A case for Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010) as one of the most formally radical American westerns ever made.

Reichardt shot Meek's Cutoff in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio — the square format of silent film and early television — rather than in widescreen. For a film set in the vast Oregon high desert, this is a provocative and precise choice.

The square frame crops the landscape that Western iconography has always used to signify freedom and possibility. You can see part of the sky, part of the terrain. You cannot see the horizon. The effect is claustrophobia in an open space, which is exactly the experience of the historical wagon train the film depicts: people in a vast landscape with no clear sense of where they are or where they are going.

The film follows a wagon train that may or may not have been deliberately misled by their guide. It is about uncertainty in a register that few Westerns approach: not the uncertainty of survival but the deeper uncertainty of whether any information you have is reliable. It ends without resolution because unresolution was the historical truth.