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The Second Decade

By Anders Wright. Originally printed in the program book of La Commedia, commissioned by The Netherlands Opera

Is it strange that independent American filmmaker Hal Hartley is staging an opera in Amsterdam? Probably not. Though it is tempting to view his work on La Commedia as a departure from the emotionally high-concept films he has made in the course of his career, Hartley has in fact worked in theater before, and collaborated with Louis Andriessen as early as 1999 on the short film, The New Math(s). Perhaps more importantly, from the beginning of his career in the late 1980’s, Hartley has always made space to investigate different ways of expressing himself.

During the 1990s, Hartley made movies that encapsulated everything a legitimate alternative to mainstream American movies might offer; they were entertaining, thought-provoking comedies that delivered, amongst much else, astute social criticism. Hartley has been persistently vocal about what he sees as the importance of making art that does not need to be produced on a huge scale and appeal to a mass-culture. He believes there is a vibrant and relevant alternative, and his own creative output, then as now, has been sufficient evidence to support this view. Few filmmakers have exhibited such a persistent long-range set of pursuits with regards to style and subject matter and sustained such a large and devoted following. Still, it is only as time has passed that we are able to look back and put into perspective the less obvious but remarkably steady progress of Hartley’s work.

At this stage in his career, it’s interesting to note that the core themes of Hartley’s recent projects remain similar to those of his earliest films, even if the underlying circumstances and plots have grown in stature. The director has long been fascinated with the way individuals communicate with one another as they investigate their place in the world, and how they determine what is important and equally significant, what is not. The characters he explored in his first features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, interact with their worlds in the same way Parker Posey does in his most recent project, Fay Grim, honestly uninformed but willing to learn and incapable of violating their consciences. His heroes and heroines would rather avoid conflict, but understand they cannot. Their embrace of confrontation becomes Hartley’s window onto the world. From the working class town he grew up in, and in which he set his first films, to the corridors of international diplomacy and corporate intrigue in his latest, the scope of Hartley’s vision has expanded in tandem with his own movements out into that very world.

“My films went out of the home,” says Hartley. “The earlier films were about individuals, people-to-people, people relating to their families and their immediate environments. Most of them are family-based. The more recent films deal with the individual and society.” And yet, the through-line of social engagement in his work was as vibrant in 1988 as it is today. Whether it is the way in which young people learn how to love and fear each other (Trust, Simple Men, Amateur) or how people are forced to re-think their situation as citizens (No Such Thing, The Girl From Monday, Fay Grim), Hartley has insisted on making stories out of the material of the world that surrounds him at the time. It is the thread that runs from The Unbelievable Truth in 1988 to Fay Grim twenty years later. Hartley does not want to make films about himself or his own personal experiences, but he understands that his subject, the world we all share at any given time can only be conveyed meaningfully through the committed transparency of the artist’s personality.

But there is something more here, as well. Hartley is proof that independent filmmaking is possible, and that an artist doesn’t need to be hugely famous and enormously wealthy in order to be relevant. He may also be representative of how an independently minded creative person can successfully operate in an increasingly globalized world.

The second decade of Hartley’s work could be said to start with the release in 1998 of The Book of Life, a deceptively light comedy wherein Jesus is sent to contemporary Manhattan to inaugurate the final judgment and begin the end of the world. But after a series of very funny and gripping arguments with Satan (who wiles away his days in the lobby bar of an upscale hotel, not unlike the Lucifer of La Commedia), he decides against it, quits his job as the Redeemer, and exiles himself from heaven. It was Hartley’s most overt examination of religion and morality, but he might never have written The Book of Life had he not spent the preceding two years writing his play, Soon, which also premiered in 1998 at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.

This play, which was later staged in Antwerp, and again in California in 2001, is based upon the 1993 events that took place in Waco, Texas, in which the Branch Davidians, a Christian fundamentalist group, engaged in a terrifying and wasteful stand-off with agents of the U.S. government. The initial clash was in a gun battle that left both fundamentalists and federal agents dead; after a 51-day siege, a fire in the central building of the Branch Davidian community killed many of the remaining occupants, including 21 children. The actions had a profound impact on Hartley, who was not and is not by nature a religious person. It affected him as a citizen, and left him wanting to better understand the civil situation and to have a better grasp of freedom of religion and his country’s gun laws. Ultimately it plunged him into a new awareness of the centrality of the media in contemporary life: the daily 24-hour news cycle that tends to blur politics, advertising and journalism into an easily digestible product for quick and disposable consumption.

