The welcoming of chance: Hal Hartley's latest philosophy
HAL HARTLEY CALLS HIS NEWEST MOVIE "FAKE SCI-FI."
What The Girl from Monday is, genuinely, is an anomaly. Stark yet brightly colored, in its characters’ faces, yet almost always seen from tilted angles, filled with gestures but reliant on mordant, explicit narration, it tells the story of a marketing exec meeting a beautiful woman from another constellation after “the great revolution.” Bill Sage, weary-eyed and skeptical, with gelled hair ever in need of wrangling, is obsessed with sex and its market(ing) value. While Hartley is slated to shoot Fay Grim, a comic narrative sequel this year to his 1998 Henry Fool, The Girl from Monday most resembles his 1999 Book of Life, a shot-on-video, $350,000 production that embraced video as a unique visual medium as well as a shambling, episodic approach to storytelling.
For this emphatic essay, made on the same scale, Hartley and his partners are focusing on distributing the movie on DVD directly to consumers, without conventional theatrical or festival release (although it debuted at Sundance this year, where we spoke.) “We’re using the paradigm of rock bands,” the lanky, laconic 45-year-old director of 10 features and many shorter works says, “They go on tour to promote the new album. I think I’ll just make more money selling DVDs than going through the whole theatrical release [process].” Is there a living in that? “If getting rich was a priority, I would not be making movies. That’s definite. There’s gotta be easier ways to get rich than making movies, right?”
“When [cinematographer] Sarah [Cawley-Cabiya] and I first started discussing in it 1999, it was intended to be a 35mm, million dollar film shot in 24 days,” he says. Book of Life was the real inspiration. It jumped off from there, back in that century.” He laughs. “Our esthetic then, we called it ‘exquisite miniatures.’ We were going to make it look beautiful, but the pictures were going to be small. I think [this script] lends itself to DV. It [digital video] likes small.”
Small is also the word for the cottage industry of Hartley and his partners’ new company, which has released one non-Hartley feature, but focused primarily on his work. “The Possible Films Collection started kind of casually with this CD compilation of music from my earlier films. We were responding to hits on the website, people asking about he music from the films, so I decided to produce that CD and sell it directly from my website. Again, [we were] inspired by musicians who were doing this kind of thing. That was a really easy success, so the next year, I started doing the collection of short video and films from the past ten years.
“We have a real good system that doesn’t requiem a lot of overhead or a lot of people. The database is quite large and growing. [My partner] Steve Hamilton, my editor and co-producer, [suggested we think] of making The Girl from Monday in a much smaller way, that has more in common with video work I do that winds up on DVD. We were a little ambivalent. We didn't know anyone else who was doing this, and it’s hard to break habits. It’s hard to be hard-line about it, ‘We’re going to make a movie and you can only buy it from our website.”
“Direct-to-video” is usually a slur, a phrase with a stigma. “Yeah. Yeah,” Hartley says quickly. “A stigma invented by the studios and the distributors which is completely fake. The other day, at a panel discussion, just before we were going on, a distributor said, ‘But if you do that, the newspapers don’t review movies unless they have a theatrical release.’ I was, ‘Fuck ‘em, they will once everyone starts releasing work on DVDs.’”
Aside from being composed in tight frames in order to suggest a militarized urban future with little dressing, the movie was shot at a 12-frame-per-second shutter speed, offering a “painterly” streaking and strobing when there’s motion in the fame. Hartley talks about discovering rather than imposing an esthetic, taking the freedom to fool around rather than being unnecessarily rigid. “I’ve always been like that. I remember when I was a kid, my sister Loretta could never figure out parallax view with a little family camera. She’d take a picture of you, it’d [always be off]. I found some of the most beautiful compositions. They’d always be throwing them away, but I had hundreds of Loretta’s snapshots which became the basis of a lot of paintings and drawings I was doing as a teenager. I couldn’t say it at the time, but it had something to do with this word, ‘aleatory,’ that I found. The welcoming of chance into the filmmaking process. It’s a good word.”
