One of the pleasures of Kelly Reichardt’s narrative films is that their plots (where they exist) never feel artificial: the lives of the characters who populate them are either – like the lives of so many – ruled by need rather than desire, or so unsteady that they don’t have the luxury of distinguishing between the two. The Wendy (Michelle Williams) of Wendy and Lucy (2008) wants to find work and keep her dog. The settlers in Meek’s Cutoff (2010) want to survive their section of the Oregon Trail. Jamie (Lily Gladstone), a main character in one section of the tripartite Certain Women (2016), simply wants human connection. With First Cow (2020), Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond – the writer involved with the screenplay or story behind five of her features – once more remind us what a life is by paring it down to its most basic requirements. Meanwhile, their audiences argue about whether or not her spare cinema is too “sophisticated” (boring) to merit a lengthy watch. In 2011, critic Dan Kois drew upon Meek’s Cutoff as a talking point while pursuing his discomfort with slow or minimalist cinema for The New York Times, concluding that as his appreciation of these films was mostly performative or retroactive, he would be more selective about watching them in the future. At the centre of his argument is the idea of worth: Kois writes that hours spent watching slow cinema “might be more profitably spent aspiring in a different direction.”¹²
First Cow examines worth too, only through the eyes of two early 19th-century workers who don’t have the luxury of examining their tastes. The film follows Otis “Cookie” Figowitz, who works as a cook for an Oregon-bound trapping company as a means of transitioning out of indentured servitude, and King-Lu, an immigrant from Northern China with an entrepreneurial spirit that thrives despite his hostile experiences (Cookie finds him huddled naked in the Oregon ferns, politely requesting the small favour of food and shelter from the vengeance-seeking Russians trying to kill him). Cookie smuggles King-Lu to shelter and then loses him, but they will meet again after the trapping company reaches its destination, a small colonial fort on the Columbia river, leaving Cookie once more in a financially precarious situation. We already know the pair’s conjoined fate. In First Cow’s opening shots, a modern-day woman walks her dog along the bank of the river, the fort now long disappeared. A barge slides across its surface; the dog digs insistently in the dirt. Soon he abandons his mission to watch the river move. Out of curiosity, the woman keeps on digging. Reichardt captures what she uncovers in a static shot: two skeletons, lying close together in an economic burial. Though we begin our story aware of its end, First Cow is mesmerising from moment to moment, reminding us that rushing towards narrative payoff does not a transportive film make.
Where Kois finds it difficult to see “worth” in that which moves too slowly, other viewers find worth in stillness’s hypotonic ability to hijack attention. Verdant period detail is First Cow’s obvious offering, but Reichardt avoids the trap of lushness – what Belén Vidal calls its ability to “dominate over engagement with historical issues.” No neutralising nostalgia coats the story; though we may fetishise the past, Reichardt does not allow us to use her film as a means of getting lost in apolitical simplicity. Such an idealised time, argues First Cow, doesn’t exist. Those who comb the screen for a comforting artefact, a reminder that things used to be so simple – that modernity, not humanity, has failed us – will find only eyes like theirs looking back, eyes that similarly seek relief from their circumstances. The first shots of Cookie show him attempting to take pleasure in the natural world; we watch him filling a cloth with flaccid yellow mushrooms, early buds pushing through soil. When he returns, however, the trappers demand that he find more, because what they want is choice, variety, complexity. After Cookie plunges back into the now-dark woods, he again finds peace in patient foraging. When not beleaguered by those seeking to make their fortunes, Cookie can settle into his surroundings just as we might wish to settle into Reichardt’s aesthetic. But in his interactions with monetised labor, Cookie is forced, like Dan Kois, to adjust his pace, though Kois is far enough along in the process to believe (at least in 2011) that this pace is his choice. Belief in agency, then, not the pace of life itself, is the heftier difference in First Cow between then and now; from the film’s start, the ability to savour is not linked to the rhythms of a particular time period, but to class.
