Sospeso presents Hal Hartley's recent work The New Math(s), a multimedia collaboration with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, on January 12, 2003.

Mr Hartley, who has produced several features, numerous shorts, and one television movie since 1990, is among the most idiosyncratic voices to come on the American independent cinema scene in recent years.  His work often elicits comparisons to that of Jim Jarmusch and Steven Soderbergh, for his films, like theirs, concern disaffected young people who are aware of, but not quite able to overcome, the absurdity and banality of contemporary life.  Another distinguishing feature of Hartley’s films is their highly stylized form:  his characters’ speech is terse and repetitive, and their movements and gestures are tightly choreographed.  In this respect his films are reminiscent of the work of Jean-Luc Godard, the ground-breaking New Wave director to whom Hartley himself has acknowledged he owes a great debt. Because of the quirky subject matter and formalized style, his work is an acquired taste, though one that is becoming more widely shared. “I know I have a limited audience,” Hartley told Martin Kihn in an interview for GQ (October 1992).  “But people I thought would never go see my films not only see them but become obsessed by them.  When you’re hooked, you’re hooked.”

The third of four children of an ironworker and his wife, Hal Hartley was born November 3, 1959 in Lindenhurst, New York, into a Catholic, working-class family.  A defining event of his early life was the death of his mother, when he was eleven or twelve.  In the following years he lived intermittently with his aunt, uncle, and cousins next door.  “I became very introverted, very quiet,” he told Ellen Pall, who profiled him for the New York Times (October 11, 1992).  “I spent a lot of time doing art. I wasn’t misanthropic, I was just happy to be left on my own.”  Besides painting, the activity he enjoyed most, Hartley spent a lot of time working on carpentry projects and playing the guitar, causing his father and two older brothers to worry about his apparent aimlessness.  “It was clear I had a creative bent,” he joked to Judith Weinraub in an interview for the Washington Post (August 4, 1990).  “But it wasn’t clear whether it was for carpentry or for telling elaborate lies.”

Hartley’s artistic interests led him to enroll in the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston, in the late 1970s.  During his one year there, he took a film course and was enthralled by the power of moving images.  The experience helped him realize, he has said, that his “vague dissatisfaction” with his paintings derived from the fact that “they didn’t move.”  “I remember the first emotions I had when I saw the images I had filmed,” Hartley told Pall, “and some of them were very mundane, like water glasses in the window with light coming through them.  I was just crushed with sadness—a good sadness, totally life-affirming.”

In 1978 or 1979 Hartley left art school, and he spent the following year working part-time in a department store.  During his free time he made a series of short films in Super-8, and on the basis of these, he was admitted to the film program at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase, where he studied under the late film director and editor Aram Avakian.  During a 1992 interview with John Fried for Cineuste, Hartley expressed his gratitude for the quality of the education he received at the university:  “What really distinguishes Purchase, and makes it one of the most important film schools in the country, is its position as a working-class film school.  It is one of the only places where blue-collar, lower-middle-class kids can go to study film.”  For his senior thesis film, Hartley made Kid, about a young man whose efforts to get out of Lindenhurst are constantly thwarted.

Following his graduation, with honors, from SUNY-Purchase in 1984, Hartley worked briefly as an ironworker alongside his father and brother.  He then began scrounging for jobs as a freelance production assistant on other people’s films. He found the film work exhausting—to such an extent that at the end of each day he had no energy left for his own film projects.  “I decided if I was going to make films,” he remarked to Martin Kihn, “the first thing I had to do was get out of the industry.”  Hartley did just that, when he accepted a job answering phones and running errands at Action Productions, a company in Manhattan that produced public service announcements.  Taking that job turned out to be a serendipitous move, for the company’s president, Jerome Brownstein, both recognized and nurtured Hartley’s talent.  “After a couple of weeks, I knew in my heart that this guy had a lot of potential, so, consciously, I took him under my wing,” Brownstein told Martin Kihn.  Brownstein even allowed Hartley to read and write when he had completed his office work.  “That job made all the difference,” Hartley told Kihn. Indeed, during his stint at Action, Hartley made two shorts, Dogs and The Cartographer’s Girlfriend.  While working on those projects, he also demonstrated that he had a talent for making quality films with extremely limited resources, for he used borrowed cameras and outdated film stock.  “I made movies with whatever money I had,” he told Helen Peterson in an interview for the New York Daily News (August 5, 1990).  “If I had fifty dollars, I made a movie that cost fifty dollars.  If I had three hundred dollars, I made a movie that cost three hundred dollars.”