[Originally published in a different form in Newcity, 14 April 2005.]
What The Girl from Monday is, genuinely, is an anomaly. Stark yet brightly colored, in its characters’ faces, yet almost always seen from tilted angles, filled with gestures but reliant on mordant, explicit narration, it tells the story of a marketing exec meeting a beautiful woman from another constellation after “the great revolution.” Bill Sage, weary-eyed and skeptical, with gelled hair ever in need of wrangling, is obsessed with sex and its market(ing) value. While Hartley is slated to shoot Fay Grim, a comic narrative sequel this year to his 1998 Henry Fool, The Girl from Monday most resembles his 1999 Book of Life, a shot-on-video, $350,000 production that embraced video as a unique visual medium as well as a shambling, episodic approach to storytelling.
For this emphatic essay, made on the same scale, Hartley and his partners are focusing on distributing the movie on DVD directly to consumers, without conventional theatrical or festival release (although it debuted at Sundance this year, where we spoke.) “We’re using the paradigm of rock bands,” the lanky, laconic 45-year-old director of 10 features and many shorter works says, “They go on tour to promote the new album. I think I’ll just make more money selling DVDs than going through the whole theatrical release [process].” Is there a living in that? “If getting rich was a priority, I would not be making movies. That’s definite. There’s gotta be easier ways to get rich than making movies, right?”
“When [cinematographer] Sarah [Cawley-Cabiya] and I first started discussing in it 1999, it was intended to be a 35mm, million dollar film shot in 24 days,” he says. Book of Life was the real inspiration. It jumped off from there, back in that century.” He laughs. “Our esthetic then, we called it ‘exquisite miniatures.’ We were going to make it look beautiful, but the pictures were going to be small. I think [this script] lends itself to DV. It [digital video] likes small.”
Small is also the word for the cottage industry of Hartley and his partners’ new company, which has released one non-Hartley feature, but focused primarily on his work. “The Possible Films Collection started kind of casually with this CD compilation of music from my earlier films. We were responding to hits on the website, people asking about he music from the films, so I decided to produce that CD and sell it directly from my website. Again, [we were] inspired by musicians who were doing this kind of thing. That was a really easy success, so the next year, I started doing the collection of short video and films from the past ten years.
“We have a real good system that doesn’t requiem a lot of overhead or a lot of people. The database is quite large and growing. [My partner] Steve Hamilton, my editor and co-producer, [suggested we think] of making The Girl from Monday in a much smaller way, that has more in common with video work I do that winds up on DVD. We were a little ambivalent. We didn't know anyone else who was doing this, and it’s hard to break habits. It’s hard to be hard-line about it, ‘We’re going to make a movie and you can only buy it from our website.”
“Direct-to-video” is usually a slur, a phrase with a stigma. “Yeah. Yeah,” Hartley says quickly. “A stigma invented by the studios and the distributors which is completely fake. The other day, at a panel discussion, just before we were going on, a distributor said, ‘But if you do that, the newspapers don’t review movies unless they have a theatrical release.’ I was, ‘Fuck ‘em, they will once everyone starts releasing work on DVDs.’”
Aside from being composed in tight frames in order to suggest a militarized urban future with little dressing, the movie was shot at a 12-frame-per-second shutter speed, offering a “painterly” streaking and strobing when there’s motion in the fame. Hartley talks about discovering rather than imposing an esthetic, taking the freedom to fool around rather than being unnecessarily rigid. “I’ve always been like that. I remember when I was a kid, my sister Loretta could never figure out parallax view with a little family camera. She’d take a picture of you, it’d [always be off]. I found some of the most beautiful compositions. They’d always be throwing them away, but I had hundreds of Loretta’s snapshots which became the basis of a lot of paintings and drawings I was doing as a teenager. I couldn’t say it at the time, but it had something to do with this word, ‘aleatory,’ that I found. The welcoming of chance into the filmmaking process. It’s a good word.”
[Originally published in a different form in Newcity, 14 April 2005.]
