Hal Hartley - Independent Auteur Writes a Book, Channels Walter Benjamin

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Back when I lived in Cambridge, MA, I had the pleasure of screening The Girl from Monday at the historic Brattle Theater. A special Q&A session with director Hal Hartley followed, and I remember being amazed by his clarity and artistic focus. I rented every film I could find, and was continually impressed by the smart, character-driven productions. With such low budgets, his films have had to survive almost solely on the quality of their dialogue, and they thrive, with a remarkably coherent, sensuous mixture of biting cynicism and tender naivete, all without a whiff of the stinking self-importance that plagues so much contemporary ‘indie.’

You can call it postmodern slapstick, or existential romance, but whatever you dub the style of Hartley's works, they are uniquely and undeniably, his voice & sensibility shining through. Now, via Young Manhattanite, comes news that he has written a book. Some nice quotes pulled by Krucoff, from a recent interview:

By the time of No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday, True Fiction Pictures shows how Hartley'd began focusing on and critiquing media and its creation (and need) of quickly digestible (then regurgitated) products (hello blogs).

"More and more, I find myself pursuing this question of determining what is real. And does the real even matter to people anymore? You know, making this distinction between the facts -- or the truth, I guess -- and information. We love information. People get excited about access to information. Networking. The speed at which information can be moved around. But fewer and fewer people seem to care if that information is accurate. Does it mean anything? Can it be verified? Is it just lies, for instance. Advertising, I guess, would assert that lies -- if they're believed -- are information too. So, we come to believe whatever is information. We believe in information. But information is not knowledge."

..some of the images he constructs and choreographs are just as striking, as this books shows in with its film stills. He seems to think as much like a painter/photographer ("A movie can be very much composed. And this composition can be very exciting since it's executed by these living and breathing people.") as a filmmaker:



Additional plums the interviewer draws out from Hartley:

- how he finances his small-audience films,
- how/why he made a monster movie,
- the difference of filming in Iceland vs. Long Island,
- the filmmakers who influenced him,
- and how we no longer have "a manner of living together as a community that has matured organically...through common expierence. Now, our manner of living together is dictated immediately through publicity and advertising... We don't, in fact, live together and experience things together that much anymore. It is mediated. In fact, not all of this worries me. A lot of it's fascinating, even."

Image by Salim Virji via Flickr

It's refreshing to see a film-maker I admire greatly, resisting that seductive urge so many artists and media theorists seem unable to -- the constantly blinding impetus to decry and devalue almost any new development in culture and art that doesn't fit within their self-serving critical framework.

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Hal Hartley - Independent Auteur Writes a Book, Channels Walter Benjamin