These concerns underlie all of the work of the second decade of Hartley’s career. And the way one project segues into the next is, in fact, so obvious it is often overlooked. From Soon and The Book of Life it was just a few short steps away to a monster movie, No Such Thing, and a little later, a tale of science fiction, The Girl From Monday. Admittedly, these films wear their respective genres lightly, but the connection to the political, ethical, and spiritual concerns of the previous work is clear. Hartley never comes off sounding paranoid or like a conspiracy theorist. His politics are never overt. But he has had the presence of mind to hear what we sound like when we discuss our contemporary situation in even the most sensible and detached terms: we sound like we are describing a science fiction novel or a monster movie.

The Girl From Monday is, at its heart, a meditation on rampant consumerism, while No Such Thing, through a strange and lovely lens, considers what the world might be like if everything was removed that could not be reduced to an immediately entertaining sound-byte. Poetry, these two films suggest, would be frowned upon, the poetry that requires monsters and bodiless aliens from outer space to represent the crucial human truths. (But poetry is no illusion. Though it was filmed almost a year prior to September 11, 2001, the release of No Such Thing was delayed by the distributor because it was felt to be insufficiently sensitive to the rattled nerves of the country in the wake of the terrorist attacks. What can be observed by this is that Hartley was working in a more politically sensitive artistic arena some years before the events of 9/11 pushed the rest of the world there.)

Though he may be leveling some light-hearted social criticism at larger institutions governments, corporations, religious sects than he did in his younger years, these organizations are not Hartley’s principle aim. They just happen to be there, on the path on his way to visit the characters he seems to love as much as anyone in real life. These characters are still interacting with their surroundings in the same ways, with understanding and sympathy expressed ironically through comic misunderstanding and naive sounding questions that manage to express profound truths. And this is important for Hartley, influenced as he is equally by such things as the theatrical farces of Moliere, the 1940’s Hollywood comedies of Preston Sturges, and the earnestly questioning Marxist dialectics presented by Jean-Luc Godard. For him, ironic detachment is never divorced from emotional engagement, nor honest skepticism from curiosity.

His films have always been critical in this regard. Hartley is not just entertaining us. He wants us to think about what we, the audience, are doing while we are watching his movie. This is most obviously and hilariously demonstrated in Flirt, by the German construction workers arguing over whether or not the filmmaker (Hartley himself) will succeed in his attempt to finish the movie they themselves are characters in. One of them suggests that even if he fails the failure itself will be a fascinating triumph. The same, in fact, can be said about Hartley’s entire body of work. Its challenges and joys lie in his courage to attempt.

While the transition to opera is an wholly sensible step in his career, for the first time Hartley is directly collaborating with another artist, creating work that supports someone else’s implicit vision rather than his own. It presents an entirely unique set of challenges, beyond exploring a new medium. So, what is Hartley attempting in La Commedia, and how is he going about it?

Hartley: “This is really something different for me. First, I’m just trying to present the live performance of this music in an exciting, moving, and fun way. I have woven together a kind of story from different strands found in the work Louis has created – ideas, opinions, jokes, poetic images contained in the various texts he has brought together. There is no story implicit in it, in the texts he’s set to music. And the story I imply in the motion pictures are inspired as much by Louis Andriessen’s expressed connection to this city, Amsterdam, as to his interest in a certain scene in the Inferno, to his relationship with Jeanette Yanikian as to a certain passage of Vondel. It is really a site-specific piece as well as, for me, an act of solidarity with a particular composer, a celebration of a certain attitude to life. Not Mozart or Wagner, I’m afraid. We’re too much in the here and now for that. Also, for me, it’s an opportunity to exercise telling stories without dialogue. I always take advantage of those types of opportunities. Also, this creation of a story on five screens, I’m really curious about the effect of that. Finally, but connected to all this, the film is subordinate to the music. The staging is, as well. How do you create this intriguing environment where the music can take over and make us all feel something big, where the music fuses all these other elements together? So far I’ve found it has to do with not being too specific. Characters and situations, in the movie as well as on stage, have to be only implied, not spelt out too exactly. Recognizable but general. I guess I’m hoping to create the circumstances for some sort of flood of associations that are meaningful but hard to state explicitly. That’s a long way out from what I usually do as a filmmaker. Here, the meaning is the music.”