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the working-class background to the story, which also frames later films such as Trust (1990) and Simple Men (1992). The imagery of washed-out colour and guitar-wielding mechanics seems indebted to Hartley’s hometown, as does much of the language used by his characters—scripts and performance often turn into repetitious structures or have sudden shifts in tone and vocal intonation, sometimes incongruously when put in the mouths of working-class males. Later films move away from this territory, mostly to New York City, in Amateur (1994) or The Girl from Monday (2005), but a global focus has developed in Hartley’s work, most notably in Flirt’s (1995) with its three international settings, New York, Berlin, and Tokyo, and in No Such Thing (2001) and Fay Grim (2006). Although Hartley’s milieu has expanded in the twenty years since the release of The Unbelievable Truth, much of his distinctive style has remained consistent, especially in the use of performance and performers. A regular ensemble including Thomas Jay Ryan, Bill Sage, Robert John Burke, Parker Posey, Elina Löwensohn, D. J. Mendel, Miho Nikaido, and David Neumann continue to feature in Hartley’s work, while earlier collaborators such as Martin Donovan, Adrienne Shelly, Edie Falco, Matt Malloy, Chris Cooke, and Mark Bailey helped develop a distinctive performance style that (1) rejected empathy; (2) used flat or inexpressive vocal tones with staccato bursts of emotive language; (3) incorporated a dance-like, choreographed use of the body in scenes of violence and movement; and (4) emphasised the role of the performing in constructing the text. Although Hartley’s visual aesthetic has developed, mostly in accordance with changes in film technology, such as the shift from film to digital, and to different collaborations with cinematographers,19 this performance style has remained very consistent, just as Hartley’s regular performers have remained fairly consistent across his oeuvre. It is this part of Hartley’s work, and the problems with which it has presented critics, which concerns this book.
Academic film studies has long been guilty of undertheorising performance. John O. Thompson, as long ago as 1978, identified acting as a “gap” in the film studies project.20 Peter Krämer and Alan Lovell contended that film theory has found it “all too easy for the work of the