Read an Excerpt
Hal Hartley
By Mark L. Berrettini
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Mark L. Berrettini
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03595-1
Chapter One
Efficiency, Estrangement, and Antirealism The Films of Hal Hartley
Introduction
Since the early 1980s, Hal Hartley has written, directed, and produced more than twenty short and feature-length films, several music videos, dramatic work for the stage, and operatic collaborations. Along with his unconventionally romantic plots and his deadpan, absurdist-comedic approach, a compelling thread within Hartley's oeuvre is his hyper-efficient depiction of narratives about transformation and actual and figurative escape. From attempts to escape one's past and familial and social expectations in The Unbelievable Truth (1989) to the global tumult and the reevaluation of established identities in Fay Grim (2006), Hartley's characters are in flux. They want to change their lives or believe that they must change; to challenge specious gendered and sexualized boundaries; to flee judicial or institutional authority; to break off romantic attachments or quickly form new romantic couplings; to set out to live in new locations or to live in new ways within old locales; and to collaborate with or compete against others to create distinct forms of aesthetic self-expression.
At the same time, Hartley has enacted his own escape—or, perhaps more precisely, breakaway—from the dominant modes of narrative cinema to rework standards of character development, story construction, cinematography, and mise-en-scène. Named "the Jean-Luc Godard of Long Island" in Peter de Jonge's 1996 New York Times Magazine profile, Hartley's films, like Godard's, attempt to disrupt habitual film viewing, pleasantly disorient us, and stimulate an active, even cerebral sort of spectatorship. As de Jonge writes, "Asked if he wants his audience to enjoy his movies, [Hartley] says: 'Enjoy? No, they have to work. Anything worthwhile necessitates work'" (20). Hartley describes his film-production process as "doing damage" to cinematic convention and "preconceptions" about film in his increasingly minimalist narrative films (Fuller, "Finding the Essential," ix; Fuller, "Being an Amateur," xxii). As Hartley attempts to break away from an unsophisticated model of spectatorship as consumption, his films address us as "cocreators" of meaning in which the relationship between viewer and filmic text is not static, one-way, or basic. All narrative cinema compels us to create meaning—we must make links between shots, infer story elements that are not shown, and so on—but Hartley's aesthetic and narrative choices do not fit neatly into the seamless structure of standard narrative cinema. Instead, his films are situated within a framework that draws upon efficiency and antirealism, a framework that is the most clear link between his work and Godard's.
Critiques of realism such as those advanced by Colin MacCabe and Fredric Jameson (both of whom have written about Godard) provide an informative background for what I want to identify as Hartley's style of antirealist filmmaking. MacCabe uses the nineteenth-century realist novel to delineate what he names "the classic realist text" and its presentation of narrative discourse as reality ("Realism and the Cinema," 34). MacCabe writes, "Whereas other discourses within the text are considered as material which are open to re-interpretation, the narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation. [The narrative discourse] is taken up in the cinema by the narration of events.... The camera shows us what happens—it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses" (36–37). The classic realist text is the form of film and television that dominates today, a type of filmmaking that has become synonymous with "Hollywood," "commercial," and "mainstream," even though, as MacCabe rightly notes, this dominance was not and is not inevitable ("Theory and Film," 58–59).
MacCabe and Jameson are concerned with the political and ideological ramifications of realism, since it helps maintain dominant and oppressive structures through the representation of reality as static, natural, and not open to interrogation or to reevaluation. Jameson and MacCabe draw on Bertolt Brecht's formulations of the Verfremdungseffekt, or "V-effect," which Jameson translates as "estrangement," "in keeping with its Russian ancestor (ostranenia—a 'making strange')" (Brecht and Method, 85–86 n.13). According to Jameson, the Verfremdungseffekt serves "to make something look strange, to make us look at it with new eyes, ... or [as] a habit which prevents us from really looking at things. ... [E]strangement unveils [appearances as] made or constructed by human beings, and thus able to be changed by them as well, or replaced altogether" (Brecht and Method, 39–40).
Hartley has mentioned Brecht in relation to his filmmaking, and while I do not think that he has the same political-ideological challenges in mind that Brecht, MacCabe, or Jameson do, he draws upon estrangement precisely as Jameson describes it: as a way to look differently and as a way to suggest change. Hartley's style of antirealism and his use of estrangement attempt to reveal the construction of reality within narrative films, whereby the goal of cinematic conventions is to "look and feel like" reality.
