Hal Hartley: The Believable Truth

Hal Hartley, so the popular narrative goes, is the missing man of US indie cinema. In the independent filmmaking boom of the early 1990s, Hartley was among a prodigious pack of young upstarts hailed as the future of cinema, part of a confident, self-made generation. Yet unlike his peers, such as Steven Soderbergh or Gus Van Sant, Hartley’s transition into the mainstream never materialised. By the turn of the century he had practically fallen off the radar, and many assumed his was a potential unrealised.

But this is perhaps a false history. Hartley never stopped working, yielding a prolific stream of movies, shorts, and TV films, not to mention stints in theatre, opera, and academia. And in any case, his work – dense, artful, measured, almost Brechtian in its approach – hardly implied a move towards the multiplex.

“It is boring,” says Hartley of the frequent debate over what could have been. But he shrugs it off: “You just get on with your work and let this empty chatter help you when it can and ignore it when it doesn’t. I’ve never done anything but make the kind of work I’ve wanted to make, the way I wanted to make it.”

As was evident from the start: the auteur first exploded onto the scene, inasmuch as one can explode from quietly philosophical comic drama, with 1989’s The Unbelievable Truth. Shot in under a fortnight with “lack of sleep and very little food,” it is being rereleased this month, alongside two other notable entries in the Hartley canon: the mismatched sibling road trip Simple Men (1992), and the amnesia romance of Amateur (1994).

The collection acts as a neat introduction for newcomers, bearing all his recognisable traits: slow-burning character studies; an arch, deadpan sense of humour; and articulate, dialogue-heavy scripts, imbued with sparkly wit and repartee throughout. Dialogue remains a predominant weapon in the 53-year-old filmmaker’s armoury: “For me, dialogue can be action. Say, when I'm creating a monologue, I try to create an image of the movement of thought. I like to show a character piecing together an understanding, or misunderstanding, of something."

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"I've never done anything but make the kind of work I've wanted to make, the way I wanted to make it" – Hal Hartley

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Hartley's films are often about piecing together an understanding of something, usually through a stylised, screwball prism. Even those which appear to lean towards cliché or genre have gravity lurking under the bonnet: 2001's No Such Thing, ostensibly a monster movie, for example, is as much a meditation on the human condition as it is about Icelandic abominable snowmen.

A product of art school who fell into filmmaking almost by accident, his output always shared sensibilities with European filmmakers rather than those from his native US – Godard and Wenders were major influences. Hartley acknowledges, though, that he might not have had the “initial confidence” to make The Unbelievable Truth if Jim Jarmusch’s early films hadn’t enjoyed such success.

And indeed, Hartley has reaped moderate success of his own, with a run of Sundance hits in the early 90s, from The Unbelievable Truth to Henry Fool (1997). But he brushes aside any allegiance to an indie community. "I've never known what the independent scene is. It always seemed like a false category made up by the sales people." For him, indie and mainstream were two sides of the same coin: "Just different sizes of corporate grip. Big corporations. Little corporations. In any case they're bigger than one individual and the individual is forced to conform."

It follows, then, that he seems happy enough to work on the fringes. Hartley's most recent film, Meanwhile, was distributed via Kickstarter, and he sells his films directly through his website, which he calls an "ongoing source of amusement and wonder. One day a week, at least, I feel like the owner of a super niche grocery store."

He once declared, "the budget is the aesthetic." Having abandoned film for digital in 1999 ("it's just a waste of time and money"), this perspective still applies. "What you can do excellently with the means at your disposal is a large part of the craft of filmmaking," he observes. "That might be one of the reasons smaller films seem to be more artistic, even when they're not necessarily. The confrontation of aims and means are more obvious. The grammar comes more to the foreground."