Showing Up marks Kelly Reichardt’s fourth collaboration with Michelle Williams, who in this instance plays Lizzy, a sculptor who also works as an administrative assistance at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. Lizzy comes from an artistic family – her father Bill (Judd Hirsch) and brother Sean (John Magaro) are also artists while her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett) is her boss. Yet she’s frustrated in her own ambitions and often compares herself unfavourably to her neighbour and landlord Jo (Hong Chau) who is preparing for two exhibitions in the midst of a romantic tryst with Eric (Andre Benjamin), the glazer at the college. Reichardt’s minimal style tends to favour situations more than narratives and that’s certainly the case here, since not a geat deal happens over the course of Showing Up. As Lizzy prepares for a show of her own, she visits each member of her family, haggles with Jo, goes to work, and saves a pigeon from her cat, in the closest the film comes to a narrative centrepiece. Yet Reichardt’s ability to draw out the inner lives and embodied experiences of her characters is no less striking for that, creating moments, images and postures that resonate long after the credits have rolled.

In part, that’s because Showing Up is not simply a portrait of Lizzy, or her immediate circle, but of the arts community regaining its elastic ambience in the wake of the pandemic. We continually cut to people working with their hands, as they tentatively feel their tactile connection to the world returning once again. There’s a general sense of reconstruction in the background, a reassuring hum of people building things, and a general affect of healing that condenses around the pigeon that Lizzy saves from her cat in the middle of the night. This pigeon becomes a vehicle for the collective murmur of the arts school, initially by drawing Lizzy and Jo closer together, despite themselves, as they take turns caring for it in a cardboard box, like a peculiarly mobile sculpture that they are collaborating upon moment by moment.  

Along with that art school backdrop, Reichardt and regular cinematographer Christopher Blauvert draw on the residual lightscape of the pandemic. Much of the film consists of dim mise-en-scenes with glary patches of light, while Lizzy is quite obscured for long stretches during the first half. There is lots of daylight – in fact the film is mainly set during the day – but it never modulates smoothly across the mise-en-scenes, meaning that shadow and sunlight are both always a little blinding and a little surprising. It’s an apt space for Lizzy, who hasn’t quite integrated after the pandemic, and is still in the somewhat sulky, surly and sour space of lockdown, but it’s even more accentuated in her brother, who remains in total lockdown mode. Sean used to be a landscaper but he’s now a complete recluse who remains inside all day with the blinds down watching repeats of The Twilight Zone, even as he outright rejects Lizzy’s offer to buy him the complete series as a DVD box set, since broadcast television has become his only tentative link to the outside world. On the rare occasions that he does venture into his garden, it’s only to work on a land art project that is little more than compulsive digging, a futile attempt to find a subterranean space darker than his living room.

In an effort to bring these residues of the pandemic into the collective light of the arts community, Reichardt imbues her film with a remarkable tactility, making it feel like her scenes are being sculpted from moment to moment. The opening credits establish one of the key components of the film’s syntax – slightly clunky zoom-ins to Lizzy’s prepatatory drawings, as if the camera is asserting its sculptural presence in space, and insisting this is all occurring in front of it, rather than at a socially distanced remove. Likewise, Lizzy’s sculptures are all of women, suggesting a renewed haptic connection between women in particular, whether through the particular care that she takes in moulding them, or in her tendency to break off their arms and then re-affix them larger than scale, suggesting a prehensile or preternatural tactile power that women have reclaimed in a unique manner post-pandemic. Again, Lizzy’s experiences with both the cat and bird help enliven this tactility, bringing her close to animal bodies and then to other human bodies as Jo becomes involved in the rehabilitation process.

Insofar as Showing Up has narrative beats, then, they tend to manifest as tactile epiphanies, revelations of unexpected closeness. While the film is shot on digital, Blauvert invests it with an analog granularity, a sculptural thickness, creating a nexus between materiality and ethereality where these kinds of revelation might occur. To watch the film is to continually oscillate between the events it describes and its own tactile proximity to you as audience, which is perhaps why it so strongly conjures up a certain kind of screening environment too – an arthouse theatre or a campus theatre filled with lovingly worn down fabrics and textures. These tactile revelations culminate around the two exhibitions in the film – Jo’s opening and Lizzy’s opening. Lizzy misses Jo’s big night, preferring to stay at home and focus on her own work, but she tacitly yearns for the collective event by turning from her sculpture, reaching out a hand slowly, and then stroking the pigeon’s head with a single finger. The pigeon also makes an appearance at Lizzy’s opening, where it occupies pride of place in the alcove in the gallery, one of the brightest sites in the entire film, before taking its first tentative flights above and through Lizzy’s work, suffusing the exhibition with a precarious collective grace.

In this flight through the gallery, something about Lizzy’s hermetic closure comes to an end, giving way to a montage of Ozu-like pillow shots that follows Lizzy and Jo’s gaze as they watch the pigeon finally ascend into the sky. This lyrical montage consist of chunks of sky, framed by power lines and trees, and accompanied by Andre Benjamin’s flute music, as dusk reaches a perfect point of modulation, in which everything is luminous but without even a trace of glare. After a film where shadow and light have both been occlusive this ambience is remarkably cathartic, and ushers in the final shot – Lizzy and Jo walking deep into the dusk, as their conversation slips back into the ambient collective hum of the film, the pigeon cooing somewhere in the background, before we cut to the credits rolling over more low-key art school work. It’s appropriate that Showing Up is one of Reichardt’s most minimal works, since in these final moments it feels like a manifesto for minimalism itself as a form of reduction that exists only to allow us to hear the collective murmur of the communities around all art.