Hartley's deployment of antirealism initiates an extreme in-mediasres element that plays out in the opening moments of virtually every one of his films, where we are shown actions without much context. Hartley has explained his avoidance of establishing shots in interviews throughout his career (see Fuller, "Finding the Essential," ix; Fuller, "Responding to Nature," ix). The contradictory feeling of such scenes is that we have missed something—having arrived at the theater too late?—while we also recognize that the opening credits are a supposed guarantor of having not missed anything. A similar disoriented feeling sometimes occurs within the films of Jim Jarmusch, a filmmaker to whom Hartley has been compared. Juan A. Suárez tells us that Jarmusch has described his own films in terms of spectators "'dropping in on'" characters "without ever feeling in full command of their stories or completely understanding their lives [because Jarmusch's] characters are only partly known: their circumstances and motivations are incompletely rendered" (4).
A similarly disarming aspect of Hartley's films is their comic, quirky, absurd tone. Characters frequently faint, fall, or collapse in humorous displays, often without identifiable cause, and when Hartley depicts physical violence, it is slapstick, overdone, or even clumsy in its style. With all of the characters falling, it is hard not to imagine that Hartley's interest in transformation links to the Christian New Testament story of St. Paul, struck down and life-altered, although for Hartley's characters, transformation usually is not religious in nature.
Hartley's characters become stuck in dialogue loops and circular conversations that are not meant to be "natural" but instead highlight the sometimes amusing problematic of communication—people do not listen to each other, are not swayed from their opinions or from their desires, or talk past each other. The veneer of fiction explodes as Hartley's characters say exactly what they think and feel, often in terms that are painful to each other, yet the actors infrequently move beyond mild melodramatic style in their delivery or blocking. This disjuncture between restrained or minimalist performance and the brutal honesty of the dialogue is humorous and challenges much of narrative cinema's fidelity to realist, naturalistic speech and to the enactment of emotion as a performance to be displayed.
Extended close readings of seven of Hartley's feature-length films follow. We will see that efficiency, estrangement, and antirealism allow Hartley to chart the struggles of individuals against the ideological precepts that pertain to public and private behavior, responsible actions, "common sense," and the cinematic conventions that support such ideologies (e.g., romantic characters who will live "happily ever after"). Quite often these conflicts are related to the restrictions posed by gender norms and are depicted as conflicts with authority figures—fathers, mothers, nuns, priests, sheriffs, CIA agents, judges, and politicians (see Fuller, "Finding the Essential," xxiii). Hartley's male protagonists struggle to live up to popular ideals of heteronormative masculinity, control, and violent mastery of the world around them, while his central female characters break from heteronormative conceptions of women as mothers, caregivers, and/or sexual objects.
Biography
This biographical sketch draws upon material that is included in interviews, reviews, and essays about Hartley's work, and in an earlier version of his official Web site, possiblefilms.com, when it included portions of interviews that were published later as Hartley and Kaleta's True Fiction Pictures and Possible Films, as Kino prawdziwej fikcji i filmy potencjalne in Polish, and as a part of Sergi Sánchez's Las variaciones Hartley in Spanish.
Born in 1959 in New York City, Hartley was raised in Lindenhurst, on Long Island. Hartley's mother died when he was eleven years old, and his father was a well-known ironworker who ran a construction crew in New York (see de Jonge 20). He graduated from Lindenhurst High School in 1977, briefly attended the Massachusetts College of Art, and later completed his undergraduate work at Purchase College, State University of New York, in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film, graduating in 1984. Hartley settled in New York City after graduation and began to work for Jerome Brownstein's Action Productions, which made commercials and public-service announcements. Brownstein became one of Hartley's earliest producers, funded much of The Unbelievable Truth, and continued to work with Hartley throughout much of his career.
Purchase was foundational for Hartley, as noted in Michael Atkinson's "Purchase Power":
What's the deal with Purchase, anyway? Hartley, stumping for his alma mater, maintains that it's a simple matter of art over commerce: "When I was there, between 1980 and 1984, the faculty saw the school not as a career training ground but as an art school. The program was allowed to be fairly elitist, and it had a high attrition rate. There wasn't a big emphasis on turning us into viable commodities. But a big part of what went into the 'Purchase Mafia' is that they made us do everything—you had to shoot film, cut film, record sound, everything. It's just like if we were art students, we'd be made to stretch our own canvases." The faculty at the time (which was when nearly all of the college's famous grads attended) was led by '70s drop-out Aram Avakian and vet doc maker Willard Van Dyke, and consisted largely of working pros. "So there was a lot of coming and going," says Hartley, "which made us more self-sufficient." Or it could be a matter of money: as Hartley says, "I went to the film school I could afford." (128)
In addition to this production background, Hartley also studied with the noted early cinema scholar Tom Gunning, who has written the introduction to the published screenplay of Flirt. While I do not want to posit a direct correlation between Hartley's critical-studies education and his later career, we do see the influence of early cinema within his films in a more elaborate way when compared with the work of his contemporaries. Indeed, Hartley has made short films without dialogue and has expressed interest in making feature-length films without dialogue since Trust (1990). His actors often perform overly gestural movements that recall some early-cinema acting styles, especially in scenes of comic physical violence (Eaves; see also Gunning).
