The Cinema of Hal Hartley: Flirting with Formalism

by Steven Rybin (Editor)

Overview

Over the course of nearly thirty years, Hal Hartley has cultivated a reputation as one of America's most steadfastly independent film directors. From his breakthrough films – The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), and Simple Men (1992) – to his recently completed 'Henry Fool' trilogy, Hartley has honed a rigorous, deadpan, and instantly recognizable film style informed by both European modernism and playful revisions of Classical Hollywood genres. Featuring new essays on this important director and his films, this collection explores Hartley's work from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and economic contexts, while also looking closely at his collaborations with actors, the contexts of his authorial reputation, his reworking of the romantic comedy and other genres, and the shifting economics of his filmmaking.

This book, up-to-date through Hartley's latest film, Ned Rifle (2014), includes new scholarship on the director's early work as well as reflections on his cinema in connection with new theories and approaches to independent filmmaking. Covering the entire trajectory of his career, including both his features and short films, the book also includes new readings of several of Hartley's seminal films, including Amateur (1994), Flirt (1995), and Henry Fool (1997).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231850841
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/27/2016
Series:	Directors' Cuts
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Steven Rybin is assistant professor of film studies in the English department at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of Michael Mann: Crime Auteur and Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film (2011) and co-editor of Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema (2014).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Hal Hartley: A Quality of Attention, by Steven Rybin
1. Up Close and Impersonal: Hal Hartley and the Persistence of Tradition, by David Bordwell
2. 'Young. Middle-Class. College-Educated. Unskilled.': Hal Hartley in 1991, by Mark L. Berrettini
3. 'Some Things Shouldn't Be Fixed': Frameworks of Critical Reception and the Early Career of Hal Hartley, by Jason Davids Scott
4. The Locality of Hal Hartley: The Aesthetics and Business of Smallness, by Steven Rawle
5. Hal Hartley's Romantic Comedy, by Sebastian Manley
6. A New Man: The Logic of the Break in Hal Hartley's Amateur, by Daniel Varndell
7. Not Getting It: Flirt as Anti-Puzzle Film, by Steven Rybin
8. Poiesis and Media in The Book of Life and No Such Thing, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
9. Bodies, Space and Theatre in The Unbelievable Truth (and its American Precursors), by Zachary Tavlin
10. Parker Posey as Hal Hartley's 'Captive Actress', by Jennifer O'Meara
11. The Figure Who Writes: On the Henry Fool Trilogy, by Steven Rybin
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Offer[s] agreeably intricate analyses of Hartley as a romantic comedy director, of “small films,” of Parker Posey as a muse, and on the Henry Fool trilogy as centered on the implications of writing. I especially appreciated the way that all the contributors . . . show how Hartley’s authorial obsessions responded to conditions of production, industry pressures, or critical reception. It’s called context, and yields a body of criticism that does honor to a director still not as fully appreciated as he deserves to be.

David Bordwell

Hal Hartley has been at work for a quarter of a century and his films still seem like fresh discoveries. Independent, individualistic, idiosyncratic, and indefatigable, he defies all known pigeonholes, and this balanced, wide-ranging collection marks a welcome new stage in the exploration of his work.

David Sterritt

This first collection to showcase the curiously under-celebrated independent filmmaker reminds us why Hartley and his films matter. Rich in original insights about conditions of authorship into the crowdfunding era, textuality and intertextuality, film style, critical reception, the local in location production, indie genericity, performance, and more across the past 25 years, this book brings Hartley's vibrant work back to the fore of film studies.

Mark Gallagher

Full of detailed analysis and screen grabs that illustrate key points, and immaculately balanced to cover Hartley's work as a whole, this is a compact, authoritative, and comprehensive treatment of Hartley.

Choice