The dream of benefitting from one’s own labour and pursuing one’s own ambitions – opening a hotel for Cookie, operating a farm for King-Lu – relies on capital that as poor men they lack, or “some kind of miracle….Or a crime.” This is a problem that cannot be easily bypassed (“You can’t just grow a tree – it takes time”), although time is short: the world of the film is already global. First Cow explores expansion lived through by men without capital as the pursuit of a constantly-moving target. “We’ve got a window here,” King-Lu tells Cookie in the frontier. Their leverage, to be wrung for all its worth, appears to be Cookie’s baking abilities, which King-Lu is shrewd enough to monetise. The two begin to sell batches of Cookie’s honey-drizzled biscuits, whose appeal relies on one particular ingredient: stolen milk from the only cow in the British-run colony. She belongs to the British Chief Factor (Toby Jones), whose bourgeois existence is laced with menace. He patronises Cookie with an order of baked goods, but as Cookie walks up to deliver the clafoutis, the chief factor advocates for the execution of a slave or indentured servant (it’s unclear which). He explains to his guest, another Brit, that when the workers see one of their rank killed their productivity increases: this exceeds the loss of capital tied up in the killing. As he speaks, an approaching Cookie and King-Lu are visible in the window. Their small theft will not offer them the freedom to self-determine, but cost them (perhaps) the lives they hope to liberate. While refusing to dilute the past to sentimental syrup, Reichardt’s direction keeps from pedagogy, too. On the outskirts of the exchange of clafoutis, the Native Chinook woman who is married to and living with the Chief Factor and her family speak to the half-listening white men around them. Their words are left unsubtitled, simply interpreted by a Chinook translator whose knowledge of their audience means the translation may or may not be accurate. But the uncertainty we’re left in is. To pretend that European colonists pursued an understanding of indigenous interests, rather than exploiting unfamiliarity to justify genocide, would be a false reconstruction of history. First Cow’s assertively critical depictions, or as Richard Brody writes, its “willful air of hopelessness”; “undercut” its pleasures. But, borrowing from Giorgio Agamben, “Any radical thought always adopts the most extreme position of desperation”, and the uprisings in the name of Black lives that have spread across America and the rest of the world in the months since First Cow’s first release testify to the futility of ignoring the original sins of violence in this country’s genesis.
Unlike Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow turns largely away from the experiences of women on the male-led frontier, but the attention Reichardt pays to small intimacies and affections – albeit platonic – between Cookie and King-Lu disrupts the mythos of headstrong masculine individualism at the heart of America’s development. It is a pleasure to watch their friendship unfold, just as it is a pleasure to watch Cookie drops tendrils of dough into hot oil, where they unravel and solidify into cakes. Watching First Cow, we take pleasure in singulars – people, cows, biscuits, places. But we cannot forget that this simplicity is rarely available to the poor even in the times we imagine to be unlaboured by, as Kois puts it, the “blur” that we may mistakenly attribute to modernity alone. Perhaps we use period films to go back to an idealised start in order to escape from modern expectations of productivity, or for a glimpse of a time when our connections to the land were more direct, our work more closely tied to our survival. In Reichardt’s unsentimental hands, though, simplicity comes not as solace but rather as an unsweetened truth: today we reap the seeds of America’s poisonous past. When the chief factor first tastes Cookie’s recipe, he announces with misty eyes that he “tastes London” in the dough. But for men like Cookie and King-Lu no such easy connections exist. Like growing a tree, these take time to unfold, time that is a luxury to those pursuing the shortening distance from a fixedly monopolised world.
1 Dan Kois, Eating Your Cultural Vegetables, The New York Times. May 1, 2011. 2 Last year, in 2019, Kois released a book titled How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together. In its introduction, he lays out the problem that led to the novel: “Above all our life as a family felt as though it was flying past in a blur of petty arguments, overworked days, exhausted nights, an inchoate longing for some kind of existence that made more sense.” His family, by his own estimation, did not know how to live – how to be – and he attributes this to an issue of pace. It’s difficult not to connect this to his article, written years earlier, in which he expresses his incapability to sit still and simply observe life. 3 Belén Vidal, Figuring The Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, Amsterdam University Press, p. 10
Bessie Rubinstein is a writer based in New York
