[ecrea] New book: Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley

I'd like to draw your attention to the following book, recently 
published by Cambria Press:

/Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley/ by Steven Rawle

ISBN: 9781604977455

http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=4&bid=443 
<http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=4&bid=443>

Description:

Hal Hartley was one of the leading lights of the independent American 
cinema boom of the late 1980s and 1990s. Although his work never 
achieved the kind of crossover commercial success that other indie 
directors experienced, his work exhibits one of the most distinctive 
voices in recent American cinema. Combining wry, aphoristic dialogue 
with stylized performances and a muted, minimalist palette, Hartley's 
films challenge cinematic conventions, especially in performance, and 
resist easy empathetic identification. His later work has carved out an 
even more specific niche, and, since 1999, his work has often explored 
extreme digital stylization.

Winner of the best screenplay award at the Cannes film festival in 1998 
for Henry Fool, Hartley is best known for his films in the early-mid 
1990s, including The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), Simple Men 
(1992), and Amateur (1994). His subsequent work has become more 
challenging, often examining the cultural role of the artist and the 
role of the work of art in the information age, as in Flirt (1995) and 
Henry Fool. Hartley has also experimented with digital video in his more 
recent work, including The Book of Life (1999), The Girl from Monday 
(2005), and Fay Grim (2006). Furthermore, he is well known as a prolific 
short filmmaker, including Surviving Desire (1991), Ambition (1991), 
Theory of Achievement (1991), The New Math(s) (1999) and two collections 
of short works released under his Possible Films label (2006 & 2010). 
The short films are experimental, formally challenging, and highly 
self-reflexive, capturing Hartley's approach in its purest form.

While Hartley's contemporaries often exhibited similar concerns with 
stylization and self-conscious narration, his work sits in an artistic 
lineage rooted in the concerns of the French nouvelle vague and the 
European arthouse tradition, following in the footsteps of Jean-Luc 
Godard, Robert Bresson, and Chris Marker. His work engages in an ironic 
critique of contemporary American culture, small town blue collar 
Americana, problems with communication and, above all, the performance 
traditions of cinema.

Despite his significant standing in mid-nineties indie cinema, Hartley's 
work has never attracted a high-profile critical following. Often a 
bewildering source of frustration for popular criticism, Hartley's 
approach to cinema has never been fully grasped by film critics, 
especially his films' distinctive use of performance and performers, 
with reviews regularly lapsing into critical banalities, such as 
"quirky." Perhaps as a consequence of this, and possibly as a response 
to Hartley's lack of major crossover success, his work has never been 
the focus of sustained scholarly analysis, despite academia's attention 
to Hartley as a significant, although minor, figure in studies of 
independent cinema's golden age in the 1980s and 1990s.

In many regards, it is Hartley's approach to performance that is a 
critical blockage, both in terms of scholarly and popular criticism. His 
work exhibits a minimalist, abstract and alienated mode of performance 
that denies easy empathy or identification, and his screenplays often 
utilize tropes of repetition that explore failures of communication and 
problems of performance discipline.

Hartley is an uncompromising independent artist----he has never had an 
agent and has run his own production company for twenty years----and, 
while the independent sector was bought out and co-opted by Hollywood, 
Hartley retained his independence, becoming a more marginal figure in 
the process. As his profile has diminished, his work has become more 
experimental, further rejecting conventional modes of performance and 
realism, and exploring the social, political and cultural processes 
behind performances and the constructions to which they testify.

With this first full-length critical study of Hal Hartley's work, Steven 
Rawle examines the physical and cultural performance practices at play 
in Hartley's work. Focusing on the critical emphasis on performance and 
the performer in Hartley's work, the book charts the development of this 
central facet of his films, from The Unbelievable Truth to the digital 
features. Identifying the main critical approaches to performance that 
illuminate this trend in his work, Rawle delves into the reasons why 
Hartley's work has never gained popular recognition and explores why 
critical reactions to his films have never fully grasped the complete 
significance of performance. Part of this reason, Rawle argues, is the 
lack of critical tools by which to explore film performance. This book 
contributes to a growing body of work on film performance, taking this 
formerly critically neglected figure as its central case study.

This book will be an important book for fans of Hartley's work as well 
as scholars of independent American cinema and of film performance.

Dr. Steve Rawle

Lecturer in Film Studies

Faculty of Arts

York St John University

Lord Mayor's Walk

York

Y031 7EX

Tel: 01904 876584

(s.rawle /at/ yorksj.ac.uk) <mailto:(s.rawle /at/ yorksj.ac.uk)>