Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

“cultural practices”, embedded in social discourses, that contribute to a reading of performance, not a construction of intention.

The book is laid out in a roughly chronological fashion and takes a pluralistic approach to theories of performance. Where Hartley used paradigms of performance (realist acting, dancing, mime, gestural movement), these require different theoretical and analytical perspectives. The first chapter provides a general exploration of the analytical frameworks followed in the book as a means of analysing the basic abstraction of Hartley’s films. Exploring the stylistic and formal elements of Hartley’s work, this discussion demonstrates how the stylistic systems of the films alienate, abstract, and attack the writing of the realist text. In so doing, this chapter introduces several of the key theoretical strands that run throughout the book: abstraction and the rejection of empathy, the Brechtian emphasis on alienation, and the focus on performance. These impulses, I argue, are fundamental to the subsequent abstraction and emphasis on performing that forms the core of my argument.

In the second chapter, I look closely at Hartley’s first two features, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. Following up on the emphases introduced in chapter 1, chapter 2 examines the ways in which Hartley’s two early teen films self-consciously, with some abstraction of performance style, critique the ways in which the teen characters, especially the female leads of both films (played by the late Adrienne Shelly), role-play and experiment with adult roles. This is done differently in both films, but gender remains a central conceit of both. The Unbelievable Truth is explored from the perspective of the central character’s experimentation with adult structures of economics and commerce while battling the controlling gaze of her father and the male characters in the film who seek to maintain control over her financially and visually. Trust, in contrast, is explored in significant depth as a key statement on Hartley’s treatment of both his characters and his actors. Looking especially at the performances of Shelly and Martin Donovan, the bulk of this argument examines the rites of passage taken by Maria Coughlin as she deals with her pregnancy and expulsion from the family home, drawing on theories of ritual liminality and performance to show how this is developing