Hal Hartley

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Hal Hartley
Massachusetts College of Art
  • SUNY Purchase
    • Occupation(s)Director, screenwriter, producer, composer
    Years active1984–present
    Spouse
    Miho Nikaido
    ​
    (m. 1996)​
    Websitewww.halhartley.com

    Hal Hartley

    deadpan humour and offbeat characters quoting philosophical dialogue.[5]

    His films provided a career launch for a number of actors, including Adrienne Shelly, Edie Falco, James Urbaniak, Martin Donovan, Karen Sillas and Elina Löwensohn. Hartley frequently scores his own films using his pseudonym Ned Rifle,[6] and his soundtracks regularly feature music by Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and PJ Harvey.

    Early life

    Hartley was born in Lindenhurst, New York, the son of an ironworker.[1] Hartley had an early interest in painting and attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he studied art and developed an interest in filmmaking. In 1980, he was accepted to the filmmaking program at the State University of New York at Purchase in New York, where he met a core group of technicians and actors who would go on to work with him on his feature films, including his regular cinematographer Michael Spiller.

    Early feature films

    Hartley shot

    Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival
    , establishing Hartley as a distinctive new talent in the burgeoning independent filmmaking movement.

    anarchist father and encounter two women in a small town (Karen Sillas and Elina Löwensohn), was entered in competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival
    .

    Amateur (1994) marked a change of pace for Hartley, exploring somber themes. Described as "a metaphysical thriller", it starred Isabelle Huppert as a former nun trying to write pornographic fiction who meets Thomas (Martin Donovan), a man suffering from amnesia, and Sophia (Elina Löwensohn), Thomas's wife and a porn star, who reveals that Thomas was a violent criminal and pornographer.

    Hartley developed Flirt (1995) as an extension of his short film of the same name made in 1993. The film is a triptych of three separate characters involved in romantic entanglements in different cities – New York, Berlin and Tokyo – with each story using the same dialogue. The film stars Hartley regulars Bill Sage, Parker Posey, Martin Donovan, Dwight Ewell and the Japanese actress Miho Nikaido, whom Hartley married in 1996.

    Later works

    Hartley achieved his greatest commercial and critical success with

    Best Screenplay Award
    .

    Hartley was invited to contribute the American entry to a series of films financed by French television to celebrate the 2000 millennium. His entry, a black comedy titled

    William Burroughs
    is featured, but according to Hartley, this is actually a shot of the film's production manager doing a Burroughs impression (plus the fact that Burroughs died the previous year). The film screened on French television and had a limited commercial release in cinemas.

    Hartley's next feature No Such Thing (2001) tells the story of Beatrice (Sarah Polley), a journalist whose fiancé is killed by a monster in Iceland. Beatrice's editor (Helen Mirren) orders Beatrice to go to Iceland to interview the monster (Robert John Burke), who is a sensitive philosopher. The film also stars Julie Christie as a doctor sympathetic to the monster's cause. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

    The Girl from Monday (2005), filmed in New York City and Puerto Rico, is set in a future dystopia where people are encouraged to record their sexual encounters as an economic transaction and thus increase their consumer buying power. The film stars Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd and Tatiana Abracos. It premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and received a limited cinematic release, receiving mostly negative reviews.

    In late 2005, Hartley moved from New York to Berlin and began preparing Fay Grim, an intended sequel to Henry Fool. The film, which starred Parker Posey, James Urbaniak and Thomas Jay Ryan reprising their roles from Henry Fool, was a comedy-drama in which Fay is coerced by a CIA agent (Jeff Goldblum) to try to locate notebooks that belonged to Henry (now a fugitive). The film was shot in 2006 in locations in Berlin, Paris, and Istanbul and premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It had a limited cinematic release in 2007 and received mixed reviews.

    Since 1999, Hartley's films predominantly have been shot with digital cameras, including the features The Book of Life,

    35mm film, which exhibit blurring of the image (due to a very low shutter speed), the use of freeze frames, and shifts between colour and black-and-white footage, also display a considerable divergence from the washed-out colours and straightforward cinematography of the Long Island films from the early 1990s.[8] Meanwhile received its world premiere at the Camerimage festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland on 29 November 2011. The hour-long feature was released on DVD in 2012 following a successful funding campaign by Hartley using the Kickstarter website.[9]

    In November 2013, Hartley funded Ned Rifle, the third film in the trilogy that began with Henry Fool and Fay Grim, via a Kickstarter campaign.[10] The film premiered on September 7, 2014, at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.[11]

    From 2015 to 2017, Hartley directed eight episodes of Red Oaks.

    Short films

    In addition to his feature work, Hartley has made a number of short films, many of which have been collected and re-released in DVD anthologies.

    Theatre

    Hartley's stage play Soon, a drama dealing with the

    Branch Davidians and the U.S. federal government, was first produced at the Salzburg Festival
    and then later that year in Antwerp. It was also staged in the U.S. in 2001.

    Awards

    In 1996, Hartley was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.

    From 2001 through 2004, Hartley was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University[12] while simultaneously editing No Such Thing, shooting The Girl from Monday and writing Fay Grim.

    Hartley was awarded a fellowship by The American Academy in Berlin in late 2004, where he did research related to a proposed large-scale project concerning the life of French educator and social activist Simone Weil.

    Personal life

    In 1996, Hartley married the Japanese dancer and actress Miho Nikaido, one of the stars of his film Flirt.

    Filmography

    Feature films

    Short films

    • Kid (1984)
    • The Cartographer's Girlfriend (1987)
    • Dogs (1988)
    • Ambition (1991)
    • Theory of Achievement (1991)
    • Flirt (1993)
    • Opera No. 1 (1994)
    • NYC 3/94 (1994)
    • Iris (1994)
    • The New Math(s) (2000)
    • Kimono (film) (2000)
    • The Sisters of Mercy (2004)
    • Regarding Soon (2004)
    • A/Muse (2010)
    • Implied Harmonies (2010)
    • The Apologies (2010)
    • Adventure (2010)
    • Accomplice (2010)

    Streaming television

    References

    1. ^ a b Hal Hartley Biography (1959–)
    2. ^ Buder, Emily (June 19, 2017). "Directing Indie Film Pioneer Hal Hartley on Why the Dream of the '90s is Dead—And That's OK". NoFilmSchool. Retrieved September 5, 2023.
    3. ^ "The Criterion Channel's September 2023 Lineup". The Criterion Channel. August 21, 2023. Retrieved September 5, 2023.
    4. ^ "Directed by Hal Hartley Teaser". The Criterion Channel. Retrieved September 5, 2023.
    5. ^ Clark, John (October 1, 2006). "Survival Tips for the Aging Independent Filmmaker". The New York Times. Retrieved February 4, 2012.
    6. ^ "The Devil, Probably: Good, Evil and the Return of Hal Hartley". Newcity Film. April 1, 2015. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
    7. ^ See Steven Rawle, Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley (Cambria Press, 2011)
    8. ^ Steven Rawle, Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley (Cambria Press, 2011)
    9. ^ Meanwhile by Hal Hartley – Kickstarter, Kickstarter.com
    10. ^ Ned Rifle by Hal Hartley – Kickstarter, Kickstarter.com
    11. ^ Dennis Harvey, "Film Review: ‘Ned Rifle’," Variety, September 8, 2014.
    12. ^ Gewertz, Ken (March 21, 2002). "Independent Eye: Filmmaker Hal Hartley sees things his own way". Harvard Gazette. Archived from the original on November 7, 2002.

    External links

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