Dartmouth Events

There is perhaps no genre more thoroughly gendered than the western, and it is here that Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff) has staked her claim as a singular voice in a crowded terrain. No sweeping vistas or grand antagonisms, First Cow is the story of a friendship between a couple of misfit pioneers: one a cook, Cookie (John Magaro), a gentle, soft-spoken man, and the other a Chinese immigrant, King Lu (Orion Lee), a prototypical entrepreneur, ambitious and scheming, but more out of necessity than greed. True to the genre, Reichardt is deep in the weeds of American myth-making. After the arrival of the first dairy cow in the territory, Reichardt, with the painstaking exactness of a procedural, plots the emerging relations of frontier capitalism—part exploitation and theft; part survival and partnership. The scope is miniaturist, but the import is monumental.

Programmed as part of the Asian Diaspora on Screen series in collaboration with the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective (DAASC).

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