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.