Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up
Stray thoughts about my favorite film in years, and what it means to me.
It didn’t sink in until afterwards, but I felt my Nani in this movie.
She is the sweetest, kindest person I’ve ever known. And I’ve been recently hyper-aware of how much she’s shaped who I am. I think especially in how I view film and music and art at large. One of her favorite pastimes is to collect leaves and flowers, press them and turn it into a pattern of sorts. In maybe the most direct way possible, I observe this and understand art as a communion with nature, with the earth, with life in all forms. It’s a gentle, tender process borne out of her caring and considerate demeanor, and her love for the world surrounding. It had been almost a month since she passed away when I walked into Portland’s Living Room Theaters to see the new film from my favorite working director: Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up.
It’s something I realize now, but watching Reichardt’s films often gives me that same sensation. She cares so much about the nature here – and especially in the way she depicts Oregon. She composes shots and uses the camera in a way that makes you feel the staggering essence of the Pacific Northwest as idyll. Meek’s Cutoff may use the sparseness and rolling plains to induce agoraphobia and create a sense of paranoia, but in First Cow and especially in Showing Up, I see Reichardt more occupied with the organic, intimate, tiny wonders up here. And in a way, Showing Up is so uniquely about man-made constructs, a mode in which Reichardt is truly able to communicate the essence of how she views art and Portland, Oregon.
At one point, John Magaro’s character Sean, ostensibly having some sort of episode, digs holes in his backyard to create a piece; he says he’s creating mouths for the earth to speak. Michelle Williams’s Lizzie remarks, “I didn’t know you were into earthwork”. His response, in essence, is that so much of art is intrinsically a reflection of our planet.
“Art is the Earth talking. Poetry is the voice of the Earth. So, it’s all earthwork.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if Reichardt truly believes this. It comes through in her work. And in Showing Up, it’s not necessarily the direct depictions of Oregonian nature we often see in her films, but more inexplicable, abstract universal reactions. Hard to exactly put together how she does it, and I’m honestly willing to chalk it up to a preternatural sense of where to place the camera, and just a phenomenally thoughtful understanding of how she can communicate the experience of something intangible. It’s like I’m there, I guess. When Lizzie finally sees the installation that Hong Chau’s Jo has been working on, it is shot in such a way where I felt its presence tangibly. Reichardt gives the piece a voice, and I responded to it. You can’t say how art will reach you until you’re there, and Reichardt is, impossibly, able to put us there.
Near the end of the film, a pigeon gets loose in the gallery, and we are prepared for the worst. But Sean, the movie’s resident earthwork expert, picks it up, calmly carries it outside, and lets it back into nature. Communion. Lizzie has been cooped up inside with her work the whole film, but now she takes the time to really see the sky. She walks around and sees the city for what it is. She puts aside her grievances with Jo. She has just helped to nurse a piece of the natural world back to health, and she has returned it to the sky within and without us. The sculptures she made and is exhibiting are a very specific, singular piece of her expression. But the pigeon is also the process. It’s her nature to care for and nurse and support those she can. This care, her art. They’re one and the same, two processes in the greater cosmic process that surrounds me and surpasses my understanding. Just like my grandma taught me.