Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

performer also unlocks a number of social and cultural concerns about performing in public and private spaces, the notion of performance utilised here is required to explore a different conceptual order from that of just acting, which is mimetic and limiting. The socio-anthropological conception of performance—as in Drake’s argument that performance is composed of “cultural practices”—that runs throughout this work draws on the theories of key practitioners, such as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and Erving Goffman, whose works have not been fully embraced by the study of cinema, despite the obvious centrality of performance to both cinema and the presentation of sociocultural subjects. Hartley’s focus on performances emphasises both the aesthetic processes of labour and creativity and the social and cultural modes of performance that lie behind the composition and maintenance of identity, gender, ethnicity, and social roles.

Despite the discursive centrality of the performer in this book, there is also a palpable authorial presence in the text. Hal Hartley is something of a self-styled auteur. In interviews he has professed his belief in the auteur theory⁵⁶ and his “understanding” that all his work will be “a Hal Hartley film”,⁵⁷ implying that he buys into popular conceptions of the auteur as a means to “unify the text”, to use David Bordwell’s description of art cinema’s authorial significance.⁵⁸This sense of authorial expression and control has recently been magnified by his increased presence as a digital auteur through the Possible Films Web site,⁵⁹ which emphasises Hartley’s role as the principal producer and distributor of his work. This book assigns a key role to filmmaker Hal Hartley as the main creative source of his films, and the figure most responsible for organising the finished film, yet he is not a critical foundation of meaning in the text. As such, the auteur appears herein as a function of the author-name, theorised by Michel Foucault as characterising “the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses in society”.⁶⁰ Therefore, Hal Hartley appears in this text as both a proper name describing an individual filmmaker responsible for manufacturing a text and as a signifier of certain discourses that emerge from his films independently of the author’s intentions.