Certain Women · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Jamie feeds the horses. She waters them, forks out the stall, moves through the barn in the cold, and Reichardt gives all of it more screen time than any plot could justify. Nothing is decided in that stretch. When the cut finally comes, it comes because the chore is finished, not because a feeling has peaked. That habit, cutting on the completion of a task instead of on a dramatic beat, is the whole film in miniature. It is also the cleanest door I know into what Gilles Deleuze meant when he said cinema stopped using time to measure movement and started showing time itself.

Deleuze's older regime, the movement-image, runs on a tight circuit. A character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation; continuity cutting exists to keep that circuit from slipping. What broke after the war, he argued, was the link between seeing and doing. People began to perceive far more than they could act on. He called the scene that results a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign, and the person stuck inside one a seer: someone who looks, listens and endures instead of acting.

Laura's story is that break restated as employment law. Her client's workplace-injury claim has already been legally extinguished. The case is over before the film begins. She perceives the injustice exactly, explains it accurately, and can do nothing with either, and when she is finally called on to act, the act available to her is to subdue him. Her competence is real and useless. This is where the Deleuzian lens earns its keep instead of decorating the film. The standing complaint about Reichardt, that nothing happens, mistakes an argument for an absence. Something did happen. It happened before the frame, in an office nobody filmed, and the film is about living downstream of it.

The lineage Reichardt draws on is close to the lineage Deleuze drew on. Zavattini's maid in Umberto D., a stretch of uninflected morning chores no plot required, was Bazin's proof that cinema could present an event without dramatizing it, and it was Deleuze's evidence that a new regime had arrived. Reichardt builds her third act out of that sequence. From Jeanne Dielman, where Babette Mangolte's fixed frontal camera holds domestic labor in unbroken real time, she takes the edit rule itself: the cut arrives when the hay is thrown, not when a feeling peaks. From Au hasard Balthazar she takes the ranch-work grammar, hands and tack and animal bodies where reaction shots would go, plus the flat, non-declarative delivery she asks of Lily Gladstone. From Wanda she takes the material decision entire. Loden and Nicholas Proferes shot 16mm blown up to 35mm with the grain left standing and the woman kept small inside a working industrial landscape; Reichardt and Christopher Blauvelt repeat that choice in Montana, down to the refusal to supply a drifting woman's interior motive.

Where she departs is just as telling. Bresson broke space into fragments joined by hands. Reichardt keeps the figure legible in medium-wide framings, inside the room, inside the weather. And her Montana is not Antonioni's. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a deserted or voided space that has stopped serving as a setting for action. Reichardt's spaces are the opposite of voided: rail yards, mall parking, a sandstone pile, a highway strip in winter, lit by fluorescent ceilings and the mercury glare of a lot, photographed closer to the New Topographics record than to the postcard West. These women are not stranded in emptiness. They are at work in a place that has plenty of use for their labor and none for their speech.

The second concept lives in bodies. When Gina negotiates for the old man's sandstone, the talk is nearly all evasion, and the husband's easy male sociability does the work her directness cannot. Deleuze took a term from Brecht for this: the gest, a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a private feeling. Watch who is permitted to ask for the stone. The pile is building material, an authenticity Gina wants for her house, and an old man's last possession, and nobody in the scene says any of that. The staging says it, across a threshold, with a doorway left in the frame.

Jamie's strand is what Deleuze late on called a cinema of the body: duration carried by attitudes and postures rather than psychology delivered by faces. We watch Gladstone work before we are asked to care, so the caring attaches to something we have actually seen her do. Then she rides into town for a night class in school law and mostly watches the woman teaching it. Almost the whole story is watching. It ends the way the other two end, in the anticlimax Reichardt inherits from the finish Hellman deliberately refused at the close of Two-Lane Blacktop.

Then the macro decision, the radical one. Three stories, sequential, not interwoven. The network narrative running from Short Cuts through the two decades after it trained audiences to expect convergence, and convergence is a meaning machine: when the lines meet, the film promises that the world is secretly one thing. Reichardt declines. The only join, that Laura's lover is Gina's husband, is dropped in without emphasis and you may not catch it. Jarmusch had already made emphasis structurally unavailable in Stranger Than Paradise by shooting single locked-off takes with no coverage; Reichardt's refusal to crosscut is that same abstention scaled up to a whole film. In Deleuze's vocabulary this is a dispersive situation with slackened links, and here it is not a failure of construction. It is the construction. He also has a phrase, borrowed from Paul Klee, for what the withheld convergence protects: the people are missing. There is no collective for these three to join, no solidarity plot on offer. The politics sit in the gap rather than in a speech.

What the film did to filmmaking is smaller than a formal revolution and more durable. In an American independent sector that had gone digital and fast, it made the refusal of emphasis legible as authorship rather than as thinness. It made 16mm grain in 2016 into an argument, that the emulsion was physically present in the same cold as the actors. And it put a performance register with no declarative peaks in front of a wide audience. The coda is the tell: each woman revisited at her work. Resolution here is not that the lines meet. It is that the lives keep going.

Watch where the cuts land next time. That is the film's real vocabulary, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it. Then carry the question it never answers. When justice has been foreclosed in advance, is attention a consolation, or is it the only thing anyone here still has to give?