Purchase also is where Hartley initially connected with a group of regular collaborators with whom he has consistently worked. A portion of the "look" of Hartley's films can be attributed to the cinematographer Michael Spiller, who has shot thirteen of Hartley's productions dating back to their college days through 2001's No Such Thing (see Wood, Pocket Essentials, 110–11). The former Purchase students Nick Gomez and Hartley's cousin Bob Gosse have worked on and appeared in several of Hartley's early films, and the actors Robert John Burke, Dwight Ewell, Edie Falco, Parker Posey, Bill Sage, and Karen Sillas have played major roles in many of his films; Hartley tells GreenCine that Posey attended Purchase after him, but that his former professors alerted him to her (Eaves).
Not all of Hartley's collaborators are members of the Purchase Mafia, of course, including Brownstein; the producer Ted Hope, formerly of Good Machine and now of This Is That Productions; the production designer Steven Rosenzweig; and the editor Steve Hamilton of Mad Judy Productions, who, along with Hartley and Brownstein, started the postproduction house Spin Cycle Post in 1992. Hartley's perhaps most prominent non-Purchase collaborators are the actors with whom he has worked on multiple projects: Chris Cooke, Martin Donovan, Erica Gimpel, Elina Löwensohn, John MacKay, Matt Malloy, D. J. Mendel, Chuck Montgomery, Miho Nikaido, Rebecca Merritt Nelson, Thomas Jay Ryan, Adrienne Shelley, Dave Simonds, James Urbaniak, and Damian Young. In 2006, Shelley, then working as an actor, director, and screenwriter, was murdered in a tragic incident in New York City. Two months after her murder, Shelley's film Waitress (2007) had its world premiere in the 2007 Sundance Spectrum, where Hartley's Fay Grim had its U.S. premiere (see Carr).
David Bordwell writes that "Hartley belongs to the more formally adventurous wing of the U.S. indie scene, a quality perhaps most evident in his storytelling strategies," his "idiosyncratic visual style," and his "disjointed and cross-purposes dialogues" (2–3). Hartley is associated with the American independent cinema of the 1980s to mid-1990s, a productive period akin to the New American Cinema or "Hollywood Renaissance" of the late 1960s to 1970s that saw the emergence of major directors as varied as Allison Anders, Kathryn Bigelow, the Coen brothers, Carl Franklin, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, and Gus Van Sant.
Hartley writes and directs all of his films and works without big budgets and usually without major stars. It is perhaps to his credit as a director and as a judge of talent, however, that many actors who "started out" with him have gone on to more high-profile work. His directorial vision takes into account his own low-budget framework as aspects of his productions, not as hindrances, as long as he retains artistic control. As he tells John Fried, "I only have one rule: I'll take as much money from anybody who will give it to me as long as there are minimal strings attached" (Fried, "Rise of an Indie"). In an extension of the auteurist-indie ethos, Hartley writes and performs music for many of his films under the pseudonym Ned Rifle.
Hartley's films have been successful on the international film-festival circuit since the release of The Unbelievable Truth, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival when it emerged as the hub of American independent cinema, only a few years after the Sundance Institute took over the organization of the Utah/U.S. Film Festival. Trust won the 1991 Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, along with the Audience Awards at the Deauville Film Festival and at the São Paulo International Film Festival. Amateur won the Young Cinema Competition Silver Prize at the 1994 Tokyo International Film Festival; Henry Fool won the Award for Best Screenplay at Cannes in 1998; and Fay Grim won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2007 RiverRun International Film Festival.
At least four major retrospectives of Hartley's work have taken place: at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1992; at the Gijón International Film Festival in Spain in 2003; at the ERA New Horizons Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2007; and at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León and the University of León in Spain from December 2009 to January 2010, which included the world premiere of Possible Films 2, Hartley's second DVD collection of shorts. Hartley was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des letters in 1997, and he taught filmmaking at Harvard University from 2001 to 2004. Hartley and his wife, Miho Nikaido, the Japanese actress and dancer who has appeared in several of his films, relocated to Berlin in 2004 when he was awarded a fellowship by the American Academy. I refer to Hartley's motion-picture output as "film," even though he has shot on film and on digital video.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hal Hartley by Mark L. Berrettini Copyright © 2011 by Mark L. Berrettini. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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