosocially perceive the play of beliefs that give rise to melancholic isolation, even if that isolation can never be known in and of itself.
Keywords: Kelly Reichardt, American independent cinema, pure experience, William James
American “Neo-Neorealism”
At a historical moment that overlaps with the Berlin School's productions, a cluster of American independent filmmakers also decided to invoke the cinema of poetry tradition to aesthetically interrogate the conditions of contemporary melancholy. This loosely connected wave of filmmakers that began to emerge around 2005 has come to be called “American Neo-Neorealism,” and it includes the likes of Kelly Reichardt and her contemporaries such as Julia Loktev, Ramin Bahrani, Lance Hammer, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. American Neo-Neorealism is comparable to the Berlin School since film after film dwells on protagonists whose affective well-being is found to be at complete odds with the socioeconomic system in which they live. The most aesthetically refined of these filmmakers, such as Kelly Reichardt, augment melancholic themes by crafting psychosocial film worlds out of free indirect perspectives that discover yet another evental symptom of melancholy: singular breaks from the common world of experience. This symptom of melancholy is especially vivid in Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, the film which I focus on in this chapter, as it meticulously renders aesthetic the psychological dimension of a group of ecological activists who come together to explode a hydroelectric dam, but whose collective then fractures once the act is completed, leaving three troubled individuals alienated from the world and the beliefs that they once held in common.
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- Cinemas of Therapeutic ActivismDepression and the Politics of Existence, pp. 83 - 110Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020