Through a combination of good fortune and his own resourcefulness, Hartley soon found himself with considerably more than three hundred dollars to work with.  One day, while he was still on the payroll at Action, he saw a sign in a bank offering personal loans to buy home computers.  He filled out an application and, much to his surprise, the bank approved it.  He then persuaded one of his brothers and a cousin to apply as well, and in this way accumulated twenty-three thousand dollars.  Hartley had planned to use the money to make a feature film, The Unbelievable Truth, in sixteen millimeter (he had never intended to buy a computer), but those plans changed after Brownstein told him he would raise enough money for a thirty-three millimeter film if Hartley would first come up with a reasonable budget.  Hartley submitted his budget, and Brownstein came through with an investment of more than fifty thousand dollars, giving Hartley a total of about seventy-five thousand dollars for the production of his film. Hartley believes that his demonstrated ability to make low-budget shorts inspired Brownstein’s faith in him.  “If you know what you’re doing, you can usually manipulate less-than-perfect situations,” he explained to Helen Peterson.  “So the crucial thing was that I had developed skills in being able to work regardless of my means.  And I think that’s what really impressed the people who eventually put up the money for The Unbelievable Truth.  They knew I could make a movie and finish it for very little.”

To make the film Hartley recruited many of his friends from SUNY-Purchase to serve as cast and crew members.  He also persuaded his father and several other relatives who lived in Lindenhurst to allow him to use their homes as locations during the eleven-and-a-half-day shoot.  Once he completed the film, his next challenge was to find a distributor.  “For nine months I dragged this thing all over the country trying to show it to people and nobody would look at it,” Hartley told Peterson.  The film’s commercial prospects brightened considerably in 1989, when it became the surprise hit of the 1989 Toronto Film Festival.  “The audiences just went wild. … We were inundated with offers,” Hartley recalled to Peterson.  Ironically, the ensuing bidding war involved many of the same companies that had initially turned down the unconventional film, among them Miramax, which eventually won the distribution rights.

The Unbelievable Truth, which was released commercially in 1990, is by any standard a decidedly eccentric movie.  Set on Long Island, it concerns the relationship that develops between Audry, a high school senior who is convinced that a nuclear apocalypse is imminent, and Josh, a mechanic and ex-convict who had been imprisoned for killing the father and sister of one of Audry’s friends.  The two “are a perfect match, the weirdest but most sensible characters in Hal Hartley’s droll, lucid black comedy,” Caryn James observed in the New York Times (July 20,1990).  And they are sensible, the film suggests, because they think for themselves, whereas all the other characters conform without reflection to the conventions of suburban Long Island.  In this respect, The Unbelievable Truth is reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s film Stranger Than Paradise and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, & videotape, as Kevin Thomas pointed out in the Los Angeles Times (August 17, 1990):  “Hartley brings to blue-collar types something of the oh-so-fashionable air of disaffection that Jarmusch brings to marginal people and Soderbergh to yuppies.”

Hartley’s scriptwriting style is similarly idiosyncratic.  Often described as repetitive and emotionless, his screenplays are sometimes compared to those of David Mamet or Harold Pinter.  During his interview with John Fried, Hartley talked about what he hoped to accomplish by writing highly formalized dialogue:  “It’s like Joyce’s Ulysses.  It’s taking the form and having fun with it. … I like to think that I am getting through to the kind of audience that appreciates ongoing, creative formal exercises.”  Although Hartley’s movies are unquestionably funny, they are also infused with great sadness, anger, and frustration.  “When people ask me, ‘Is this comedy or is this drama?’  I don’t have an easy time answering,” Hartley told John Anderson.  “Because I don’t necessarily work that way.  I don’t consider myself a writer of comedies or a writer of dramas.  Whatever works, works.  Writing, I try to work out some sort of reconciliation of the incongruities I see in life.  Sometimes they make me laugh, sometimes they make me laugh and cry.  In any event, I think that’s the stuff that’s really rich—the stuff you can’t figure out, the stuff you can’t label, the stuff you can’t categorize.”

Ethan Straffin, from his Hal Hartley site.