Hal Hartley

Introduction

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 hyperefficient 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.1 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 2 | Hal Hartley 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...