One of the most recognisable women filmmakers in contemporary American independent cinema, Kelly Reichardt, might not initially appear to be a particularly obvious candidate for this volume, as she does not tend to be associated with popular genre film. Her artisanal, small-scale mode of production and relatively low budgets have possibly granted her greater autonomy than that enjoyed by the filmmakers working within the major studios (for example, Cody and Kusama, discussed in Chapter 2); however, at the same time this production mode has represented a serious resource restriction, which, as I will argue later, is conceptually and materially inseparable from Reichardt's austere aesthetics. The director's film style is commonly read in connection with international art cinema, both historical and contemporary: on the one hand, critics have drawn a number of comparisons between her work and that of Italian neorealists, and on the other, they have inscribed it in the recent phenomenon of ‘slow’ or ‘contemplative cinema’. Nevertheless, as Elena Gorfinkel aptly suggests, Reichardt's oeuvre ‘sits at the cusp of experimental and classical film traditions’ (2016: 123), and it departs in many respects from her more ‘radical’ contemporaries – for example, in terms of shot structure and slow style, which is, in fact, not so slow if measured against other films created by prominent figures of contemplative cinema, such as Bela Tarr or Tsai Ming-liang. More importantly, Reichardt clearly works with ‘the tropes of a specifically American idiom’ (2016: 123) – namely, the generic conventions of the road movie. In fact, all of her features to date notably draw on this genre, employing what Gorfinkel describes as ‘the beckoning horizon of wide-open […] landscapes and their tarnished promises of freedom, autonomy, and self-reliance’ (2016: 123): her debut, River of Grass (1994), described by the filmmaker as ‘a road movie without a road’ (Skinner 2016); her ‘Oregon trilogy’, comprised of Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Meek's Cutoff (2010); the subsequent Night Moves (2013) and the more recent Certain Women (2016) which feature a car as a central trope.