Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley
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Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

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Sharon Marie Carnicke has characterised two kinds of filmmakers: the ones who start with the actors and the others who start with the camera and the visual stylisation of the text:

On the one hand, directors who start with the camera and emphasise the visual design may place high priority on collaborating with actors, while directors who attend to actors’ objectives and their vocal and physical choices do not necessarily work collaboratively with them. Those directors who start with the camera but leave actors alone to do their creative work often view them as experts who contribute specialized knowledge and talents to the enterprise.61

Actors represent a source of specialised labour—they work with numerous directors and “single actors adjust their techniques as they move from film to film within the limits of their skills and anatomies”.62 Mirroring Baron and Carnicke’s criticism of discourses of film outlined earlier, the agency of the actor does count for something in this taxonomy: the film director (as an overall agent of film style) does not do the acting for the actor, just as editing, camera movement, framing, and sound effects do not do the acting in a film’s overall performance. The actor has agency within a system of performance. For the material quoted throughout the book, Hartley would appear to be a director who “starts with the actors”, or one whose design for his films is focused significantly on performance, gesture, and working with actors. His collaboration over two decades with a significant recurring group of actors and performers stresses an important role for the ensemble in considering the development of a recurring style. Unlike traditional modes of auteurist criticism, the roles of these individuals cannot be attributed to the director’s “vision”, “personality”, or “structure”. Actors contribute important decisions and bring training, interpretation, and labour to the films themselves. Therefore, the performances in the films, although they derive from Hartley’s scripts (the work of a writer) and benefit from Hartley’s direction and organisation of performance in front of a camera (the performance of the image/editing/sound), the sole authorial agency cannot be attributed to a single organising consciousness or vision.