Kelly Reichardt is widely recognised as one of America’s finest contemporary filmmakers. Even among her admirers, however, 2013’s Night Moves is all too often considered an unsuccessful and ill-advised foray into genre territory. In this book, Dominic Lash and David R J Stent engage in a sustained attempt to put forward an alternative view. Via twenty-four letters, two friends and musical collaborators – one of whom works professionally in film studies, the other having a background in experimental writing and publishing as art practice – work through the film from beginning to end. By turns informal and rigorous, speculative and minutely observed, this book is both a love letter to an unfairly neglected film and an experiment in critical form.
Dominic Lash is a film scholar and a musician active in improvised and experimental music. As well as articles in journals such as Screen, Movie, and Film-Philosophy, he has published four monographs on cinema: The Cinema of Disorientation (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Robert Pippin and Film (Bloomsbury, 2022); Cure (BFI Film Classics, 2024); and Haunting the World (SUNY Press, 2025).
David R J Stent is an artist and educator whose practice explores experimental writing’s intersection with images, particularly in relation to painting and film. His recent research has focused on publishing as art practice, image-text relations, and the use and abuse of theory and philosophy in contemporary art. He currently teaches Fine Art at West Dean College, founded by the poet and surrealist patron Edward James.
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