Less Threatened by the World's General Inclination Towards the Lowest Common Denominator

Original YM Chris Gage, who once interviewed Hal Hartley for Gothamist, reviews Hartley's new book, True Fiction Pictures and Possible Films.



With a king-indie (sorry) Hal Hartley movie (his boss helped fund his first movie. Boss? Can I have $62,500 and somewhere to stick my boom?), I just wait around for bad-ass Martin Donovan

()

to hit someone, or to be inappropriate

().

If Donovan's not in it, at least a Hartley femme-hot fatale, please: Parker Posey, Adrienne Shelley, Elina Löwensohn

().

True Fiction Pictures & Possible Films (from Soft Skull -- buy it! it! it!), alas, contains narry a fight scene (coulda made a rad pull-out flip-book) but the Q-and-A-format photo-bursting paperback does explains how Hartley's earlier work (Flirt, Simple Men, et al.) was so highly staged it was like a filmed painting:

"My preoccupation at the time was this: is the dialogue necessarily more important than the camera movement? I didn't know. I had always seen my films as pictures of people saying the dialogue."

Or,

Ned Riffle: I want adventure. I want romance.
Bill McCabe: Ned, there is no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire.
Ned Riffle: Trouble and desire.
Bill McCabe: That's right. And the funny thing is, when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you're in trouble you don't desire anything at all.
Ned Riffle: I see.
Bill McCabe: It's impossible.
Ned Riffle: It's ironic.
Bill McCabe: It's a fucking tragedy is what it is, Ned.

; but by the time of No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday, True Fiction Pictures shows how Hartley'd began focusing on and critiquing media and its creation (and need) of quickly digestible (then regurgitated) products (hello blogs).

"More and more, I find myself pursuing this question of determining what is real. And does the real even matter to people anymore? You know, making this distinction between the facts -- or the truth, I guess -- and information. We love information. People get excited about access to information. Networking. The speed at which information can be moved around. But fewer and fewer people seem to care if that information is accurate. Does it mean anything? Can it be verified? Is it just lies, for instance. Advertising, I guess, would assert that lies -- if they're believed -- are information too. So, we come to believe whatever is information. We believe in information. But information is not knowledge." [Embedded links mine.]

As an aside: Thank you to S.S.P. for putting out an oddly shaped 4C book on someone no one in my family will ever hear of. (What recession?) And now.

You may never see



in a Hartley film, but some of the images he constructs and choreographs are just as striking, as this books shows in with its film stills. He seems to think as much like a painter/photographer ("A movie can be very much composed. And this composition can be very exciting since it's executed by these living and breathing people.") as a filmmaker:



Additional plums the interviewer draws out from Hartley:
-how he finances his small-audience films,
-how/why he made a monster movie,
-the difference of filming in Iceland vs. Long Island,
-the filmmakers who influenced him,
-and how we no longer have "a manner of living together as a community that has matured organically...through common expierence. Now, our manner of living together is dictated immediately through publicity and advertising... We don't, in fact, live together and experience things together that much anymore. It is mediated. In fact, not all of this worries me. A lot of it's fascinating, even."